Creating Stylized 3D Environments for Games

1. Course Trailer: Name is Justin Wallace, and I'm a freelance three D artist in the games industry. I'll be your instructor for this course. In this fun but intensive 15 hour course, you'll learn how to create a stylized environment in Unreal Engine five from start to finish, resulting in an impressive portfolio piece that demonstrates your environment expertise. This gibbe inspired concept was provided by the talented John Wall and Laberto. So it's a pleasure that we get to work on this scene together. Go over a lot of different concepts together, like translating concept art into a three D blockout with camera and lighting matching, creating painterly PBR materials for Giblisque scenes with substance designer and paint box too, creating organic props with the high to low game asset workflow, painting stylized foliage cards, and modeling low polyfoliage with blender and tree box, modeling and UV mapping a modular set piece with Tylan materials, vertex paint, and particle systems, creating a collection of powerful shaders that blur the line between realism and stylized and level design and lighting fundamentals to get the most control out of your scene and materials. To get the most out of this course, we'll need the tools and software necessary to complete the environment and follow along. I'll use Blender for modeling, UV mapping, and look development along with my blender add on tree box to model the trees and bushes. We'll learn substance designer along with my other add on paint box two, to create ten portfolio ready materials to populate our scene plus a bit of substance painter when we need it. Zbrush will step in to take care of any sculpting in the high to low game asset workflow. I'll use Photoshop to draw our foliage textures, and last but not least, we'll take a deep dive into Unreal Engine five to supercharge our assets and create our final scene. By the end of this course, you'll have an in depth understanding of the fundamental workflows, skills, and assets needed to create an industry standard stylized environment for games and cinematics from scratch. I follow this concept closely. The same principles can be applied to any concept you're looking to replicate. While this course is suited for all skill levels, it's essential to have a basic understanding of the software listed. All the project files, including the nrailEngine project, student resources and source files will be included in this course. 2. 01 Introduction: Okay, everyone, my name is Justin Wallace, and we are officially in the style Emil for allowing me to be on his channel and to get to teach you guys about my style and my production process and how I go about creating these really fun Gibby like scenes. That's the main inspiration for me is Gibi art, and so trying to translate that into three D has always been a really fun challenge for me and getting to share that with you guys is a total honor. And another thing that's an honor is, um, getting to recreate the scene based off an awesome concept by the wonderful artist John Wallen Liberto. To be quite honest, getting to do anything with Naughty Dog is really, really awesome. So to even be in the same scope as some of these talented artists really blows my mind. And so I'm really privileged to get to work on this with you guys. This particular video is going to be about preparation for planning. And that's right. It's got to get boring before it gets interesting. You need to prep, and then you need to plan. So for the prep stage, and I'll be recording the trailer, actually, at the end of this course. What we're looking at here is the look development version of the scene. So this is everything I had created to get us ready to start on the course. And so, luckily, or actually not luckily through sheer will alone, I wanted to dissect this as best as possible so that I could teach you guys how to replicate this as best as possible. And that means we need a couple add ons, a couple of resources, and we had to know what softwares we're. So I'm going to go into one of my favorite, like, you know, brainstorm applications called Pure F. And quickly, I want to talk about the software that we do need for this course. The base scene, the final scene is going to be in Unreel Engine five, and that is, you know, discussed in the trailer, obviously. I'm going to be using Blender for my modeling, but you can use three DS Max. You can use Maya. You could even use ZBrush if you're crazy, right? A lot of the village pieces are basically kind of low to mid poly models with weight to normals, and that's because the concept is not demanding that we deform these models to an extreme degree, say, like in Zbrush, right? We're not aiming to destroy every edge here. Of course, if we can put some love into that by getting some variation width in the final stage, that's always awesome. But no, these are not extremely complex models. So so with that discussed, let's go back. And I am going to be using some Z brush, and it's just for the rocks. That's because a lot of these models, you know, they're very squarish and garish and man made and manufactured. But the rocks, they're going to be a little tougher to pull off in this specific style. Let's actually move this window without a little bit of Zbrush work. So there is another triplanar mapping material on here, but most importantly, it is getting its curvature edge detail from a sculpt and so we'll be going over a little bit of that, as well. Bring up the concept right here. And, um, so where did we get these materials? We're going to be making the materials in substance designer. If you're an intermediate to advanced artist, you know the deal. You know that you're going to be getting most of your custom materials whenever you come up with an idea in three D from substance designer. While substance painter is typically used to take those base materials and then use them to texture assets in substance painter. So for small assets like rocks, we are going to be using a substance painter. However, we don't need to take these modular village pieces into painter, actually, we're just going to be using tilable UVs based off the materials that we make in substance designer. So we're going to be doing a ton of this. Honestly. That's a really underestimated part of the three D pipeline that people always underestimate. They're like, Oh, I got to be the best modeler, the best sculptor. And it's like, Dude, we can't hire you because this whole thing is black and white. There's no texture on here. And so then they're like, Well, where do I get the textures I'm seeing in my head? It's from designer. It's from designer. In terms of, um other softwares we're using. I am very old fashioned with my foliage, so I'm just going to be using Photoshop to draw my foliage. If I go really insane and the brush is not collaborating with me, which on my 9-year-old Wakeham Intuos might be the case, I might also use Procreate, or, you know, the foliage shapes are really simple, right? You could even vector draw these. You could do Illustrator. You can do anything you want. The list goes on and on. We just need a way to create some nice little two D images, and those are going to be our Alpha cards and stuff like that. Until I have a big epiphidy, I believe this is all we need in terms of the actual software. So again, we'll take a look at this nice concept, art. I'll provide this in the resources, actually, so that you can have the full res image of this. Thank you, John. I want you to really take this in if you're going to be following along. If you have your own concept, your own idea, then shift your mindset to, Oh, this guys going to teach me how he would at least approach the concept, and I just need to copy kind of kind of what he's thinking when he approaches it. Otherwise, yeah, don't you know, the world's always there. I just want to give you the tools. So when it comes to those tools, though, there's a couple of things we need. If you go to my ArtStation page, and I'm Justin Wallace, I'm Shingdora it's artstation.com slash Shinggdora We NT tools. And that's because there are no other tools like this. I've developed them over months and months and months, and I'm very, you know, privileged to have been gotten so much support by the community to improve it and to take it to a level where we can actually, you know, develop a whole, like, portfolio ready environment with it. So that is really awesome. So this first one is called Tree Box. It is a blender add on to create stylized foliage canopies based on volume generation, and that sounds super nerdy, but basically, it's creating these little clusters. It's spawning canopies around them. It's auto smoothing the normals, and it also has, like, an entire crazy branch system. Come to think of it. If you look at the concept art, there are no branches, right? I like to take things just a little bit further. So if we can get away with yeah, obviously, these were trees. They're not just painterly blobs. Treebox is up for the challenge, which is fantastic. So I'm only going to be using the base version in this course. You are more than welcome to look at the extra tools and look at what Tree Box Pro does, or you can use it to sell your game Ya yada. But for the course, you only need this Base version. Similarly, paint box two. That is something I've been working on even longer. You can see this little thumbnail down here. I've used this tool to create painterly environments for quite some time now, and I've improved it time and time again. If I go to the page itself, the entire goal is to be able to create substance designer materials in, like, less than an hour. To me, time is a very, very precious thing. So we know that designer is the perfect suit to create amazing materials as a professional. However, there comes a time in every artist's life where you realize, Oh, I've plugged and if you know designer, maybe you know what I'm talking about. I plugged a slope blur gray scale into a non uniform inverted mask for the 5000th time in a row. And eventually, you realize, Okay, for stylized art, there's a lot of things that we're doing time and time and again. And so with that in mind, these are things that I have created to just get us there a lot faster, right? I don't want this to be a 50 hour course. I want this to be ten to 20. And to me, that's a beautiful thing. I want you to continue on with your life, have something incredible to show people, have a ton that you learned from it, and, you know, maybe tell your friends that you found a really cool tool along the way and then give them the discount code and tell them tell him how cool this guy is for teaching you how to do this. You can go much deeper into this, right? You can learn a lot more about these tools. I even have videos, but I don't want to talk your ear off for that reason alone. Let's go back. Um, to the Pure Rf. So with these two tools, use Fast Track Shin 25 at check out, 25% off forever. You guys deserve it. For paint box two, I'm using paint box two. For tree box, I'm using tree box. Yeah, seriously. Don't get the wrong tier. Don't get a version too expensive. I'm just showing you guys what I'm using to create this course, okay? Okay. So these are my tools. In fact, we'll drag this up a little bit. And these are Blender addons that I'm using in this course. Every tool can be replicated with different modeling packages of your choice. So for Perspective plotter, this is the new working version of FSpy. If you have used FSpy before, that is a free add on that was used to match perspective and blender. However, as a 4.1, 4.2, that has stopped working. This talented artist has created an alternative. And so I had used this to say, Okay, this is my concept art. I need a way to match the camera view so I can create a blockout that matches this as close as possible because it is totally also possible. To eyeball this and kind of go step by step through the sequence and figure out how big a building should be real engine. And that's a perfectly valid way to do that, especially for level design. But because I'm matching concept art that is really meant to just be viewed nicely from one angle, I wanted to get a little assistance from this. The reason why I say all that is because it's 18 bucks, and so in the official course resources, I have provided the blackout. So that's it for perspective plotter. I'll show you how to use that when we get to the blackout stage. And for UV squares, this is a free add on at this link. I've provided the links where we need to in the text file and also include the concept. And so this is just to straighten out UVs. If I have a circular wood ring like this, and I'm going to want to straighten out those UVs so that the wood grain follows that mesh. And I could explain that again later. But this is free, and I would recommend that. And then I believe, funnily enough, that I paid 30 bucks for this back in the day, but I think it's an official blender extension now, Texel density checker. And this is this is a really easy tool. Once you set it up, I'll explain the setup later, and you click a button, and all your UV islands are the same scale, the scale that we desire actually in engine, right? Because we don't want the wood to be super low resolution and we don't want the walls to be super high resolution. And, you know, so this will solve that problem. So those are the three blender add ons, the two tools. And again, this is my art station page. None of these are necessary. These are If you want to learn substance designer, I personally think these are a fantastic deal, but again, they're not necessary for the course at all. Or just use these for this if you get a little lazy. I don't know. Hey, quick edit. I shouldn't forget to mention that this is also one of the resources that I'm using in this course. It's an incredible resource of Z brush brushes for stylized art. It's called the or Brushes Pack. And it's by Michael Fasene. You can find it on his discord, and I highly recommend it. If you're using blender, I know if you search it up, there's also a blender version of this out there. And now I'll explain the resources folder real quick. So, like I said, we have the blockout that I'll provide. The text is just the links that we may need. The white HDR is the HDR used for the skylight. I guess I could go over that really fast. If we currently have the white HDR. If I switch it back to the captured scene, because our sky atmosphere is very stylized, it's reflecting a ton of blue light. And so I like the cleaner look of the white HDR. These three folders are the textures, and they're not textures for the materials, they're textures for the shaders. So I personally don't find a lot of value in recreating shader noises over and over again. These I typically drop into my unreal scene, so I have a little bit of a head start. So that's something you got. This is an extra discount for my store cause why not? And then the final scene, whether it's this look development version or the one we created in the course, one of these will be provided in the final version in the resources folder, I should say. So, yeah, you got your software, right? You got your tools, and you have your resources folder. With that in mind, that should be what you need to get started on the course. Again, I'm pretty excited to get started on this with you. Hopefully, you enjoy the sound of my voice. I'm just an innocent little artist that wants to share some tips with you, and I'm very grateful. So let's continue on to the next video where we've moved on from preparation, and we go into a little bit of planning. So I'll see you there, where we've moved on from preparation, and we go into a little bit of planning. So I'll 3. 02 Starting The Blockout: So in this video, we're going to be talking a little bit about planning and then hopefully starting the blockout, as well. I'll try to keep this short, in essence, everyone's challenges are going to be different when observing environment art concept, but I'll show you kind of how I tackled this one. At first, I stared at this for a while to decide what assets I needed and how to approach them. I was pretty lucky in the sense where I knew that this village would pretty much all need to be just low poly to mid Poly, right, if we bevel those edges. Pretty much the only difference between low poly and mid poly anyways. And so I was like, Okay, then what could be duplicated? The houses had some different proportions in which I didn't know if I wanted to duplicate these large base shapes, but I knew the pillars could be duplicated. I knew this fence, as long as it was, like, a little bit varied, could be duplicated across. I knew a ton of these wood planks could be duplicated. And I'm just trying to figure that out as I stare at this concept. And so the asset names might be like house one, house two. And furthermore, and furthermore, because I didn't know exactly at first what approach I wanted to take, I kind of got those jitters out of my system by sketching a wire and this had allowed me to confirm whether or not that vertex painting would be suitable for a project like this, and it totally would be. There's a lot of different ways to approach texturing, and one of the most popular ways is just putting the asset into substance painter, but I wanted something a little bit more flexible. So we're actually blending tiling materials together through these simple quated up mid poly shapes. And so, after we're done with the blackout, that's something we'll definitely get into. So I'm thinking about modeling. I'm thinking about the assets we need, and then I'm looking at this and thinking, Well, then what tiling materials do we need? Since this is the only baked material, the rock, everything else would be tiling. So I'm thinking that the grass grass and dirt, obviously landscape material is very popular. But then we have a pretty unique stone texture, a white wall and a red wall. We have construction wood. We might have bark underneath the leaves. We have leaves. We have a texture that we'll have to see if we can maybe push that fidelity with some Alpha cards later on in the course. And I'm looking at all that and deciding what my final material list would be. Once you have this, you know, depending on the scope of the project, you could look up all of these on textures.com, right? But for this, we need something that fits our purposes for the Syl scene. So that's why we're going to be hopping into designer to make these tiling textures. Now, I had brought this up in the last video, but the tools that I developed are tools that I wanted to make sure could handle a project similar to this and projects beyond that. The whole essence of these two tools, if you break it down, is to say, I need fluffy foliage and I need paint worly material. So that could be applied to a lot of different concepts. And throughout the course of the last few months when I was developing this, I had updated these products a ton to meet the needs of this more high fidelity, awesome concept. And so I'm really happy with some of the tools that we get to look into in a little bit. With that in mind, we'll do the blockout first and then we'll go ahead and set up, our folder structure and our unrail engine project. But I'm going to go ahead and switch over to Blender, and we'll see if we can get a nice little blockout similar to this going. So I'll see you there. Okay, so before we hop into blender, I'm going to make a master project folder. I'm going to call it village because why not? That'll be the master folder. And we'll create two folders in this, one called projects, and one called textures. We can create more folders as we go. And then we'll open a blender and we'll save it in the projects folder. So I'm just going to go ahead and delete everything here. I'm okay with that. I'll save it as the blockout. Again, I have provided very similar blockout to what we're going to be doing here in the resources folder as well. I just don't I don't want to force you to get perspective plotter. It's not my add on. But if you did get it, we are going to be going over the blackout process with that just about now. So I'll go to add ons to Perspective plotter. It is installed. And so if I click on the end panel, we can see Perspective plotter here. And so the first thing we need to add is a camera. So I'm going to go ahead and find the camera and add it. I'm actually going to minimize this for a moment. And in our Master folder from the from the course files provided, you should be able to download a folder similar to this. The keyword is resources. I'm going to go ahead and extract. And this should be what I wanted to give you in the course. And so in this, if we click on reference, we will have our concept. With that in mind, I'll go back to Blender. And in the camera settings, I'll go to background images and add an image. I'm going to go ahead and click Open and I'll go to desktop, find our resources, and we'll use the concept. I can press zero to preview my camera, and it'll show us that background image. I'll press zero again to hop out of that for a moment. And I'm pressing, you know, one of the numpad buttons to preview or holding Alt and middle click to quickly scroll in orthographic views. At the top view, I'm just taking my camera away. And let's see. What I would like to do is add a little human reference. So this adds a two meter cube if we press Shift A and add a cube. For me, I have hard Ops, which means if I hold tab, I'm going to be switching between these Edit modes. However, it is the same on clicking on Object and then switching to Edit mode right there. Again, with that in mind, this is a two meter cube. I'm going to drag it up and that should be about the size of a person, right? We're just going to say this is our six foot tall guy. He is not that wide, and we'll have this be a little head. His arms can be this wide. If I click on both faces and press E, S, and Y, we're now scrolling and bringing his arms outwards. And we'll just scale him in this way. Now, I know our front view is one. So if I click one, I'll see he's actually facing the wrong way. So I'm pressing R, Z and negative 90 to get him facing us, and I'll just click All transform. So we know that this should be about the size size of our guy. And let me bring the concept over one last time. And we know he might be a similar height to this. And so we could understand that if he's around 2 meters and we import all of this into unreal, it shouldn't be some crazy different size, right? As long as we have the export settings correct, this should look fairly similar. One thing to note about, you know, this three D perspective plotting process is that even when it looks correct, like you could be dragging all of these models to the correct places in this view, and then you press seven on the numpad and everything might be in the wrong place. And that's okay. It just means it's probably at the wrong depth. So you could start bringing things forward once you have the base shape done, and that's kind of how you fix that. There isn't a secret workaround for that, as far as I know. Okay, so in blender, I might have moved the camera during a recording just to test the process. If I press one, I'm going to want to move the camera. Somewhere around here, right? Somewhere around here, right? This will not be the final position, but now I'm going to click on Plot perspective. We have our background image assigned. I don't mind getting this a little closer. Might reset it in a moment, though, but it might help us visually. We know we needed to go this way, and the horizon's pretty flat. So once I click Plot perspective, it does get a little crazy. I'm going to use the river as our main perspective, like, guideline, and, you know, hopefully we don't have to be 1 trillion% accurate. Um, I know, as well that the Y axis should actually be going this way, which means our X axis is horizontal in this situation. It's going to keep looking crazy, but just trust the process. Okay, okay. It's detecting something. Our horizon's a little flatter. I think we squeeze in the Y axis here a little bit. Maybe that's too much. So we see this white.in the middle, and I want that to be like kind of our frame of reference for the world origin. I'm going to click Flat Horizon. That did a little something, if anything, it told me that our horizon is a little bit long. Something closer to that for now. So I'm going to take this middle three D cursory point, put it around right here, and I think our X axis is flipped, so I'm going to try to flip that as well. We're getting there. Let's put them right here. I'm also going to increase the camera distance because we know this is about six feet, so I'll say 18 meters. Don't think a focal length matters. Target location. I'm okay with that being at World Center. I just want to make sure that this is really as close as we can get it. We can even. I'm going to see if adding a cube can help us determine whether or not we've gotten the scale correct. So I'm gonna get something similar to this and scale it up. And let's just try duplicating it a few times using shifty and Y. Oops, soup, soup, soups. Okay. Okay, let's just move this a little bit. Oh, okay. See, I had moved my camera, and it kind of messed up the math of the perspective plotter. However, however, I'm going to turn that off. I'm gonna go to view and turn off camera to view, and I'll see how this looks. You know, I don't think that's too incorrect. If we think about the scale, our human guy would be looking out into the distance, and the three pillars for the houses would probably be somewhere around there. They do look a little far. I don't know if changing our camera distance would help that. So, what if we took these three now being that's more than helping us. If anything, it might have been around 20 meter distance. I'm getting a little bit better of a feeling from that. Turn that off. Okay. We'll stick with that for now. And once we're done setting up the shapes, we'll determine whether or not the depth is extremely inaccurate or not. But, you know, this doesn't have to be at a minuscule scale. I'll apply the rotation scale for that. So that is a pretty good starting point, actually. Camera views off. It was pretty fun to use this tool to get as close as we could, and then, you know, we'll change it up if need be. So we do have our perspective ready to go. I'm going to split this window. And right now, this is our camera view. I have a set the wire frame now, and I'll probably do solid view in this one with free perspective so we can actually work. I feel like to get a good sense of if we got the perspective, right, I'm going to go ahead and add a plane. And I think if we start with the ground path, we might and I think if we start with the ground path, we might be able to get a good sense of where this path is going and what the ground plane is in terms of the height. So I'm just adding loop cuts with Control R and moving these around on the X and Y axis. I'm actually not moving it on the Z axis at all. Doing G, Y, bringing it forward, bringing it back, checking out what looks good. Yeah, no movement on the Z axis. And I'll drag this one back and I'll drag this one forward. I'll do S Y and zero to give us a flat perspective, and that's probably as good as we're gonna get. We in a side view. I know it's got a dip because it's a river, so I'm bringing it down, looks a little steep. That looks okay. Bringing it across here. Let's see. Do I bring this forward? I'm trying to see where we would like the edge of the river to be. So that makes me guess that n is just a little bit forward. Remember to go back to overlay mode. It does reset in newer blender versions. Okay, okay. And this should be okay. We'll take these edges past the path and we'll extrude them outwards. And it seems as though we know, let's play with this. Let's play with this right edge. I'd like to find where we think. It seems as though this planter might hit the edge of this one, but I'm just kind of double checking by sort of staring at it. I think if we bring this one closer to here, that's actually reference point. So in this background, let's actually extrude it out to the X axis this way first. Pretty okay with all that. That's fine. So we know that this would be our center base, pretty much. I'll do one big extrusion for the back and then probably split it up. It's definitely going far. Let's scale it out. Looking at it from a top view. I know it's huge and scary as of right now. I'm looking for a loop cut to sort of bring to where we want the house to be in the back. And then it sort of looks like it dips down. So I'm turning on proportional editing up here. Let's see what we can do. So, the bigger I make it with the scroll wheel, the more it affects my selection. I'm cool with that. And then lifting these back ones up just to sort of match that silhouette better. We'll let the detail kind of fade out in the final one, so we don't have to worry about this too much. Now, let's get the side ones again. I'll extrude them out on the x axis. Uh, I'd say, with one more loop cut sort of right here. This one suggests a little bit of a lift. Let's see where this edge is leading us. Do we need to bring this one back more? I'd rather not, so I'm just gonna lift this up. Uh, do, I'm gonna add a loop cut to make sure that we're perfectly. Um let's go pretty flat on these vertices. And then I'm going to turn on vertex snapping that we're just at that same ankle. Okay. Oops. We're in Global. Let's go back to increment, turn it off, and I'll do E and x. Let's just drag it out. And this one, I'm going to start rotating towards the camera, and I'm going to scale it as appropriately as I can. This is just going to be a very, very big mesh. And it's just for reference purposes. We're not actually doing a final production work with this. I'm gonna try to lift up these two. This one? We're just filling up that silhouette as best we can. Um, I'm okay, seeing if it works better when this is lifted up or down. I don't think I want to mess with this vertice, but maybe these two. Okay. Okay. Not bad. Not bad for a background landscape. Everything that does not consist of this main area within the camera, I'll even take these back ones. I'm going to separate the selection, basically. I'll take these ones, too. So that way, I'm not having to accidentally click on this background element the whole time. Okay. Not bad. Not bad. Let's see if we can get the fence in the correct position because I feel like it's a little smaller with asset, and we want to make sure that they can actually fit within our scene. This one might be a little tricky. I will let's take this cube up. I added a 1 meter cube and back in object mode. I'm gonna scale it down. Let's see if we can meet the correct edge. H. Scale it down a little more. Edit mode. Let's just lift up this top face. We may end up using the blackout pieces. We may not, but we need to make sure we at least get the proportions correct. Okay, okay. Not too bad. Not too bad. I'm gonna duplicate this cube. Bring it out this way, lift it up and scale it in on the y axis. This will be our horizontal plank. Let's drag it in. If we look a little closer, we don't have to make it as tall, lift it up, duplicate it with Shift D and drag it down. Let's take these Shifty X. These ones have some kind of inconsistent widths. When it comes to final asset production, I prefer for them to follow like modular grid pieces. So if you want to create duplicate pieces to have these all be different widths to meet the standards of the concept art, you're totally welcome to do that. It would just be a case of, like, finishing your asset and then duplicating it and then, you know, kind of changing this up, maybe moving one of the planks a little bit. And that's how you'd create your variations. So we'll continue withdO just the basic proportions for now. And, you know, if you're especially particular with how you're using your blockout messages, you could do Alt D instead of Shift D. And that'll make it, so you're editing these pieces together. However, I'm not too emotionally attached to these cubes, so I don't feel the need to make sure these are all sharing that same information, not until we get into the production phase, at least. So I'm going to pause it here for now, and we will continue in the next video. So this was, you know, setting up the blockout phase. In the next video, I do hope to perhaps finish the blockout, and if we're lucky, hop into Unreal right after. If not, that'll be the 4. 03 Continuing The Blockout: In this video, we are continuing the blockout. Let's go ahead and continue adding just some cubes. In this scenario, they are other 1 meter cube, so it takes a little bit of accuracy to get them on the floor. G and Shift Z to drag without moving on the X axis. We're just going to scale these out. Shift again, and scale. It's good to know where the placements are. That way we can decide what kind of variations we might need for these rocks. Let's skip this down. It's looking, Okay, perspective wise, I am grateful for that. Shifty Shift Z. Let's scale it up. No scale. Let's go this one up too. Oops. Shift Z. There we go. I tried to duplicate it and accidentally put it down into the floor there. Let's go ahead and scale that out. I think that's already the rocks taken care of. Let's go ahead and tackle the planter. Once again, 1 meter cube. Let's see. Let's drag this one out. We'll make it wider. The Y axis. We'll bring it out on the X axis. And I apologize. Sometimes I click around and go, y, no, X, now, Z, no. And I try to look for the correct axis. It's totally bad muscle memory, but you could always use the transform tool and be a little less crazy than me. So I'm going to drag this. I'll take these back a little. Maybe I'll bring this one forward. Yes, I will. And I'm a little crazy, so I'm going to grab the edges of that, as well, so we have it nice and proportioned. Okay. I'd say that's our planter pretty taken care of. Gonna bring it back a little if we need to. So I guess the next best thing would be the pillars. I'll go ahead at a cube. I am guessing they're around this size. This one might not be exactly on a grid. So Shift Z. G Shift Z, looks like we're gonna Oops. We're gonna bring it out on the X axis. We're gonna bring it out on the y axis, push it out a little bit. It's wider than it is, uh, thick. If that makes any sense? Let's just extrude this one down so we know what the ground level is. Then I'll extrude this one up to the base point. Nice, nice, nice. There was an original attempt where these pillars, I like, put them down, and they were all the way down here, but they looked correct here, and that wasn't fun. So, luckily, you're getting to correct the version of all this. We'll bring it out one more time. They don't seem to have perfectly proportionate distances and heights. I might change that just because I don't know, it's nice to gratify things in production pipelines and then scale them, like in engine. I think it's a better habit. That's a little bit besides the point. So I'm going to turn off the overlay for the wire frame here so we can get a better sense of what we actually need. I'll duplicate this woodplank. I will drag it out, bring it in. Let's rotate it a little bit. Because I've already rotated it, I'm now going to scale it on the local axis up here. So by scaling on Z, I'm gonna co. I actually don't work with the Gizmo a lot, apologies. And I'll just bring that to the correct location. Because it's in local, I can press S Shift Z, and it'll actually just thicken it. Let's bring it down to the base level of the river. And then I'll also press GZ to take it to that spot. I'll just make them flush. Let's take a look back at the global editing, and I'll duplicate it once. Let's see if we can get the correct proportions for the second one. We're going to need to go into local and I'll drag it down. Duplicate it again. Let me bring it up a little. These seem to be in the correct spot. These seem to be pretty good. So I think in global, I'm going to rotate it this way, then I'll rotate it this way. I'll lift it up. Back in Global. I'm just going to take a front view at this. Let's just get the correct rotation here. And in local, we can change its X axis and lift it down and bring it in. Well, let's find the correct axis for that. That's what I mean. Sometimes you just got to talk with the accesses and see what's working best because I was in local view. I don't know why I moved it down, but there we go. There we go. Somewhere in between. Okay, not perfect and not terrible. It seems like these are supposed to be flush against them. So I'm going to break the rules a little bit. And there we go. That should be a bit better. Let's take a look. Everything's looking okay. I'll press Alt H, and our landscape still looks good. Now we'll add the cylinder. I'll just make it 32 by default. We're not actually editing this one. If I rotate it on the X axis, scale it in, bring it back. Okay. Let's check out it's correct CenterPoint. Let's scale it up. We're gonna find out why the perspective is incorrect. It's probably a little bit of this and a little bit of that. A moving it on the X and Y axis and then scaling it on the X and Y axis. So it's incorrect. That's fine. That is fine. Let's see if we need to play with these pillars first. That might be a little better 'cause we still need some room in the river for this. I'll bring it behind. You know, this is the stage where we find out what needs to be changed and what needs to be moved. So it's still behind these pillars, which I'm okay with. I want to see if I need to unfortunately, squeeze these a little more. And I'm bringing this up, but then scaling it back. Just trying to find out what is working. Okay, so now I'm gonna move this landscape and see if that alleviates the issue a little bit. It seems okay. Let's take a look. Let's take a look. So my guess is that that is okay. It's just that the bushes are going to kind of be part of that slope, so we'll have to take that into account during the blockout phase. That's probably the closest we're gonna get because hmm hmm. Actually, let's bring this one forward as well. I'm gonna bring that forward. In fact, let's just get these flesh. I feel like a little bit more forward is just going to solve our problems in terms of these pillars, bring it over here, and we can even make this a little thinner now because we've alleviated this space in between them. Okay, okay. I'm actually going to keep that in it's nice to see how you can approach sort of alleviating perspective issues like that. I think that's going to be our best bet. Okay, I'm going to continue with the house meshes. So I'm actually going to start with a two meter cube. It is easier to snap them to the floor. It's just one move up like that. And let's go ahead and start moving it. Um Okay, okay, probably somewhere around here. Let's scale it out. Let's lift it up. Let's see if we need to move it this way. Do we need to bring it forward? Probably not. Maybe we just needed to move it back because it looks like, um, looks like some bushes might be able to creep in between there. So let's keep going. Lift it up. Turn around. Let's take it out. I don't necessarily know how wide this house needs to be, but that feels that feels about right. So for our roof meshes, we're going to start really simple for the blackout face. They're going to be duplications of the top faces of our houses. So once we have a house done, I duplicate it with Shift Deep and press P to get a new selection. And that's the same plane as a new object. I'll take it out some on the X and the Y. Whoa. Okay, so I'm going to lift it up, bring it in on the Y, then bring it in on the X. And so we're just lifting it up and scaling it in both ways. That was actually a little slow of me, but I guess I'm just preferring to get complete control over that. So to get this cube, I think it'd just be easiest to duplicate the main cube and create a standardized, little chimney for us. And then we'll apply the scale and rotation. So we know it extends a little bit over this way. And let's bring it down a little. Looks like we might have to play around in edit mode. I'm gonna grab this whole whole mesh. I guess we got to bring it forward, and I'll bring this in. And then it seems as though it's not gonna extend through the other side. Oh, this one's a little tough, huh? Oh, okay. And that might mean that this is this should be a bit steeper. So I'll test that out. Hmm. We're just going to keep going back and forth till we get something we're medium happy with. You know, I think I'd rather give it a little bit of a square shape and push it this way. That's pretty good. That is pretty good. Nile bevel downwards, and this shape matches pretty evenly. Just sorry it took so long. So we have our cylinder. We'll just keep going with the houses. I'm gonna get this one now. I know it should go behind the wheel. And I am going to prefer for it to be as forward as possible, so I'm gonna watch the scale from. Let's lift it up and see what we got going on. Hmm. Moving it out a bit. Gonna bring it forward. Supposedly, it's a pretty thin house. Yeah, it's definitely just some sort of small extension for the wood to wrap around. We'll bring it. We'll play with that. We'll play with that. So let's duplicate this P for selection. Let's make our roof again. I'll do S and Y and extrude it upwards Z axis, and it's pretty even a scale. And it seems like we could add a loop cut, bring it up and then scale it out a little. We'll do the same thing for pretty much all of these. Let's get some consistency going on. So we'll get a loop near the bottom, and then just trying to make sure it's even ish on these axises. We'll go ahead and scale these on the Y at zero, and we'll do that for the sides. That way we have some reference to work off of. I just accidentally clicked Slash there that'll isolate a selection. Not bad. Not bad. Okay, let's continue on. I know I don't want this next house to be too far back, and they share very similar topology. I'm sure they're similar in size, so I'll base it from there. It might be thinner on the X axis and might be whiter on the Y. And now I'll get one of our chimney blockout pieces and duplicate it and move it, see what we got going on. I will start by bringing it here and there, and let's scale it down. Lift it up, and let's keep bringing it forward. A little more in. Again, I prefer these chimneys to be a little more squarish rather than too thin in this direction. So to me, that looks pretty good. We'll take another look. That is three houses down. Why don't we start tackling this one in the back? Let's get her. Let's open up our landscape, the original one we had. Okay, I'm going to stitch these back up together. Mm. Well, we'll get the active selection, the active vertice, and we'll go to vertex snapping. Click on active right here, and I'll do G and just hold control and move that back there. It's not completely necessary, but I wanted to know where our house was. It was back here. So we'll start from there. It might be closer, it might be farther. It seems like we got seems like that would make some sense back there, though. It's a bit of a smaller house. Let's get it on the X axis. I guess it rotates a little bit towards us, so let's get the scale down first. And it might not even be rotating towards us, but we might rotate it a little near the end. So I'm going to go intoFace mode. Let's drag this down. Let's extrude this up. And that's our little roof piece. And we can grab these three and duplicate that selection. Let's see. How do I want to tackle this? Let's extrude this up and we'll get these front and back sides. We'll press ES and X. And then I might even want to grab the sides, as well and press ES and Y. I'm thinking that maybe for these side edges. And by the way, I just did click Hold Control and then click again, and that's going to give me the shortest path, so I can make my selections really fast like that. I think I'll drag these down. I think that's a pretty good blackout shape. Let's grab another chimney mesh, and I'll bring it down. Okay. And, you know, you don't have to follow this specific concept. Once again. You could be trying to get the correct proportions of a door or an alleyway, or a Sci Fi cord or pretty much so on and so forth. It's just I'm showing you how I would approach, you know, matching the perspective of a particular piece, and I think this beautiful concept art is a fantastic example of that. You know, there's not too much science behind this blackout phase, but it could be a little bit tricky, right? So that house looks pretty good, too. We got one, two, three, four. Why don't we challenge ourselves once again? I'm getting to big piece last. I just feel like that'll kind of force us to scrutinize our perspective and get the scaffolding in the correct position. So let's get the cylinder tower in the back first. I'm just going to grab a random cylinder, it's already in the correct orientation. I know that this house would be first, the big house in the middle, and then this one in the back, so I'm going to bring this one back more. I will scale it up. Don't go ahead. Ooh. You know, I'm going to unscale that. And I'd rather drag it up first a meter. I don't know if that worked, but it did. Yeah, I I hold control and bring it up, it should make a two meter object snap to the floor, which is how I prefer my modeling. So now I'll scale it up. I might have messed it up a little bit. Let's try that again. Let's just delete this at a cylinder. It is 2 meters. Oh, but we weren't in increment snapping. There we go. Perfect. So let's bring this back. We know it should be somewhere around here. We'll press S. Yeah, I'll just press S, actually. G shiZ. And I know it's going to taper as it goes up unless that's a perspective thing. We're about to find out due to our perspective matching pretty well. So let's grab a face, and we'll drag it up. And if you ask me, it is tapering a little bit. So go to taper it. Now, just like the other ones, I'm going to duplicate this. Get that face, and we'll go back into Edit mode, and this is our new roof. So like before, we'll have that little kind of flat ring, but then we bring it up and scale it, just like the other roofs. We'll see if I need to reposition this, um, as shift Z, perhaps. Okay, so I am going to be a little safe and get another cylinder, but this time, we'll make it 12. And we'll bring it up again. Let's get it back to our cylinder house. I want these to be the little chimneys that are protruding from here. We'll scale it, bring it out, find that correct axis. Again, I'm always looking at the concept art, dragging it up. Look how simple. It took me a lot longer the first time. This is why we practice and get that preparation ready. That was a quick duplicate, moving on the same Shift Z, not moving to the floor, and bringing it down. I cannot personally tell if, this one is part of this house, but I'm pretty sure despite the perspective it is part of this house. So I'll see what I can do with that right now. G Shift C. Let's just bring down to face. That is a pretty tough one. In the meantime. I might, um, I know, I'll scale it down, and I might have to bring this out on its axis. As Shift Z. We're gonna find kind of a negotiation between these two elements between the three D and the two D. I'm gonna make this one thinner. Bring this one in a little bit more this way. That's not a bad compromise between what the concept is sort of demanding and what we can pull off in three D. I'm gonna untaper that just a little bit. 5. 04 Finishing The Blockout: Okay, that is good enough for the blackout phase for that one. One, two, three, four, five, houses. We have our cylinder, we have a river, we have our fences or rocks. I believe the last one might be the big building. Oh, you know what's funny is there is a little extra small house, or at least I believe it to be, like, a very similar shape to that in this concept art. It's like, right in this area. I think I'm going to try to take this house and duplicate it. I'll rotate it this way, 90 degrees, and I'm going to bring it in. I think I think this is the correct orientation to scale it from, surprisingly, and I think I'm just going to extrude these two elements forward. Let's find out. So this could totally be something else. Don't get me wrong. This a little bit is up to interpretation, especially around this area. If you ask me, John, might be kind enough to tell me, like, What are you kidding? The scaffolding? Of course, it goes this way and then this way and then this way. That's the perfect, you know, plywood fence. But to me, I see this shape when I work on it, and so that's okay. We have the scaffolding going this way, and I think I'm totally cool operating off that interpretation. Let's see if we need to bring it more one way or the other. Well, that's okay. And if we decide to change that shape or you'd interpret that another way, that's more than okay. Let's add a new cube. We're gonna bring it up. This should be our large house. Let's see. So start by scaling it up. Let's bring it. We know it's behind here, and it's close to flush. I know we have some scaffolding in between. So let's just start hoping for the best and moving things around. Okay, let's bring this out. Bring this out, too. I know the perspective isn't exactly perfect. We'll keep playing around with that. I know we got to bring this back quite a bit, which means that all this is gonna be taller. Okay. There is a potential chance that this building could, in general, be rotated towards us. That could very much be the case, but I think it's something where, if anything, we'll go a little bit off for now. And if we need to rotate that mesh, near the end, we can. So for now, I'm not going to do that. For now, let's keep it like this. Yeah, don't let your OCD get the absolute best of you. We are A, okay. We are A, okay. So bring that forward. We'll keep it a little farther back. And if we bring this back forward, now we're playing the perspective dancing game. You know, we're bringing stuff forward and back and seeing what works. I know for a fact, like, we have this scaffolding that wraps around, so we're gonna need some distance in between there. And then let's just try to drag this down one more time. Looks a little more accurate. Maybe what could help us is trying to start with the scaffolding. I'm gonna get a cube shape. And we're starting to head into the wild west of how these shapes down here are interpreted. So I know we have a slightly thick scaffolding that is covering this area. It seems to be in the correct place when you account for the fences, and I'm going to drag it out this way. Or, yeah, let's actually get the correct depth. We know it should be pretty flush against here, which means we're raising it up. Nice, nice, nice, much better. So we know it probably wooden cross into the water wheel, but we can extrude this out this way. And to. Okay, okay. We're getting somewhere, for sure. I think we would need a way to get up to that scaffolding, so I will extrude it somewhere around there for now. And then we know we want another type of scaffolding cube up in this area. So I'm gonna drag this back and see what dimensions, you know, we need to change. Lower it a little bit. I'll see if I can find a corner piece, which I can't actually. Which means it wants to be further back. Okay, and I'm actually going to take my little human guy. Try to bring him a little closer to this area. Try to figure out what type of logic we want to follow in this blockout. I noticed the stairs are definitely going up. It seems like the path that is interpreted between here is not at the center of this. So it leads me to believe, and I'm going to shorten this guy for now. I'm going to shorten that. That'll be a little bonus piece, you know, if we really need that. So if the stairs go from here to there, and it seems like the edge of that would be pretty flush with it, that means we would be something a little closer to that. And the scaffolding pieces would probably also be as close to there as possible. And at the same time, it seems as though that this edge is going inwards. So I just press G double G to drag that in. And now I'm going to select everything with A and press M and merge by distance. So let me merge those shapes together. You can scale it a little bit more and see what's going on with that. Okay. Okay. So another I want to know if we need to bring this forward or back. This is where it can definitely get tricky. We have a plank. Let's go ahead and make a cube, and we'll drag it up. And we'll start interpreting some sort of ramp shape. That way, we can see how everything would connect. Let's see what we need to do. We're gonna drag this one forward. And we know we need some sort of shape to go from here to down here. So I'll start with an extrusion and then lift this up. I'm not gonna look pretty yet. We just want to see where everything connects first. So if I bring this forward, Okay. Starting to look a little better. I'll drag it up. I'll have it pretty much meet the scaffolding, and this doesn't have to be exact because we're not working with the perfect grid system just yet. But I also don't want to mess up how this is being interpreted, either. With that in mind, I might bring this house out more this way. And then once again, adjust those faces. Okay, okay. So that means it's really kind of Hmm. For the sake of, like, realism, right? I am okay deleting that and then having a different ramp shape lead up to here. Even if we never see it, we know that some potential player could walk up there in this fashion. I'll bring these four down. As much as I love that wonderful brown blob, I think it'd be easier to interpret it as the area that the player would enter this scaffolding. That's good enough for the blackout shape itself. So the stairs, they're a little steep. Let's figure out the base level of this first, where we actually walk Oh, grab this right here. Okay, okay. I guess we're gonna have to start by taking the whole thing. We'll bring it more this way. I'll grab these faces and I'm trying to find that correct thickness between these stairs. 'cause I know the ramp goes there. Oh, and then I had actually pushed these ones a little bit too far out. Then this rail kind of goes down a little low. So we're going to make our own rules here at this point. We know we don't need this extra large shape anymore. Because we're gonna have to interpret these as stairs at a later date. So that's one of the ramps. And let's go ahead and bring I just duplicated it and brought another one out. Um, I know we're gonna have to play with where this comes up right around here. You can also tell it doesn't immediately ramp, so I'm going to extrude it outwards and press F to fill that. So I want to check this out. I'll make this thinner for starters, 'cause we're more worried about what the shape of the rails are doing more so than the stairs. Let's bring this one forward. G Y. Okay. I'm going to duplicate this face, press P for selection. Once I select it, I'll press object set origin origin to geometry, and I'm going to press A R, Z, 90. Now I have a new nice little plane to help less face the other way. See what happens if we extrude it. That does seem to be pretty accurate. I think both of these can be lowered a little bit. And I'll take another one and bring it out here. Obviously, this face is going way too crazy, so I'll bring that back in. And I'll get our Y axis railing and just flatten this one out. I'm okay, bringing this far to the back. I'm just gonna bring this back, as well. Hmm. I just wasn't comfortable with this extension being so thin stylized or not. I think this one needs to be whidened as well. Now we're starting to be like, Okay, well, we got to change some things in order to make this really fit in the three D perspective that we're working with. That's not bad. That's not bad. However, now the casing in which the stairs would be at this angle is a little choked out. Wonder what's going on. Okay, that should be good enough. That's wide enough for a person of sorts. Grab this shape. And now I'm just gonna start interpreting maybe what the back would be like. So if I had imagined that this goes we could have this keep going really and then lift up this edge. And perhaps, this one's going crazy, step now. Okay, okay, okay. There we go. I think just we need to deal with the top edge rather than worrying about the bottom. If that were back there, we could take this face, lift it up. We know it's supposed to be something to that thickness. So let's fill this face. Now I will be taking in a sense, it's also decent to practice probably what shape is going to be used as the actual scaffolding. So instead of this very thick shape, as we get to a bit more of a challenging part, I think it'd be important to also practice the correct thickness of that floor. So I'll extrude this out here, put a loop cut here. We're gonna keep wrapping around this guy. Cause in this area and we notice, actually, that we're a little we might not be steep enough. So if I raise that out, bring that in a little bit. Hmm. Okay. I think we're a little bit more accurate now. Constantly working around the clock for this guy. Alright, cool, great, cool. We're totally getting there, turn off overlay mode. Let's move this edge. Okay, we'll find that more appropriate angle for this guy. I think we'll have it end like around right there. We might need to lower it again. And in terms of the thickness of how I wanted this to look in the Redi space, we're pretty good. I'm gonna lift up this edge too. That means we need to bring this one forward as well. And this scene will start building itself a little more logically as we continue. It could be a little bit tough to get those perfect shapes in at first. Yeah, we can even lift these two up. Now I guess we could just start following this. Yeah, it's not horrendous. And we can find out the correct height of these rails in just a moment as we get this edge back to the concept. So I'm putting in edge loops, grabbing that correct thin face, bringing it out, doing it again. Yeah, these look a little tall. I don't know. We'll find out. So down here, they are about this height. We go up. Seems to, it seems to get a little bit tall. Let's take these back down. What happens if we lift up this shape a little bit? No, it's okay. It's okay. I think we're from about this height. Let's hide this landscape so we don't lose our cool out there. Okay, we are making some good progress. I'm gonna go ahead and duplicate this face. Get our base roof shape, shifty selection or Pifer separate selection. Scale that up, extrude it up, and I'll start bringing it in. But not too not too scaled in on the X axis. And I think I'll tackle this by just adding a cylinder for now. You know, we could suffer the consequences of two meshes in one, but we're gonna rebuild it later anyways. 'cause I know that we just quickly needed to get that really nice rounded cylindrical shape, it is a little shred it upwards this way and separate that, give it a new origin. Now, let's play with this face. No, I'm taking a farther look at it, trying to see what is working, what is not working. And I'm gonna see if we need to bring this one out more. But I'm not entirely sure. We're just doing a bit of troubleshooting. I know those edges meet correctly there. Okay. And so the elevation is correct. However, we might need to bring this, this and this backwards. So I want to drag that back and that might have to be a little bit closer to what we settle for because I don't want this roof in this building to fight each other so much. And at the same time, I want this to have a little bit of thickness. It's still thick enough to where someone could get through. They could walk up, trying to decide what to do with this. Okay. Let's go back to vertex. Just trying to grab the bottom vertices. Okay, now it's a little more familiar to the shapes we're actually looking for. I do notice, as well, to take this cube and bring it back, bring it in, scale it in, drag it up, make it thinner. That is probably this red area we're seeing here, like a nice wall or a dam for the river. I'm not entirely entirely sure. We do got to bring that back. Yeah, we'll make it so that someone could walk around here, come on in. They'll climb up this scaffolding. That seems to be pretty appropriate. I'd like to take one of these fence meshes, shift D, Shift Z to bring it under, hide this wall for now. And I just want to get, like, a little bit of some supports going on, just to help me feel better about how this thing is being lifted. Not bad. Not bad. I do want fence meshes around here as well. So if I rotate this after duplicating it, start getting a little something. Drag that up. Do the same thing again for this side. I'm gonna bring this face in. And then I know we got to, like, get that 45 degree angle right here, um, for a fence in between. We'll figure out the precise, like, proportions for that later. So, so first is, like, major proportions, and then we start adjusting to what would the official grid side of this be? But if, you know, it can get a little challenging, just jumping straight into modeling without at least spending a little bit of time interpreting how these pieces would connect based off one concept art. Sort of cool with that. What I'd like to do is, I'm just going to put an edge loop here, I bevel it. And then I'll grab each of these faces, duplicate it, press P to select, and boom, we just got the perfect, like faces for the ramps right here. You know, work work smarter, not harder. I do not live by that, but it is something I will try to remind myself. Very cool. Okay, I would consider that to be some sort of railing on top of the wall. I'm not sure why that would entirely be the case, but we can just grab that duplicate that selection. You just drag it up and make it a little wider. We'll make it probably like a wood beam. So, so, so so. I know that this house in the back also has a little bit of scaffolding, so I could duplicate the pieces, at least some of them, right, and try to bring them down. Looks like it's Whoops. It's meeting down here, and it's not bad in terms of how deep it's going. I wouldn't mind a full wrap scaffolding in this scenario, whether it makes sense or not. We're really building this environment off of one angle. We're not gonna scrutinize about how every angle corrects. However, for that main part of the house, I think it was worth the effort to be like, Okay, well, how do they even get up there? In fact, this piece is bothering me a little bit now. I don't know how far we do or don't want that, but let's test this out. I think it should connect to the house itself. And then, um, maybe we can put an edge loop here. And find out what edge we can collapse. That's not bad. It's kind of like a little little more construction looking in terms of, you know, saving planks where you need to. What was thinking? In be impossible to duplicate this edge. I want to make a little construction piece out of that. Cool. I just filled a triangle and then extruded. And I'll try to remember this should be like a wood plank, wall, if we even see it back there, we kind of do. It'll be behind the house. But that's a good world building, right? We don't want someone to fall through there, and this thing goes up, but the shape is strange. So that's my interpretation of it. If you want to approach it differently, that's super cool. I'm no architect. Maybe I'll go to school for that one day, so that's okay. That's right. I know that this will be handled in the block phase. I wouldn't mind getting an edge loop here to determine kind of what these large sections are looking like. I'm just pressing I to inset and then E to Extrude. And that'll give me a decent interpretation. I think this is too wide. Mm hmm. We'll probably Oh, shoot. What we're going to do is re tackle the proportions of the specific house later at the modeling phase, but I'm pretty happy with where we are in the blockout phase. So I'm going to go ahead and let's get this ready to export. Throw the camera in there. Call this collection blockout. See if I need to change anything. I'll press A, get an active object. Control A. I'll do rotation and scale. I don't know if I want to join everything in one mesh. But shoot, I might need to because sometimes when you import a bunch of meshes into real at once, it can get really fussy. So I'll duplicate this. Duplicate the collection. Random objects? No, and then I'll press Control J. Let's check out face orientation in the overlays panel. This should tell us if we have any nasty flipped normals, and we do. Oops Strange, strange. Uh, I shift N on that selection of polygons that I selected with L to flip those normals. It's gonna be really hard to rotate around now that it's based in it's orbiting around it as one object. But this should be the proportions we need. I'm not going to fuss over it too much. Let's call this blackout. Let's do static mesh. Bout. So when I go File Export, I'll click on FBX. I'll go to Desktop. Let's go to our village. Let's make a new folder called FBX and another one called game FBX. That way, if we're importing exporting stuff, we know which ones we need, and we know which ones will be the final you know, game ready mesh. I'm okay with the blackout in either one of them, so I won't select a preset, right? Quick mesh is basically what I'm about to do here. It's mesh, and by holding Alt and selecting one, you're just isolating that. We only need the mesh, right? So pretty self explanatory. We want to click Selected Objects. All of this should be left at default. And in smoothing, we'll click on Face. That's the way Unreal likes things to be. Armature, do not click leaf bones or uncheck that and unclick animation. Everything's looking good. I'll call it SM blockout. I'll click Export. So I think I'll save our blender file, and this is our little baby blockout. It's not perfect. It's not bad either. I really enjoy looking at this. It was fun matching the perspective, and we'll fix up any inconsistencies in the scaling or how meshes are flushing with each other during the actual modeling phase. But it's good to know that we have that correct scale so we can get our landscape going and have a good frame of reference. So we're finally going to start opening up on real, and we have some project settings to get through. So hopefully this is exported now. You have your files ready, and I'll see you in the next video. 6. 05 Setting Up Unreal: Okay, so close down blender. I have my blackout file saved, my blackout FBX exported. And in the Epic Games launcher, I'm just going to go ahead and click Launch. We're going to wait for it to load, and I'll see you back in a second. So here in the Epic Games Unreal Project Browser, I'm going to go ahead and click on Games third person. I don't think we need starter content, so I'm going to leave that alone for now. And I'm going to call the project Village UE for Unreal Engine, and I'll save it in the village folder. Yeah, I'm going to save it in there. I'll press Create. So it's funny because we're going to do something boring first. We're gonna wait for the salode and then we're gonna close it immediately. We also have all these shaders to compile. So I will also see you in a moment. So, we are here in Unreal. This should be the basic third person map. Let's go ahead and test that everything's working. There's a third person character. Um, one of the thing about the courses is that this probably shouldn't be your first time in all of these softwares. Of course, I'm going to able to go over and totally explain what I'm doing. But, of course, you're gonna have a better time if you at least get yourself familiarized with, you know, what I'm clicking around with in Unreal. So first things first, we're actually going to close it. Too bad. So sad. We're gonna open up the master folder, go to the Unreal Engine project. And in configuration, let's open up default engine dot INI. Um, in the Purifile, we should have a couple console commands that In Unreal Engine. Well, we're not going to be putting in const comands outside of that, because I do feel as though a lot of the default values work really well with Unreal Engine, but at the end of the day, these ones will help Lumen and our foliage interact with each other better. I believe it's render setting. So I'm going to go to dot Lumen dot screen Probe gather. Dot screen traces dot HBZ traversal. Yeah, we'll do an equal zero. Syntax for that. Now, let's get our second one, which is array tracing dot Geometry, equals zero. You know what? Let's not do this one. Let's not do this one, because if you do end up playing with the automatic grass function, you're actually going to want that disabled. But we will do the third one, right? So it's screen probe gather, short range AO, dot screen space, dot foliage occlusion. 1s1s. And we're going to have an equal 0.1. This kind of reduces the flickering, and this reduces the harsh AO. So that's pretty much all we need. With that in mind, we're going to go ahead and open up Unreal Engine again. And then we're going to dive into the project settings. You probably got a little sneak peak in the window to your left at the moment, but let's go through it together. So let's go to Edit and project settings. We're going to search up the settings we need. The landscape is going to give the grass its color, right? And that is done through the runtime virtual texture. So I'm going to type in enable Virtual texture support. That's one of them. It will want us to restart soon. I want to turn off enable virtual texture Import. Okay, yes, everything's good looking there. Now we'll double check for something that should be on by default, which is generate mesh distance fields, and we'll look up the anti aliasing method. M. So I personally am a bigger fan of TIA. There are literal videos talking about how terrible it is if you're a gamer, but I don't know, it totally works for the style. And it's much cheaper on the hardware, which is something that's important to developers at the end of the day. Let's look up Ray tracing. Use hardware ray tracing when available. I'm okay with that. I'm also okay with detail tracing for my specific hardware. It is more expensive. You don't have to use it, but it just helps the global illumination a little bit. I'll turn on a trace shadows as well. Let's hope that this didn't just log out my entire computer. We'll find out. No, it didn't good to go. Support hardware reason. I'm going to turn off path tracing. And I'm pretty sure that's all we need in the project settings. We can also go to maps and modes, and we could make our map first. In fact, we could start with our kind of official folder structure. Why don't we call this one unreal? I'd rather have this extra stuff be in a folder that's not distracting us. I'll click Move here, and I will click Accept. I don't think this is going to break anything. Okay, as far as I know, it didn't break anything. If I click on content and click on Update redirector references, this will clean up a lot of the folder stuff that we end up doing. So I'm going to click on Delete on these three folders. Let's see what happens. Yeah, we're just going to try to delete these folders and see what happens. Yeah, we're perfectly fine. Cool. So we have the unreal stuff. Now, let's call Let's get our base folders going on. Let's get textures, and let's get materials. Let's get maps. For now for now, let's start with this. So Indi Unreal One, I'm going to get the third person map, and I'll press Control C, and I'll go to our maps and Control V. Let's call this the village. For now, we haven't made our textures and materials yet, but what we could do is grab the resources. So if I go to the resources, and then we can go to the textures and add a resources folder. Now, I do want to take in RGBA. And I'm okay with bringing in defaults. Let's bring it into the resources folder. And then let's also get the black and whites. So now we have a couple just base textures we can use for the simplest of shader formulas. And I'd rather give you guys these shaders rather than force us to waste a bunch of time, make it a bunch of brushstrokes no one really cares about. And I'm sorry to say, but that's the way it goes. Cool, cool. So, let's open up the Village map. We're gonna save everything. We will keep some of the space structure just for a moment. What I really want to check out first is the post process volume. And we'll restart this in a moment. I like to go to convolution, first and foremost because it's a bit more of an accurate bloom algorithm. And then in exposure, I am definitely I do prefer that we stay in manual mode. It definitely helps us get the consistent lighting that we're looking for. Or actually, you take it to zero, go to basic, and then you clamp the values of the min and max at your desired scale. So probably first things first, we should change the sun intensity. I'm going to bring it to something like 12. It's a little stronger to the point where some of that global illumination isn't struggling so much to reach around the corners. And there's a bunch of different ratios that you could use in terms of lighting. Like, some people might do 2000 and then just totally ramp this up. But in my experience, somewhere around 12 works best with the post process materials that we'll take a look at later on. Because I can't read the scene color if it's just way too bright. So let's keep it at one for now and see how we feel. Okay. How about zero. How about 0.5? Cool. Now let's look at the skylight, and what I'm going to do is, let's go back to the resources folder. Including the one in our finder, and I'm also going to bring in the white HDR. I believe that's all we need for now, but I'm going to put that HDRI into the cube map of the skylight. And you can already see the difference. I showed it a little bit earlier, but this is the natural, very bluish global illumination from the sky atmosphere. This one kind of just cleans that up with more monotone values. It also looks pretty good at one intensity, so I'm going to leave it like that for now. We'll go back to the post process volume, and let's see what else we need to change. I'm okay with this. Color grading doesn't need to be touched, but we can look at the global illumination settings. We are going to be using lumen. This is an lumen deep dive, but for now, let's just boost it up a little bit, and then near the end, I want you to boost this up to the maximum value. There's no reason why you should be hiding detail away from your work and near the end. We'll check out in advance for a moment. Skylight leaking might be interesting later on. We're going to ignore that for now. And then in reflections, let's just take the quality to two because we only have one reflective object in the scene, and that's going to be the water. We may as well double check that it looks pretty good. We'll keep this bounce at one for now, but that's what you want to aim for. Of course, if you want to go the most optimized route posible, you can turn both these features off, and it messes with the foliage a little bit if you do turn this off, but I can show you how to alleviate that later. And then in the post process materials, this is something we're going to look at at the end. But I basically just wanted to make sure that we have the correct settings in our post process that we have the correct exposure, that we have the correct directional light. I'm okay with the fog density for now. This is unreal note their stuff when it comes to their settings, but I am going to select volumetric. I do prefer that. Let's double check that retraced case shadows are on for this, and they definitely are. And in the volumetric cloud, real quick, I'm going to duplicate this material. We'll browse to it. It's going to open up, um It's going to open up the engine content. You could see that out here. When I really just we'll close that in a minute. I just want to go to materials, maybe make a folder called FX or something. Or, actually, let's put it in maps because I think maps should be a little bit of our messy folder. I don't want to make I would rather have one messy folder rather than 1,000 folders that just happened to be organized. I learned that the hard way many, many times. So in maps, let's call this Village Clouds. We'll go ahead and edit that in a little bit, but at least we know that they are assigned to there. I'm going to delete the sky atmosphere or the sky sphere, sorry. I wasn't even active. I guess they've replaced that in future builds. And we have some settings we can look at here in a little bit once we get to the lighting stage. But next, we can keep players start. We could keep our lighting information. But I'm going to start deleting the meshes. I'm not a fan of the world partition system in unreal. So I'll probably include edit at the end of this video discussing if it was difficult to get rid of this because this is how the landscape layer system works for now. Look at that. It's already being fussy, so I'm going to look up world partition. Does it give me anything? Let's try to disable this. Wow. Very cool. So look up World partition in the world settings and disable the heck out of that. That's awesome. Okay. I'm glad we figured that out live. Very cool. Lighting playground, let's delete the playground. And let's delete our cylinders and blocks. We'll mess. So with this should be the most naked version of our scene. I'll click Control S, I'll click Control S. Everything should be saved. And next, we'll get into the landscape really quick. 7. 06 Landscape Blockout: So I've restarted Unreal, and I'm also going to go to the project settings into maps and modes. And in the Editor startup map, we can set it to village. We'll do the same for the game default map. I'll close that. Everything else should have been applied. And then for the landscape, we're going to press Shift two. And we're going to be able to see what we have going on. But that does remind me. Let's go into our content, add a folder. Let's call it mesh. Now let's find that blackout we created earlier. I'll go to my village documents, and let's find the FBX. No go ahead and put it in meshes. Um, Okay, we got a couple of things to check out here. I'm okay with this. Um, I'm okay with doing whatever it wants to the normals in tangents for now, but I do want to combine this, and then I don't want to build Nani. I just don't find it needed for this course. Turn off animations, turn off materials, um, yeah, we want to set it to do not create materials, right? We don't need any textures. There's just so much stuff that we're just like, don't it. Um, maybe I'll turn this off for now. Maybe we won't have it recompute. Let's import it and check it out. Let's set it to zero on the map. Let's see if our scale is anywhere close to what we actually need for now. Okay, let's go here. Let's turn off the collision. I'm going to type in collision, and I'll type in no collision. Now we can better check out the landscape and build size. I'm assuming it will let us translate it for now, and it will. So let's go let's go to 127 by 127, let's move this. If need be, we could do 255. You just got to be a little careful and a little conscious of what you're doing. But actually, this could be good because in the background, we could probably get some more hill like details, kind of obscuring itself into the fog. I'm okay with that. I'm going to press Create. And so let's see if we could find a base level that we're happier with. I'm switching between landscape and selection mode with just shift one and shift two. As well, shift three is foliage mode. Shift four is vertex paint. I think that's all the ones I use. I know Shift five is modeling mode, but we're not going to get into that in this course. As well, those selection modes are right here. So I'm going to bring this up a little. And it looks like we'll have to bring it forward. And right away, let's go ahead and create a camera. If I click on the plus, let's go ahead to maybe not visual effects, but cinematic. I'm gonna look for the cine camera actor. I'll rotate it this way. And what we're trying to do is, to the best of our ability, let me get my PUF back. On my other monitor, I'm just trying to match this as best as I can. We are just eyeballing it at this point, and that's okay. I know that if you're looking at the reference, the same one as me, you know our guy is a little bit close to the center, but not exactly. In fact, I'm going to pilot it. So I'll press perspective and go to the cin camera actor. I also know that the edge of that building is obscured and that the back building is not only in between those two, but a little bit lower. And we have some room for the rocks in the back. In that house is a little further back than originally anticipated. In fact, I can go back to the blender blockout and we can double check it. So back in the blackout, I'm just double checking the wire frame against the camera position. I'm gonna go to Wireframe. I'll go to camera. And that is in the right spot. So I can go back into Unreel and just be a little fussier with this. I'm assuming it could have something to do with the focal length. So let's go ahead and play with that. The current focal length is 35. What happens if I set it to 18 or maybe even 12? 12 is a little steep. So let's go back to 18. We know our rock is at the bottom corner there. We know our building is obscured. We know this is lower than this one. If I can bring that up a little bit, not so bad. And then the back hoouse is pretty close to the wheel. So as far as I know, that's looking good, it seems like the horizon, surprisingly, does not follow the rule of Thirds. It seems to be at the halfway point. So I'm dragging it back down, and I'm zooming in a little bit. You know what? I think in this scenario, as we're not dealing with the exact focal length, something like this is gonna have to do for now, but at the same time, we could zoom in a little more. Because I noticed the top of this is sort of close to the top of the canvas. Also, that's good looking to me. If you go to the film back and type in 16 by nine, I also wanted to make sure that we get our sensor width and sensor height in the correct spot. And it seems like that might have even affected the focal length a little bit. So, let's try 15. You know, it's a little bit of a tedious process, but we will totally get it down. I noticed that the landscape is supposed to be in that spot, so that's pretty good. Bringing that main house or that side house closer to the wheel. And that perspective looks pretty good. It seems as though, however, that the actual ratio of the scene might be something like 18 by nine. So I stretched that out a little bit. And I think that works. So I'm going to exit the camera, and for now, I'll lock it. We can move this again later on. But for now, I'll press Shift two to go back into landscape mode. I wonder if we could select the camera at the same time. We can by pinning it. I'll press Shift two. I'm going to bring down the strength, and let's make the size. What? 1,000. This should be a pretty straight path, correct. So if I press Shift, we're going the opposite way. The brush is a little big, so I'll go to 600. And I'm just sculpting it a little bit right there, right? And I'm mostly relying on the flatten tool. I do feel like it's better for the initial, especially the blackout phase of the landscape sculpt. I think we'd even bring the flatten back to this side, as well. We're just playing with the heights between these two. At this soft strength, it shouldn't be too egregious. Maybe I'll make this a little thinner before we take another um let's see. I want to flatten it from here. And already, that's not bad looking. I'm extending the length of that river. And so now we can take a look at these slightly rising elements, and I'll bring my brush up to something past the default. 6,000 looks okay, and it has to be pretty darn soft. So when I start sculpting, I do not want a lot happening. I want to be able to tap on this and get the values I need so that after that, I press on smooth. And as long as you're careful, the landscape tools are pretty awesome and unreal. Took me a long time to get used to them, and still, I don't think they're perfect. I just feel like the secret is to just have that really low tool strength. That's what they don't tell you. And even then, it's not gonna be perfect, but that is okay. Going underneath, you know, finding those forms, and I'm just trying to match what we had in the blackout. And then once we get to a later stage, you know, it is a flexible landscape system. So we're going to be able to re sculpt this, not resculpt it, but smooth it out in a way we're just really happy with the final result. But no, this landscape is a one and done deal. This will be the one used in the final one. Let's go ahead and even this out too. Now, if I look at the camera right here, I can see that I definitely don't want it to be that I don't want it to be that bumpy, so we're going to have to take our smooth tool and see how far we can push its strength. I don't know if changing the strength of this to something over the maximum does something in the way that I'm intending. But see, even with a low sculpt strength, it is still very possible to kind of get these way too bumpy areas. So we're smoothening that out. I need be, I might speed up me wiggling this mouse around. So look forward to that. A long story short, you know, scraping by with the sculpted brush got a little messy, right? So I was able to take the flatten brush and kind of do a little bit of a dance between those. You take sculpt flatten and smooth and, you know, eventually, you'll be able to get something a little calmer. But, you know, these are rolling hills. They're not too they're not supposed to be too lumpy, yet it can be easy to sort of fluff up. But, you know, with a little bit of flattening, I think the smooth tool also operates just a little bit better, see if that full strength can work out for us for once. And while it's not perfect, I'm looking at the canvas here, and I think it's personally a lot better. I want to smooth the transition between these hills and what is going on in the main scene, smoothing, smoothing, smoothing. We might even be able to alleviate some of this bumpiness with the ramp tool. If we take the ramp tool and decide it's two position points, you can take it in. Click AD RAMP. And this is a pretty good way to get the smoothest forms possible. We will increase the fall off. Okay, we're just gonna have to bring this one a little bit lower, a little bit more forward. And let's try to add a ramp. Pretty cool. I'm just adding one more ramp seeing if we can get a nice silhouette there. We totally are. Going to lift this up? Re add that ramp. And we are You know, I didn't want to start with the ramp because I feel like getting that sculpted smooth flattened process out will help you at least determine your proportions in the best way possible. So now with a very smooth ramp, we're not having to guess where we need to place our points. So I'm gonna bring this back now I see if we can get just, like, one or two little elevations. That kind of offset with the background. I'll lower this a little and I'll try to add a ramp. And I think that kind of did the trick. I do want to add another ramp back here with a bit of a smaller width. And just I'm aiming to kind of smoothen out this position, whatever's going on back here. That's kind of okay. Let's make this 0.03 No, I don't want to do that. However, I kind of want to clean up just this area back here. So I'll re increase the smoothing, bring these points in. And I'm just being a little finicky with the landscape. So I'll click on my Smooth tool, and now I can start cleaning up the edges between these ramps as well. And the smoothing responds a lot better to the ramps than it does to the sculpting modes for some reason. I think it's that sharp transition that really allows it to understand where it needs to be smoothed. I'll click on my camera again, check out what we got going on. I'm still just smoothing along. Um, I'm a fan of these smoother shapes because even though it's less realistic, it tends to push the composition a lot more. I think we're pretty much there. Okay, let's re flatten this one more time. Or, I'll just let me undo that last one. Okay, so for now, I'm okay with this landscape. We'll do that second polish pass near the end. But in theory, we have taken our blockout. We have put it into unreal. We've set up the project settings. We've gotten a very base lighting pass down. We put the blockout where it needs to be, and we sculpted the heck out of that landscape. For fun, we could go to the volumetric Clouds, and let's go to the sky atmosphere first. Let's continue our base lighting pass. And so, first thing so is I'm going to decrease the ground radius. We want these clouds to be lower to the ground. Multi scattering can be increased because we want the scene to be brighter. And this is a little more stylized, but I'm going to input some thicker atmosphere up in here. And as well, in the concept, the concept is a bit bluer in the sky. It's like a nice, it's very hard to pick this sort of blue because go a little too green and it's nasty and go a little too blue and it's purple. Personally, I'm okay working with this. This looks okay. I guess for now, I'll work on the brighter end of this. Okay, not bad at all. And then in the sky atmosphere still, the last thing I want to check out is the MIE or the M scattering scale. And I'll start playing with what I think looks good. I'm okay kind of cooling those colors down by increasing this just slightly. So now we can check out the volumetric Cloud. This is our duplicate material version, and, you know, I did not create this material, so I couldn't perfectly explain to you what every single setting does. But I did take a bit of a look into it, and a lot of the things in these sub panels are going to give us some interesting shapes that are a bit closer to the concept art. So if you give me just a second. I'm going to look at my concept art to the right of me, and you should do the same too. And we noticed that the clouds are really close to the ground, and they're a little fluffier and they're a little bit crazier. So I'm going to keep pumping out these sub menus and see what we could change to get these looking crazier. Cloud coverage, I think that's going to work because the clouds in the concept are fluffier. I'm looking at these base passes. You know what? This might be the second layer. Perhaps we're going to look at the cloud per type scale first, okay? I see small changes, and let's actually go into seen a camera actor, see what we got going on. Okay, okay. It's affecting the shape a little bit. This one seems to have the largest effect. So I'm looking for something with a little bit more volume like this, but then maybe a little less density at the same time. I'm okay with the larger scale. Seems to affect the base pass. Velocity, only it's more like the seed. It's just moving it around. But I really want to find out how to get the most change in density. I think it's going to be our global scale. And as well, we have these other settings, not gonna play with clown shape, or maybe. Let's see. Let's play with noisems. Okay, okay. Okay, this seems to add a little bit of directionality. I'm a fan of that, too. Let's go ahead and check out storm clouds. And that that actually that fits a lot for these ones. These are very, very full clouds. Don't know if colors gonna do anything for us, but, no. And I'm trying not to press Control Z two too much. Okay, I'm going to redo that one as well. Check out face controls. We can check on multi scatter. We're just seeing what is going to help our composition the most. I think the intensity of the multi scatter works well for this. I think the occlusion boost works pretty well for this. I'm wondering if there's a way to change the tone of the shadows themselves. That is something I can find out a little bit later because I noticed that the shadows themselves are pretty gray in the final, but at least we have our base pass. We'll see if a certain velocity looks good. Just playing with the values. I'm pretty okay with this for now, actually. I am a fan of that. So I'm going to take one more look into the cloud settings themselves, see if we can find any other fun settings with the menus. And let's check out the bottom altitudes. This is how we're going to find some thickness controls outside of the material itself. Let's see, cloud material, maybe some art direction tools. Oh, oh, very interesting. So this is pretty cool. We're reaching outside the realm of what the sky atmosphere can do now. We're able to add some warm values to these clouds. I think I want, ya, like, just a little bit of warmth in these. I think that'd be pretty cool. I can see more clusion in the back by changing this one. I'm pretty okay with that. I don't want to change the view distance. I'm gonna play with the layer height one more time. Let's reset that, see what we like. Maybe we'll leave those at default for now. I'm gonna save this, make sure we got everything taken care of. And, you know, as far as I know, with all that taken care of, we are ready to get into the next step. And the next step is to build the library of materials slash textures we would use to then start the modeling process, right? In some environment, art pipelines you are going to do the modeling first, and that's completely valid. But because we know what materials we need and we kind of want to see how those would look with those materials, we're going to build those first. So long story short, get your knuckles ready for substance designer. If you haven't used it before, I'll be as giving as I can, but we have a lot of materials to go through. So I really hope you ready. Look Look up a beginner's tutorial before you hop in because it'll be a lot of fun. But I'm also happy with where we are here. And so I'm glad we have unreal setup for it. Trust the process. This thing will come out looking cool eventually, so I'll see you in the next video. 8. 07 Designer Introduction: Okay, so before we hop into Substance Designer, once again, I do want you to check out the store page because we're going to be using paint box to build these materials. Again, I'm using the base $20 version. This includes all the nodes that you could need to build these materials. It's just that they don't include the crazy source files that honestly aren't entirely necessary for this course. So we can take a little peek at what kind of materials they're suited for. They're basically um pretty ready to go when it comes to Gibiesque materials, and I feel like that's a really popular and growing style. And so I put a lot of effort into adding tools over time to make that process easier. We could see one of the first demo environments I had made when developing these products, too, and you could take a little bit of a look at kind of how this operates, right. If you're a substance designer beginner and you create some random noises together, close enough to what you're trying to achieve, just a couple of extra nodes can really push it far. And we have some kind of cheat sheet nodes to be able to do very repetitive tasks a lot faster. Uh, including some fun color notes to kind of bake in light into our materials, so on and so forth. This thing goes crazy. I think there's a lot of value in this product. So on my page, I can't I can't download it off here. Again, the discount code is Fast Track 25. So once you check that out, it should be in your art station library. And once you download that, I'll go ahead and open up Substance Designer, and we'll see how this all operates together. So I'll see you in a second. Okay, so I'm going to go ahead and open up Substance Designer. And from paint box two, the nodes that I want to look at are in the nodes SB SAR folder. We are pretty much going to be ignoring the nodes in this trim folder, but the generators and filters are some pretty powerful shortcut nodes that we'll be using in the process of this course. So I will go ahead and start by making a new project. And I'll call this village materials. I'm okay working with two K. I don't think we need to go lower, and I don't think we need to go higher. I am okay getting us a little preset, which is the metallic roughness, because we're making a PBR material, right? So I'm gonna press Okay. And, I suppose I could be kind enough to just give a little bit of a breakdown on how these output nodes are working. I'm not going to have time to be able to show you how every note in substance designer works, but we're going to be, you know, operating in a very live way. So if you need to, just copy what I'm doing. But if you see sliders and options that you think make your material look better, you know, while you follow along, please feel free to do that. And as well, you're not even forced to follow this specific concept, right? If I pick green and you want to pick blue, that's perfectly valid. But it might be worth understanding, at least why we're plugging things into here. Um, so let's zoom into our three D cube. Let's say I want a tiling texture that is made of a bunch of dots, right? So the main shape generator in designer is the tile sampler or tile generator. Tile sampler has a couple more options, and then you'll work with the generator, and you're like, Oh, I just need that one option, and it just so happens. It's in here. So maybe I want dots. So if I change the pattern to a disc, we already have something like tiling, like one of those plastic floors. So how do we translate this shape into this material? Well, the base color maybe in real life, it'd be something like yellow. So we know that a color file should probably plug itself into the base color. I'm not a fan of that, Hugh. There we go. And for the normal, we understand that these dots would go up into the surface a little bit, and then light might bend around the edges. And so the way we generate this normal map is through the magical height map. We put a ton of work into the height map from here, a node goes here, goes over there, swings around here, and it all plugs into the height at the end. And I'd say the height input that we're working on, that is so easily converted into these ones. I'll show you that process right now. With this shape, like I said, I want it to go up a little bit. So by changing the bubble size, it's almost like looking at it from a top down distance. We know that these edges are now changing up a little bit. With that in mind, maybe I can change the scale of these discs. And then I'll just plug it directly into the height. Now, we see it affecting the height, but we don't we can't really tell what it's doing to the surface, and that's because we're missing the other parameters. So for the normal, it's as easy as plugging the height into the normal node. And you can change the intensity. And now now the surface knows how to read where the light is bending around the surface. And furthermore, if you take that same height map and plug it into an HBAO node, that is generating the fake ambient occlusion in between the height. So we're already getting a pretty nice looking material. We could pretend that this was metal, and in real life, metal is either black or white. You know, I'm no genius. There could be instances where some materials out there in the real world have a half value. Perhaps it was manufactured that way. But most of the time we're playing either between full white or full black. However, I will say for stylize in between, can be perfectly valid, depending on, you know, what the goal is. So I'll leave that a black for now. And for roughness, that is just the shininess. If it's black, it's super shiny, if it's white, it's very rough. So as I drag that along, we can see the shininess of this change. Something that is very, very common, in fact, is to invert the ambient occlusion node. And if we just get some control over that with the levels node, we're basically saying where there's more shadow, it's less shiny. And where there's less shadow, it's more shiny. So if I plug that into there, you know, you barely tell, but at the same time, we know that these darker parts are just not going to be as shiny. And so we're playing with blacks and whites, getting the features that we need. As long as you know how these output nodes work, you're basically already a master designer. Then it gets difficult in terms of, well, how do I achieve this specific shape that crosses away this way? And, you know, I'm no expert. You learn that every single time you hop into this program. So we'll be discovering new things, maybe switching nodes around if we need to. You know, there might be settings live that I feel worked better than my previous practice. And that's kind of how this Um, this software operates. It's great for creativity, and it's also a little finicky. For preview purposes, one last thing I'll show is to boost up that tesselation factor. It's not too expensive, so I believe, and you can always change the height scale. You know, sometimes during the development process itself, I'll keep it at zero, but one is perfectly okay. So that was our test material. And I think first, I want us to make a grass material. So I'm going to go ahead and click on New graph. Actually, not new graph. No. Mm. We'll just duplicate this. I'm pressing Command C here, clicking on the package, and pressing Control Ve. I will save the package. That's what's going to hold all of our materials. And I'll just put it in the projects folder. Okay, so in a second, we'll get started on the grass. Okay, we're gonna get started on the substance designer adventure. I'm gonna save some of my talking energy because this is going to be a battle of attrition. So I'm going to delete this first one. I just wanted to show you guys how to copy and paste materials, and I'm gonna rename this with F two or double clicking. And the first one I want to tackle is the grass. Like before, we're actually, you know, luckily for you guys, my glass is broke. So now we're gonna zoom in extra hard on these nodes. The first thing we're going to start with is the tile sampler gray scale. So, in theory, this will be able to duplicate patterns across our, you know, material in many more ways than just this very manufactured looking pattern. And that's because we have a ton of different sliders that can really take this from, you know, pattern to noise. Um, including brick walls, including tiling rocks, including grass, pretty much everything that you need to get started with a material. So the tile sampler gray scale is very powerful. I'm going to make a grass blade shape, and I'm going to start that with the shape. Bring the scale down a little bit. What I'd like to do is start moving this around with a transform. And to see what that's doing, I'm going to plug that into a mirror gray scale as well. So if I start moving this around, maybe we can get a thinner shape. And if I go to the tiling mode, I can select absolute and no tiling, and we have just the mirror. So I can scale this up with the transformation two D. And now we have a base grass blade shape, and I'm going to start creating variations of this with the directional warp node. And we'll do that twice. So I'll get a new shape now. I'm just pressing this Control C, Control V. I prefer that rather than, you know, looking up the shape again. And I'm going to change it to something with some gradient value in it. If I plug that into the input, we can see that this black and white is forcing it to start to warp. We can use a transformation two dende on the shape. And we can move it around a little bit. You know, I think I'm gonna want smoother shape, so I'm actually not gonna move it much and maybe just change the scale. Or the warp value. I'm a fan of changing the warp angle to something like 62 degrees. I'll just try, we'll use the same one for this and just change the warp angle again. If this one's 20, maybe we could try something more intense, like 50. And we do have three grass blades now and in the tile sampler grayscale, I'm just going to go ahead and set it to pattern input and set it to three. We can go ahead and plug each one in. So if I go to our tile sampler gray scale, we can see that we do have the base shapes going on. But in order for them to blend together correctly, they're going to need different black and white values. And so for each one of these, I'm going to take a blend node. Hm. Or maybe we should just do it once after this original one. We can hold control or sorry, shift to move the inputs and outputs. We're going to plug this into here and reconnect all these nodes. And I think I'll just take a gradient. Let's find gradient one. I'll plug it in instead it to multiply. So now we have a little bit of a different height value going on. We could even use the levels node in between these two. And we could clamp it a little bit more, get something kind of intense going on. We don't have to clamp it too much, though. So back in the tile sampler, I think what I'd like to do is we'll start scaling these up and we'll increase the amount. Let's go to something maybe 128 is too much. Let's try 70, 70. Looks like we might need a little bit of random rotation, so I'm scrolling down. I think a little bit of that. And we're going to increase the scale more. I don't really want black values in between there, which means we'll also have to increase this. Let's try, uh yeah, these thinner blades are working, so I'm increasing the X amount compared to the Y amount. And now we're going to take one of the first custom paint box nodes. So if you have the nodes SBSAR folder, we're just going to go ahead and go to generators, and I'm going to get the brush. I'm keeping this folder in a different window, and it's probably advised not to move these materials in your folder until you're done. That way you know how everything is being referenced with this add on. So this is like a pretty complex tile sampler node that comes with a bunch of presets to help get us some very interesting painterly noises. It does include a couple presets. You know, there's a lot of settings in here. We'll also try not to go too overboard to allow for a lot of fun, different shapes without needing to plug 100 things into each other, which if you open up the SBSAR sorry, the SBS file, you'll see how this operates in the pro version. But I want to plug this into both the color and the rotation. And I do want to change up this pattern a bit. Let's see if I could find a preset that's a little bit noisier. And I think I'm looking for something like that. So I'm increasing the position. I might keep the contrast somewhere around there, and I'll use the slope subtract to get a more interesting shape out of these brushstrokes. So with that plugged into those two inputs, now I'm going to go to the rotation map multiplier. And we can see now that the grass is moving in a similar way to what the white values of this is. So if I increase the white values with that position node, we'll see that do something, and the contrast is also changing how these are affected. And I'll also apply this to the color map multiplier. We're giving it a little bit of depth. Let's see what color random does for us. Okay? We don't need to turn it up all the way if we do, you know, actually, why don't we boost both up and see what it gives us? Yeah, we're going to have to find a mix between the two. I think that looks pretty good. So for our grass, we're not necessarily going to bevel it, but we're going to be doing some things to add some detail in it. So let's organize this really quick. Because these are grass blades, and I'll delete this for now. So when I select everything and click Ad Frame, I'll call this the grass pattern, and we'll go ahead and get started on the grass details in just a sack. 9. 08 Grass Material: Hey, continuing on with the grass, I'm going to go ahead and grab another one of the custom nodes, and we can go ahead and put two in here just so we don't have to get them later. Let's go ahead and get LZ filter grayscale. LZ is short for lazy because this was originally called Lazy Paint box. And then we're also going to grab colorize, and I want to grab masks and light. We don't need these ones for now, but it's nice to just have them in the project, and I'll explain those in just a little bit. So for the filter, we're this filter node is pretty much just a quick and dirty way to get some a little effects on here. And one of the things that I want to do is kind of inflate and soften up the shape. That might require us to blur this as the slope input a little bit. So in that blur, just gonna take it down to, like, one. So a little bit of smearing, a little bit of inflate, and we get something more painfully in that way already. I don't think I want to play with the filter in smooth. There's a lot of fun options in here. Like, for the slope intensity, you'll see it's not doing anything until we increase the mask position. And that way you can have some interesting ways of distributing that sloper. So we're kind of busting up the height map this way. And so for the grass itself, I'm not too interested in the slope, but I did want to kind of painterize that height map, and we could even give it the slightest blur if we need. I don't know if 0.1 is what I'm reaching for. It is pretty cool. Okay, so I'll take a blend node, and we're going to put something pretty cool in here. What I'd like to put is a, we'll take it from this blur, actually. And I think I want to warp it, just a regular warp. I'm going to plug the brush into the actual input, and it's going to be warped by the temp. So now we have these random brush strokes that are being distributed kind of across our temp. We can play with the intensity, see if we find something that looks a little more tame. And so now we have these brush strokes that are sort of following the edges of the curvature without going too crazy. I don't mind taking another filter node and sort of seeing if that same effect does something cool for us here. It does. It does. I could even have it. I could even have it be a little tamer. And so, yeah, this filter nodes are really a fun way to start inflating and smearing your shapes based off an input. And depending on what style you're going for, there's even a quantized node, so you can quickly, get those values without having to add to your graph. Really fun and easy to use. And the PBR version applies to the whole material at the end that'll be really cool to see as well. I think I am going to quantize it a little bit. Let's see what that warp can do for us now. See, we're just experimenting and seeing how these custom modes can help boost sort of the creativity of how we approach a substance designer. So I'll take this, and I think I'm just going to try to overlay this. A small overlay of 0.3, add some, you know, cool, interesting effects to this hype map. This is no longer, you know, and the AO and the normal. You'll see it's not exactly realistic in terms of what the temp is doing, but that's because we're not going to use this iteration of the hep map. We're going to be putting more effects on it soon to give it a very painterly abstract effect. So after that blend node, I'm going to go ahead and get the full value out of this with the Auto levels node. And now this has brightened up our image quite considerably. I also wouldn't mind trying to get another blend out of this cool paint jelly image we have. So I'm just gonna blur it a little bit, and for this one, I think I'm just gonna try and multiply. And even more so we're getting some cool variation out of there. So you shift to drag these outputs out. And I'm also going to add a histogram the final values of what our height map is doing, um yeah, the final 'cause you're not going to always want that full zero to one range within the height map itself until you're getting to that output phase, because, yeah, yeah, simple as that. So let's frame this up, and I'm actually going to make sure we leave these I'm going to unplug these PBR attributes because we're going to be using something else near the end to get it actually working the way we need. So plug these basic inputs back in for now. I'm going to frame this, and we'll call it the grass details. Looks like I deleted the Instagram range. That's okay. Very cool. So what we're gonna do is actually take one more custom node from the paint box, and we're gonna get filter PBR from the paint box, and we're going to get filter PBR. So we're going to start setting up our base painterly output. This is a pretty crazy node, and it just makes it so that the final outputs, which would be these, we're plugging into here instead, and it's going to let us pump some of the similar effects we have going on here into the entire PBR material, which is just pretty cool. So for now, let's delete the default inputs, and let's plug these in correctly. Normal does go to normal, roughness, metallic. Height, or ambient occlusion. And we'll see these two nodes right here, and I'll explain them really quick. O stands for occlusion. R stands for roughness, and D stands for displacement, which is also height. When you're packing your textures for unreal, you don't want to work with, like, 50 black and white textures, and you can actually pack for black and white textures inches. So this is like the optimized output. Depending on what the shader is doing, you might want the metallic in the blue channel or you might want the displacement in the blue channel. So we actually do have, you know, both options. And in fact, I'm going to add another we're going to add a few outputs. Um I'll type space space bar output. And this one, I want to be normal GL. And that way, we can preview the materials correctly in blender, as well as we're previewing the materials. So I'll take that same output and just plug it into the normal GL. I'm actually not going to use any sort of output for that for the three D view. So I'm going to get another output, and we'll call this one ORD M. We'll put the same thing for the label. Um, and I don't think we need a usage for this. Just go to switch the letters around for this one, ORM D and ORM D. Very cool. We have both pack textures now. Let's make sure that normal GL has a label too. We have all sorts of outputs ready to go, except for the fact that these are in the wrong spot RDM and RMD. Awesome. So before we get started on the color, I think it would be cool to take care of the other outputs first. So this is our base height map, right? And already, I want to see if we need to un smear or uninflate some of this. Perhaps we're going to go with the regular version. Yeah, that's a little more subtle. I do enjoy that more. Then we'll have this blur take care of this pattern, plug it to here. I just kind of refining this a little bit. I think I enjoyed that a little more as well. So with this being our final height map, let's go ahead and process it for the Lazy filter PBR. If I press Alt when I have a node dragged out, I can create a dot node, and it can help me kind of organize my graph a little bit better. So first things first, let me go ahead and get our masks node. And this is going to help us create our roughness map because it takes the normal, it takes the height, and it processes it in a way where, for example, that inverted ambient occlusion little formula we did is automatically built into this. You would just increase the opacity and find the values you enjoy along with the change in blend option. So it gets a little abstract. It gets a little crazy, but it's better than trying to figure out the perfect solution of nodes. So I'm just playing with what I find to be the most interesting. And if we're trying to raise some of these black values, we probably I'll increase that even more. Painterly materials aren't typically extremely contrasted. However, I will plug this into a levels node after or actually a histogram range, and we'll get a little bit more control over that final output. So maybe I'll decrease the base position now and we'll have the range take care of some of that contrast. Cool. And so I'm going to plug this into the roughness. Let's get the same one and get this for the height. And before we do that, let's actually get the auto levels. And I'm going to press D to dock the Auto levels node because, you know, there's no settings to change in that one. The same put if I hold the same put if I hold and click on the node, it'll add a dot node so I can start, you know, bringing them out from here. Another one I'll grab is the ambient oclusion node again from our height map. I'm going to make this really subtle. Or actually we'll yeah, yeah, I'll change it in. And that looks pretty good, pretty good. Roughness looks good. And so to get our normal, we'll just take a normal, and you can choose between the normal or normal Sobel. In my experience, I appreciate the output of this a little more. I'm not exactly sure how it works. I'm going to set it to something like five so that I can actually take down the intensity in unreal engine, if need be. And then we will start working on our color in a moment. For the metallic, I'm just going to get a uniform color and set it to grayscale. It's at black, we'll dock that. And I'm going to get another brush node. I'll copy and paste that over here. And preset one is definitely my favorite when it comes to a starting point for how you want to slope blur in a pretty painterly way. Despite how this specific pattern looks, it does the job of what the slope blur needs to do really, really well. Let's increase the Y amount. And I'm playing with the depth. Maybe the fade a little bit. This has a lot of cool, interesting effects built right within this node. And I'm going to put this into the output. We will call this section, if I frame it PBR. We have our outputs. It's definitely coming together. I'm going to make sure we take the intensity and just put all of these at zero. Nice, nice. Put all of these at zero. Nice, nice, nice. Okay, so we're going to be taking the initial height map output, and we're going to start building our color map out of that. For starters, we always want some sort of effect to overlay it on. So I'm actually going to get another brush node for now, and I'll actually get another masks node, too. And I'm gonna plug the original height into this mask, and I think I'm looking for something similar, but I want less AO in the mix and more curvature. I think I'll invert this. We're looking for something to give us some detail around the edges. I think we're almost there. Don't want. I think we're going to need more range. And there we go. Yeah, some of these other sections were taking down. I'm playing with the we have some interesting height information to work off of for a blend. So first things first, I think I want to take a regular blend, and we're going to get our crazy version as well. We're going to put this on top and plug this into the colorized note. Not only is it going to be the slope blur, but I want it to be the mask, as well. It creates some really interesting effects. We can go ahead and pick our first two colors, so I'm going to grab a uniform color, and I'll find it green, kind of unsaturated a little bit. And we'll get a dark one and a light one. See if I need to change the hue a little bit here. Maybe that was too much. So I'm just gonna plug both of these in here. Color Is notice, like, a quick a blend. Like the traditional blend, but it comes with a couple extra effects to get a pattern that's a little extra interesting. I'm finding two values that I find work better with each other. Even if they're not too different. So with this, we could change the way that the mask is distributing between these two colors. So if I go to the position, we can get a different threshold of what we find looks interesting. That's what's pretty cool about the colorized node. We can always distort it up with that same slope. And we can always plug a different input into the slope blur section of Just a little distraint of bit. Just a little distortion is not bad. Not bad. Okay, so with the brush node two, I just want to create, like, a new type of little overlay pattern on this. So I'm okay having some black in the mix, so I'm going to increase the mask random. I might change the slope scale or actually with that in mind, with the slope scale increase, we could change the regular scale, increase, subtract and just try to find something new and interesting from these effects. Change the mask again. And I'll plug this into the opacity, and I'll find one more color that I enjoy. Let's go with something I guess based off this and a little bit darker and yellower saturated. Let's find out. Plug this into the color. See how I feel about that. Looks like we can increase the position. Okay. And so now I know I want something a little more green, maybe brighter. Change the contrast. Yeah, that's pretty cool. And the thing is with the grass, though, is that in the final tiling, we're gonna have to take out a lot of this contrast. So even the stuff I'm doing here, we're going to kind of green it out because we do need the base landscape grass texture to be a simple grass texture, to be as simple as possible. Uh, with that in mind, we can create, you know, the world's simplest painterly noise. This is kind of like the fast food version of lazy brush right here. And it's how we all make our stylized materials. It is just a Clouds, too with a kind of a histogram scan, and don't let anyone tell you that using this is wrong. Look at that. It's still a wonderful noise that can do a ton of things. I'm going to take a blend. I'll create one more brush. And what I'm looking to do is create a very small, small version of this. I want little dots of detail. I'm not sure if this is going to be the correct shape for us, but I'm going to take out the fade. Maybe undo that scale, and that can even change the brush shape. So I'll unmask some of these, take the scale really low, including more scale variation. Just want this to be really dottish and weird. We could even change the scale so that they are less elongated if we need. Okay, and now if I plug this into here into the background input of the blend with this in the foreground, set to multiply. Now we're taking out, you know, these little dots in a more interesting way. So I can plug that into the blend another time. We need this to be the opacity. Get this as the background, we'll get one more color of our choosing. This one, I want to be brave and say, I want something more saturated and more yellow. That's pretty cool. Okay, let's consolidate this a little bit. As confusing as it looks, sometimes, you won't regret having your graphs look smaller. I prefer consolidated and smaller over spread out and out and I don't know, makes 1% more sense. It doesn't have to be extreme, though. And the whole point of paint box is to sort of be able to create these materials without, you know, plugging a ton of nodes into each other. I want to see if this is benefiting us for the height map. You know, it helps a little bit for the multiply. I'm gonna get rid of the overlay one, and we are using it. What I wouldn't mind is taking a histogram scan on this guy. Hm. Yeah, I want the original height mask here. These are extra effects layers here. And I'd like to give our original wacky overlay a dedicated, like color. So I'll just take a blend. For the histogram scan, I'll increase the position. Just play around with that. I'll find a color I enjoy. Alrighty. Not bad. With that in mind, we might want this to be more yellow, too. Now we're being a little bolder with our colors. Okay, very cool looking. I'll bring this up. Let's see what we need to drag out. Looks like you know, for sakes sake, let's see if this can be pulled off as the slop ler. You want a little more yellow in this now? Okay. I just didn't want a node to be used all the way across here for no good reason, if you ask me. Now, I'm okay, making this one a little greener. And we'll mask out some of these guys. So the last thing I want to do to the color is take the light node, and this is a fun one to where it's going to read both the height and the color. There is a normal map version, excuse me, I'm going to switch it to height Map. We're going to plug the height map into there. And it's reading that height map information height map information and projecting colors on it. And so it's going to be able to blend with our color map really well. I'll probably have to make the default values better, but here's how it really works. Just take everything down to zero. It's just letting you know that it works, right? So AO, opacity, nun, shine, none, casado, none. And we can start from a better starting point. So we typically only need one or two in each section. If it looks funky, right, like it does right here, that means we need to increase either the height to normal intensity, the threshold, or the blur. So let's take another look at our height map. Maybe let's get the auto levels version of this. That might also help us a little bit. Okay, so opacity one is the top down light. This can be You know, I'll actually set it to none for this one. Mm hmm. Direction works better for some of these. I think this kind of north facing light going downwards, actually looks a little better. And I'm just working with these at low opacities. You know, for now, we'll keep it a little higher and we can change the final blend. But these are different shadow directions, as well. I find AO to be a little more useful in this case. Set it to something super, super subtle. Changing its position adds a little more variation there. And maybe we just don't Hmm. Yeah, we need this really, really subtle. And what I will change, though, is the shine opacity. These are little speckles of speculators that are being baked into the light in a very fun way. Okay. And I've scrutinized this enough. We even have mask outputs if you want to see how that's all being operated on. I went really subtle with this. I really did. Maybe I do want some top down now. I can blur it. Okay. Let's put that into color. And now we're starting to get there. In this scenario, the normal map is super strong. So first things first, it's just grass. Let's take it down. And next up, we'll check on the ambient occlusion, and that's pretty rough looking, too. For painto materials, I go really light on the ambient occlusion. We'll try to be brave and boost it up a little bit. Okay, so we have this material, and first things first, I'm gonna Okay, so we have this material, and first things first, I'm gonna go to quantize. I'm just gonna quantize the whole thing. I'm going to see what amount of steps. Don't push it too far, but add some nice color variation. God I liking that. So 20 steps isn't bad for there. Let's check out what we want to do in the Effects panel. I think a little bit of inflate looks good with this grass. And more than anything, yeah, I don't know. I boosted that way too far, but in theory, I don't want the sharpness to demand too much attention in this. So I am trying to play with both the filter and the smoothness. And this is from the built in Kuahara filter. It's just part of this package. I don't think smear is gonna work for us in this scenario. And again, because I know that, like, this is going to be this is the part where I'm going to get one more blend node, plug it into here and just get a uniform color that is kind of being the deciding factor as to what the main color is. And so now the quantis might not give us hues that I was exactly desiring. And so that's where you play with both the quantis and the fact that this HSL node comes before the quantis. So with that in mind, it just seems like the darker variation within here might be too saturated. So I'm going to bring up the brightness. Take down the saturation, change the hue. Okay, so we're getting some little bit of greens in there. And let's see if we can hunt down a fun, maybe bluish hue. You know, this part, be a little finicky, but you're just trying to decide what color makes you the happiest. And lastly, for the slope intensity, I'm going to start busting up this material with the pain to the effect. Okay. And, you know, it's basic, but that's exactly what we need for the grass. So I'm going to take down this and this fade, no depth. I want these to be pretty sharp, contrasty differences. You can even see if it's busting it up to the way we desire by changing that height scale. Change with the Okay. Cool. So you can always change the saturation. You can always change the quantize amount. In fact, I think I do want a little more control over that. And we have a nice grass. You can even undo this blend if you want to get your complete colors back. I just know I want this to be pretty subtle and its color changes. And then in unreal, it's not going to have tessellation. So it'll look something more like this in the final package. But that is going to be the template basically for a lot of our other materials. So hopefully we won't have to set up every single color combination for all ten materials. We'll pat ourselves on the back. Good job on this material. And next, I think we'll go ahead and make the kind of a similar one to this with the roof texture. So I'll see you there. 10. 8: Okay, so we've finished our grass material. I put a little color frame around here. And, you know, one of the best parts about substance designer is that even though it could be a little difficult to set up, you know, some of your first materials, you're basically building little formulas that you can then replicate for other materials. And so you're able to make things faster and faster. Speaking of which, the next material, which is the roof material, be pretty similar to this, because we are spawning, you know, these fur like grass blade shapes onto a tile sampler. We add some details to it. We are deciding the colors, and thanks to Pat box two, a lot of the final PBR material setup process is kind of automated. So with that in mind, we're going to duplicate this material. So Brest Control C, go to Village Materials, Breast Control V, and I'll rename this roof. Let's open it. So first, we'll tackle the pattern. And for the roof, I don't think it's gonna need a lot of random rotation. So I'm gonna find the rotation map multiplier and settle it down a little bit. We can have some. For the actual rotation, why don't we change its direction to downwards? And I'm thinking I might want these to be a bit bigger, as well. So instead of changing the scale, I'm going to change the amount. And I'm already kind of enjoying this. For the brush strokes, I feel like we should maybe match this a little better, too, so I'm going to change the random rotation. And just to get a little more variation out of this, we change the seed. And we can play with the color random. Besides making these just a little bit longer. I'm pretty okay with this as sort of the base impression of the roof material. And so now I'm going to go into the details, and I think I want to put levels on this. I feel like these are a little steep right now, so I want to get the white values out of there a little better. We get a brush shift. And we'll check out what we got going on. Let's see what happens if we boost the warp a little bit. Maybe we should blur this, too. That's a bit more interesting. We're just creating some new variation shapes out of this a little bit of smearing and inflating. Let's see what the slope can do for us. Let's try the original height. It's a little intense. But at least we're getting some distortion out of there. So we're starting to see some painterly roof like height gouache coming out of the displacement map, and it's being distorted by the PBR filter, which is really, really cool. So let's go ahead and just hop into the color. Maybe for masks, we want a little bit more contrast out of this. We're just experimenting, trying to see what looks interesting. Blending some AO in there is pretty cool. We're just using this as sort of a distorted mask, and let's go ahead and change the colors. I know I want something a bit browner and darker. We'll get the duplicate color for the one above. I'll just raise the brightness on this. We'll check that out and we'll play with the sliders a little bit. Maybe I want a little bit more of a yellow or actually, that red was pretty cool. Mm. But we'll probably have better luck with a more yellowish tone. So I'll start that a little bit with the mask intensity. Now we'll hop into the next color and see if we want to change the histogram scan of this mask. I think that looks pretty cool. Maybe we will raise the brightness on this as well. Or actually, that already more yellow tone sort of does the job. I know there's so a lot of yellow in the roof material in the concept. However, I think I want to get something a little bit browner, and then we can lower the brightness and change the hue in the shade or I just want something a little bit more generic for now. So maybe changing the seed on this could do a lot. Already, that's not so bad. We could play with the fade and maybe we can play with the position. Even changing the contrast is pretty cool. Now, I'm going to do something similar with this one. I'm going to add a warp, maybe even a directional warp. And I'd like to I just want to get something based off the hike map into this intensity input. So we could try this mask and see if it does the job. And it pretty much does. I just wanted to get some distortion around what this brush is doing. Let's go ahead and change the angle, if need be. And I think I'm enjoying the look of the warp, actually, directional. You know, it's good to experiment, find out what works, what doesn't in this case, it's all about what you prefer look wise, and I'm enjoying the look of this more scratchy directional. So again, I'll change the hue. But I don't want something too complex. You know, these are gonna be tiling a lot, and the last thing I want is giant patches of paint that break up that tiling. Nothing wrong with a little bit of darker tones there. If I zoom out, we can kind of observe that tiling. I believe we can also observe the tiling through this. And we totally can. So let's see if we want to change the hue once again. We're just finding our favorite tone, being a little picky about it, trying to see what's gonna work the best. In fact, you may be using this as a tool to break up some of this variation, it's gonna be better because right now it's a very similar tone. So if I increase the scale, we're kind of blaring that up. For these little extra details, why don't we elongate them again? Let's go to the brush and then turn off random rotation. We can mask more random and we'll increase the scale. I do want these to be pretty thin. See if we just change the disorder on these clouds. And I'll go ahead and just make this a brown, dark, slightly desaturated tone. A more saturated and darker. Now we'll see how the light is working with this. Let's go ahead and turn off the opacities and start from scratch. Mm. You might even change some of the colors. You never know. So let's go to the light first. We'll see which opacities we enjoy the most. Would you like that to add some depth to this one, but I think it's mostly about, like, what the AO is trying to give off for this roof. Very top down type of material. So just by changing the sliders around here, I'm getting a top down light, and I'm just trying to see what mask looks the best. I'll also see if a certain color looks better. Mm. Sort of okay with the light being a little bit more grayish and desaturated on this, but, you know, we'll keep testing that out. I'll take a look at the ambient occlusion, if I need to. I'll go desaturated for this one, too. So this is another type of material where sort of less can be more, so we do have the option to decide if we want to blend just one simple base color over all of this. And that's probably going to be a good idea. I'm also going to decrease the amount of blades going on. Let's see if we can find the X and Y amount. We can start seeing in the three view how much noise we might want in that material. Still a little large now, but at least giving off some directionality, maybe with really long strands will help us achieve that. Okay. So maybe even for the slope, maybe I'll try turning off the random rotation. We can zoom in and play with the slope and see how it's affecting it. This is our base material. This could be a situation where I might want less of these sprasttrokes, but still pretty contrasted. I'm gonna turn off the grain, turn up the depth. We're just seeing how it pushes this material around. I think it might help us if we turn up the tesselation. And then this does seem to be a situation where we might benefit from a little more ambient eclusion. I know in the concept art that this is definitely not this saturated. Then I'll also quantize this to a lower amount, see if we can find some interesting tones. So where are we getting our green tones from? Looks like playing with the contrast, alleviated those grains, which I like. I'm enjoying where this is at more. Just gonna play with the slope a little bit more. I want to see how it's affecting it, and I feel like we're losing a little bit of sharpness due to the depth. Kind of like that a little bit more, but perhaps with a lower intensity. I'm pretty okay with that. Let's turn off the height tesselation. And if we're previewing this, you know, at the angles and the view distance we intend to, it's a little sharper so that it gives off some kind of alpha cart effect. Well, of course, we'll add the alpha carts, but at least right now, it's it's a bit of a rougher grass blade type fur. So that's pretty cool. We have some color variation in here through Jaquants. We could see, now that we have this if perhaps adding some light through here will do us any good. Maybe through a different side. And I enjoy that extra variation, definitely. So, we didn't have to add that many new nodes, but we have a pretty different looking material than the grass itself. So this is what we'd be putting on top of our roof. And, you know, maybe at the end of the course, we'll go back to this graph and see if we can add an opacity map, maybe create a shape similar to this, and then populate them on the roof meshes, you know, if we want to take it to that level. But in the meantime, yeah, that is our roof material. And next we can tackle the bark. So I'll see you in the next one. 11. 09 Bark Material: Okay, let's go ahead and get started on the next material, which is going to be the bark. So I just copy pasted, T Bark, let's open it up. So, in theory, a lot of what is going on here with the masks, we can keep a lot of what is going on here with the color. We can also keep we'll be adding some stuff to this. But we pretty much I'm not too interested in this height map anymore, to be quite honest. Let's see. So I'm just going to go ahead and delete this. What I will do is find or let's see if we can keep any of these. I'll keep a filter and I'll keep a brush. And we'll go pretty crazy from there. So I'll look at this brush first, and let's see if we can find a preset really quick. You know, surprisingly, kind of what I'm going for is based off a pretty much based off the shape. I just want to rotate at 90 degrees. Let's see if we can find the rotation. Let's try 90. And then we can add a few more on the X amount with a little bit of random rotation. Maybe a couple less on the Y. We can play with the contrast position, and so on and so forth. Maybe some mask random. Kind of like one of these dark spots. I'll keep that in. And, you know, these kind of look like overlapping bark features, if you ask me, you know, we're going a little bit impressionist here, but it's because we have a lot of materials to make, and I think that looks pretty good. So I added an auto level so that we can get the full black and white value. Now I'm going to add a little detail on this. So this and the purlin noise are pretty similar to each other. This one is a little bit more organic, and these are super popular for very soft deformation. So for this one, I'm going to use the Gaussian noise. Maybe make it a little bigger. I set it to multiply wherever it ran off to. There we go. Next, I'll take another blend, and I'm just going to start getting more of these brushes so I can make some cool overlay patterns that get slightly more detailed. So I could change the brush shape, see if something wants to agree with what I'm looking at the X and Y amount too. Bring that back out. I'm just trying to see how I can get some cool details out of this, maybe less steps. It's pretty interesting looking. Well, maybe I'll bring back, some of these features. There we go. I'll plug that into the foreground, and maybe I'll set this to overlay. Now we're getting some really interesting patterns out of that. And I will do this one more time with another brush. And I'll say this one to multiply, and I'm going to increase the contrast. And I want some very horizontal details up in here. Come to think of it with these shapes that are popping out of here, maybe add is the better approach or Max. That's pretty cool. So from here, I think I just want to get AD is the better approach. Or Max. That's pretty cool. So from here, I think I just want to get a quick filter on this. So let's get that same filter. Let's see if we either want to plug it in with itself. First, let's maybe we don't need quantize just yet. We'll see if we want to plug the original height or this edited height into the slope. We'll test both. Surprisingly, I'm a fan of this more subtle distortion effect that comes with the original one. You know, we could put all sorts of little effects on here, huh? I think I want to keep it. Okay, okay. A little bit of smearing will probably be good to get some variation out of the height. Just the slightest amount of inflight. Very cool. We can take a simpler slope blur gray scale, and we can just kind of add a more detailed grunge map. Maybe I want to go with, we'll try five. We'll play with the bounce cause this one's pretty directional, too. We'll increase the samples. And maybe I need to blur this. We're getting a little bit of distortion out of the edges of this. Max doesn't look too bad for that blend mode. And so let's find what we enjoy the most right here. And so for a slope blur gray scale, and the actual one, you could change your mode between blur, Min and Max way at the shape, as you can notice the Max is inflating it. So for this one, either Max or Min would be cool. I don't want to blur it too much. Yeah, it looks like we're chipping away at the edges a little bit, and that's pretty cool. I don't mind getting a little bit of levels on this, seeing if we can push the darks. And perhaps in auto levels, too. Cool. I'll work with that. For emergency sake, we can always get a histogram range on here and then change the range through here. So yeah, I'll keep it at one for now. We'll call this we'll call this the height. And first things first, let's plug it into the PBR and check out our roughness mask. Maybe we'll want one more brush so that we can overlay a new roughness pattern on this. So I'm going to paste that in pattern on this. So I'm going to paste that in, check this out. We can do less smearing. We're just changing up the shape a little bit. I'll do less random rotation. And let's just plug it into the overlay. We'll start with maybe a inverted blend and change the opacity of this. And I'm increasing the roughness of the ambient occlusion. And I think I'll increase the base amount of roughness. I'll increase the range. That's pretty interesting looking for the roughness. I'll increase the normal intensity for this bark. Something like, three looks pretty materials. And I think we're going to add this node, which might be a normal invert, because we do want to flip the Y channel of the normal map for the normal GL export. Let me double check if that's correct. So if this is our direct X normal and this is our OpenGL normal, going to see if flipping the Y channel, A green channel does the job, and I think it does. I think it's working correctly. And I'll double check that in a little bit. So with our height, we can now move on to the color. So I'll plug this into this node, and I'll also plug it into the masks node. Let's check out masks first. And I think I want a little bit more of a base position maybe invert one of these blends. Just get something new out of that. Just get something new out of that. And I think I want the full range to come out of this, so I'm gonna get the auto levels. I'm also going to make some more room for the color. Let's go ahead and drag some of these back, and then give this a little space as well. So we'll pay attention to the colorize first, and we can shift to drag these to the correct one. First, I'll get a little bit of a brighter color here. I'm okay with this being a little more contrasted. We'll play with the position and range again. And again, I'm just moving stuff around, seeing what looks good, and what doesn't look good. I might want to switch these colors around, so I'm gonna drag or yeah, drag my mouse over these two connectors and press X to switch them. You can do that with any two blend connect. And I want something more like that. And for this next blend, you know, we'll keep this little effect where we blend it in with our height. Ooh. Yeah, we can go back and you can change how this mask is operating on this colorize. In fact, I'll double click this one more time and see if what I prefer more little bit. Something around there is pretty cool. And I will keep this extra histogram scan version just because it's nice to get information based off the height map. But I do want this to be more subtle. I'm already going to grab the original color. And I'm also going to increase the contrast, decrease the position. And so the real goal is to take a couple of these brushes, and I want to get some very directional ones out of it, I might take these two, actually. And I don't know if we need these warps anymore, but we'll get two brushes and two blends. So I'm adding two. You know what? We'll even add three because it's not so much about what the height map is doing in this style. It's more about what the color map is doing. And we want to use these brushes to add some fun variations, and I'm just going to do that by really just going through the controls, adding some randomness through this, seeing what I can find that's abstract, yet yet still interesting and kind of horizontal looking. So cool with this one, I'm going to go into the mask capacity, and we'll change the hue a little bit. Alright, let's make this one brighter. And let's see if we just find something that suits it nicely. Not bad at all. Let's check another one of these. And you know what? Maybe I'm a little crazy and we can add a directional work to some of these. Let's just plug the auto levels into there and set it kind of high. We don't have to do this for everyone, but it's cool to always get some color information actually wrapping around. So in this one, we can go kind of crazy and let's see, I might decrease the position of this one, and I want to add something that's less saturated. Maybe increase the contrast. And that's pretty cool, too. Now I feel like we could totally grab another one of our masks, and grab another one of our masks and just overlay a little bit of height information on it. So I'm going to go ahead and grab another mask. We'll put it down here and I'll get a blend. Or let's just use Do we want to keep that one? Yeah, we do want to keep that one. I'll get a blend. We'll plug this into the opacity, get it here, and just add one more brighter color. First, we'll play with the mask itself. It should definitely be pretty pretty contrasted. We'll see what opacity is affecting what? That's kind of cool. It's kind of cool. And so masks operate similarly to the light node, except, you know, we're getting a lot more control out of one mask rather than some simple masks at different colors. So I'll increase the brightness of this. This will be our, like, edge curvature. I'm not sure what the perfect hue for this is gonna be, but we will find out. Almost okay with, you know, this kind of greenish look to the curvature. We'll definitely have to replay this light threshold. Let's play with some of these sliders and see what's gonna get us back to a good looking spot. Oh, and it's because no height map is plugged into here. So let's take this down a little. And let's go ahead and I'm going to add a dot node. Just take our auto levels, plug it into there. And as well, we do have one more brush. We can check out what we want to do with this. And so I'm already kind of a fan of the actual shape of them. Okay, I'm going to go back to the light note, and now we actually have the sliders playing around appropriately. So let's see what's doing. What? I notice we definitely have a lot of light coming from somewhere. It's probably the shine, which is not bad, but let's go to the regular lights first. It looks like I might have to increase or decrease the threshold. And I do like that. I just want to change the color. Let's go back to something warm. I'll change the opacity. Let's see if a side shadow do us any good. Yeah, this bottom shadows pretty interesting for this bark. I do feel like it could be the wrong tone. Maybe we're aiming for something a little more on the red side for the shadows. Really, I think that looks pretty interesting. Then let's go back to the shine. Have it be pretty subtle. But I do want some there. Yeah, the light node takes us really far from the original blend node, that is for sure. I feel like we don't need too much overlay for one final blend color, but I'll change the hue. Let's check this out. Cool. It's a little soft, but we can always increase the contrast. Maybe we want it to be a bit darker. I do like that. The sloper is already behaving pretty well with this one. I'll see if random rotation works better with it. Random rotation works better with. And then maybe we'll extract a little bit of detail out of this. Yeah, that seems to push it in these directions a lot more. What I wouldn't mind trying is going back to the light and finding our ambient occlusion. Yeah, and we're going to get a lot more depth out of that. It's already the correct color, too. So it's even going to the output nodes correctly. The AO seems to be at a pretty good level. Could bring it down one or two. For the roughness, if it's a little shiny for your liking, you can always go back, increase the position. And for the over I kind of want to increase the contrast to that. We can even check out a different, you know, shape for this. I think that's pretty good for the bark. I'm really enjoying the colors coming out of it, and we could always play with the quantize them. Cool. So, similar to the grass and roof, we're going to be able to duplicate this in a minute and get started on the actual wood, and we'll use that wood texture to apply to the wood beams. But this will work really well for any foliage based assets you have or if you add trees and whatnot. So awesome job. We'll get to the next one in just a minute. 12. 10 Wood Material: Okay, now we're going to continue on onto the wood. So I'm copying and pasting into village materials. I copied the bark. Call on this one, Wood. Let's go ahead. So we're going to be, you know, going from left to right, once again, trying to tackle this material. And, you know, when I think about wood, I know that there isn't too much wildness going on, but there's a lot of variation, and it's very directional. So, if anything, we would have very, very little on the X axis. So I'm just going to go ahead and play with this. Let's see if I could find something interesting. I'm definitely looking for a lot of contrast. I don't know if the answer is maybe scaling these in more. And, you know, that might be the situation. I'll test out six on this. And, you know, for now, I'm okay with this one. Let's see what we got going on. So we could always change the disorder for some new height variation. And for these two brushes, I know I want to do something similar to that first one. So I'll get rid of that random rotation or at least a lot of it. I guess none for this one. I'll mask quite a few of them. And I'm just, you know, trying to get a feel for what would be a nice addition without overtaking what we had. Maybe this would make for a good multiply. And then for this one, let's get something a little bit blotchier. But I still don't want random rotation. And we can go ahead and play with the shape a little bit. I'm just testing out what works, what doesn't And I know I want, like, a low scale for this. At least we're getting some tapered shapes out of this. Definitely gonna need a lot of masking. Cool. It's definitely a bit of a harsher wood, but we're gonna overlay that a little bit. I want this to be less inflated. And we'll see what's going on with the slope. I do like how the mosaic blends it together in that horizontal fashion a little bit more, so we'll keep that for now. And I'm still okay with how this tackles the slope blur. I'm going to see if changing any of these. Mm mm. That seems to Vignette inwards. And that's pretty interesting. After the levels, let's get rid of that and just go to auto levels. We'll keep all that for the range, and we'll double check the PBR. I definitely want to play with a different brush pattern for the roughness overlay, and already this preset is pretty interesting. But is preset six. So it's very harshly changing the slope shape. So I'll change the X amount here or maybe the Y amount. That seems pretty cool for a painfully type overlay. I'm going to uninvert that. Let's see if we need some contrast to go with this. Maybe we do invert this. Very interesting. Very, very interesting. We might even copy this brush for use in this section, too. So first, I'll check out our mask once again, and we'll get a new base type of pattern out of this for the colorized node. I'm just moving stuff around. And I like this high contrasted look. Go to the colorize. We have these two. I guess we'll get a little more variation out of here. And then I can change mask intensity, color intensity, position, and range. Maybe we'll even switch these two around, see how we feel. I do enjoy that, so let's continue on. For this second one, we're not going to want as many original brown tones as the bark, so now I'm looking for some dirty definitely some dirtier colors. It's already pretty cool how it's just one big, you know, breaststroke here. We can increase that a little bit. And I like that it's kind of like fading out right there. Let's see if we want to change some of these brushes. I definitely do a little bit. Why don't we use this brush instead and then make something different based off this? So first things first, I'll go to the mask random, and I'll also go to the scale Y, scale X. Let's see if regular scale random does us some good. Now, we'll play with the shape a little. Cool. We'll try that out. Let me see if we want to know, we'll have to play with the tone with this one for sure. See what looks best. I think we're going to go with a sort of green, actually, see if we can find the right tone, a little darker, saturated, and we'll make these longer, as well. Pretty cool. And I'm already a fan of how this one is distorting. I guess we could just change the seed of this. Pretty much want, no overlay or very little. Also, pretty cool with that, but this time, I think I want to go for a darker color. I'm just trying to see if a cooler hue works for this. We're going for some really dirty wood. I actually really like how this kind of covers up some of that. And so I'm going to let's see what we want to do. Maybe increase the histogram scan of. Maybe we don't need it at full opacity, but it does add some nice original reddish hues back into that. We can check out the light. This time, I feel like the green is a little bit strong. So I'm going to look for a more yellowish reddish tone. That's pretty cool. And I know we're going to want some strong ambient occlusion for this one. Maybe less on the position. And then we'll see what tone works best. It could be blue. It could be red. It's kind of hard to pick. Maybe the secret answers is pretty gray. Gray with a little red. I think the difference between those is pretty cool, but I do want to play with the threshold still. The AO is a little strong. Go back down. Let's play with our lights. I like these horizontal changes. And the underneath shadows would probably benefit from being a little bit bluish green. Maybe not at such a high intensity. But that is pretty, very, very interesting looking. Again, very little overlay going on here. And we'll check out what we can do with this. For this one, I think I want to filter it much less and sharpen it. I want the wood to demand a bit of attention. Always blur the height a little. See if one of these effects does something for us. Okay, so I don't want to inflate, but I do want to slope blur it. That is pretty cool. Play with the steps. Now we're getting some really deep reds in here. Check out how that looks. Intensity off? Pretty cool. Does something for us. Okay, so I don't want to inflate, but I do want to slope blur it. That is pretty cool. Play with the steps. Now we're getting some really deep reds in here. Check out how that looks. See intensity off, pretty cool. And I think that's doing the job. This one seems to kind of not want its random rotation. And then we'll play the detail of this a little bit. I'll go back to our original first preset and turn off the random rotation of it. And I do really enjoy that directionality. Let's see if we just need to get a little more detail. That's cool. And then I'll bring down the intensity a little bit. Well, and the wood is always one of my favorites. It's pretty forgiving in terms of the tones you could pick. You get, like, a lot of age out of it, and I always have a lot of fun with it. Super directional. So we'll be able to use this one ton. It has so much variation in it that we can move any of these planks around, and they should look pretty interesting. If need be, you can always add In fact, let's do it live. Let's get one more blend. And for this one, let's go set it to multiply or actually, let's set it to minimum. Then what I'd like to do is find a way to get some really, really thin lines. So if the answer means that we got to scale these in like this, then we can get some really, really deep cuts in the wood, as well. So it seems to slope it pretty intensely. So we'll actually keep it pretty minimal back there. Then we got wood and maybe that AO could behave a little more strongly. So And if we don't like the tone in the final one, you know, we can increase the lightness, see how it's playing with those hues. We can decrease the saturation and just find what you think looks best for this material. It is a little bit strong here still, and maybe it could use a little fade and maybe a little bit of random rotation and maybe even larger strokes. Very cool. Awesome. So that one was a lot of fun. I think the next one is going to be pretty abstract. We're just looking to make some grayish extract. We're just looking to make some grayish noise with the tiling rock material, which we'll use on our baked rocks later. So let's look forward to that. Good job on this one. And I will 13. 11 Rock Material: Let's go ahead and get started from the wood to the rock. I'm pretty sure we can copy this graph and then change some things up to get a bit of a simple rocky surface material. The thing about this one is it really shouldn't have a lot of detail because we're going to be relying more on the sculpt of the rock to extract detail. I just want a little bit of extra PBR and color information with this rock. With that in mind, let's go ahead and start with the height map. While we'll keep, you know, some brushes, I kind of want to start from scratch here. So I'm going to chop this down, honestly. And we'll start with a new brush. I'm going to find a preset that might be able to help us get to that starting position a little bit faster. And it might be this one. It's kind of organic and noisy. And so I'm going to increase the scale. I am going to try to smear this up a little less. Keep detail, keep fade. Perhaps this needs to be even bigger. So I'll play with the position. Let's see if Fade can introduce some cool height variation in there. That's pretty cool. Similar to our grass, we're going to get a warp and we're going to plug this into a blur. Then I'm also going to get a new brush. Sort of change this one up. Let's let's just add something kind of crazy. Let's just plug this into the input, and we'll plug this into the gradient input. Let's see if we need to blur this a little bit more and increase the contrast. That's a bit cooler. So let's go ahead and take our actual. We'll keep the original as the height map will just keep the blur for the input. And let's go ahead and blend these two with each other. We'll try overlay. That's pretty cool. I'm also going to try Let's see what a non uniform blur does. This is a bit of a strange node. It's also good for inflating shapes. Sometimes you want to even invert the input and see how it operates with that. It's some pretty subtle stuff and maybe we won't need it, but it might calm some of these quantized overlays down a little bit. So with that, I'm going to get a new custom node. I'm going to go to my SB SAR folder. And And I'm going to go ahead and drag in the cracks. Maybe even the rocks, too. We'll keep rocks over here for now. But for cracks, let's plug let's plug this in. And this is just a quick way to get the cavity of the height map, and it'll start, you know, generating some pretty lazy cracks. We could even pre bevel them and see if it gives us a more interesting shape. I don't think we're going to do that for the scenario. And I might blur this. So we'll increase the blur. And I'll keep that in. I'm gonna go to another blend node. Maybe I'll blur this, too. I'll go ahead and set it to Let's do subtract. Now we can experiment with this a little bit more. That should be a pretty, you know, noisy base, rocky surface. It's not too bad. I think what I might want to try to do is get a sloper and plug a crystal one into this. This could be at a pretty high scale. Increase the samples. Let's just set it to minimum. And so we're putting in these choppy little distortions into it. And all the same, I'm also maybe we won't slope blurt with the clouds just yet. We can test this out. But for fun, I will get one more filter. So we won't inflate. Let's see if some directionality could add some interest to it. Maybe even some sharpening. And let's go ahead and just try one of the older inputs for the slope. And we'll stick with this as our height map for now. These are our backup notes, so we don't have to keep reaching into the task explorer. So I'm going to frame this and call it our height. Whoops. Now, first things first, let's plug it into the PBR, and we can go ahead and decrease the contrast for this brush. Actually, we're gonna have to add some, like, fade and a little blur, maybe not too much blur. That's pretty cool. We're just trying to find something new and interesting. Let's try this shape. And now we can play with the actual mask. This would be the cracks. So the rougher it is here, that's actually what I'm looking for. And for the curvature, I do want it to be a bit shinier at the edges. So that also looks okay to me. Now we'll play with the base. And this note is definitely one of my favorite way to get a quick roughness map when you're dealing with a lot of materials. I definitely want this to be fully rotated random And that doesn't look half bad as the normal map. So now we'll plug this into the color, and we'll go ahead and get started changing this up. Okay, and now let's start changing up these colors. I definitely want perhaps less contrast than this one. So I want some values to play within the color eyes. I'll decrease the intensities of these distortions. And now let's start picking our colors. I know we're definitely not dealing with a lot of saturation. If anything, we can handle that in substance painter with some huge shifts later on if need be. You know, I don't mind a little bit, especially at the variation stage, but I'm not looking to create anything too distorted right now. Or to contrast it. Excuse me. So we want to extract a new mask out of this or actually, this is the one being used as the colorize, because I wanted to switch between those two. So now we can change the position of that even make this one a little darker. And so it's capturing the cracks, thanks to the histogram scan really, really well. I'm just going to see if I can increase the contrast a little and decrease the position. Check out those colors. And for the cracks, you know, it's not bad that they're that dark, but for fun, I'm kind of looking for a more bluish tone. I guess just less saturated at the end of the day. Yeah, that's fine. So we want to get some new less repetitive variation out of this. So I just want something pretty large and in charge. This mask doesn't look too bad. I'm just scaling it up and down. Even that in between, it doesn't add too much information, but it is pretty cool. Uh, so I definitely going to change the hue of this. See if even saturation looks any good. I guess just a little bit does. And, you know, we can change the shape a little bit more, if need be. And that's not too bad. Now I want something a little bit messier. I don't know if we want this same type of distortion. It is cool that it wraps around the cracks like that. So sure, why not? But let's take out some of the mask random. Let's see what looks good. This might look good a little bit brighter. So this seems to be like our basic overlay color, and I don't really want to get there yet. So I'm going to add a mask in between here. I'm just going to add a new brush. Want to get a couple more variations in the color. So I'll have these ones be smaller. We'll just play with the different brush shapes. Definitely just testing stuff out. Nothing crazy. If you see something that looks better, please feel free to switch to You can always make your own crazy masks. But with this, I'll increase the position, decrease the mask random. I'll do random rotation. We'll do more fade and we'll add to the scale. So now I can increase the position and increase the contrast. And look at that. We got something new and noisy. So for this, I'm almost okay with it being brown, but I definitely want to change the not too bad. That is actually completely black because our copy is off. So let's go back. Let's change the color, and we'll see what looks best. Seeing what amount of saturation I can get away with. And I think that works. Now, let's see what this mask is doing. This was an original cavity capture. So I don't know if we still need this, but I'm going to see if we can get something interesting out of it anyways. I think I mostly want to play with the curvature. Let's decrease the other opacities. So if I blur the input a little bit, we might get something new out of this. Let's go back to the curvature. See I'm just trying to get something in between, kind of cartoony and pretty interesting. I'm not looking at the three D view yet. I typically look at that last. So with this being curvature, maybe I want to add and make it really subtle around here. And for this one, I just want really small specs, actually. So I'm totally go to decrease the scale and we'll do random rotation. I do want to make them a little rounder, right? So I don't know if this is the correct one. Scale Y. Yes, it is. Increase the regular scale or decrease mask random. Actually, let's do that. And for the color, maybe something pretty light or pretty dark, something whatever suits this best. I think I'm going to go with white, and I'll decrease the position of this scan. So let's see what the lights doing now. We're gonna have to reset these opacities. Let's turn everything off. And yeah, the AO was definitely doing too much work. That was adding a lot of chaos, but we could always use could always use a little bit. Like a super small amount for this one. We'll check out which shadow we can pull off. I do think the bottom shadow has some potential, even at this bluish green phase. But, um, maybe I will try to desaturate this. I think that's for the best. And even so for these cracks, they're a little intense. And then this is just not random enough for me, this colorize. There we go. I think we've busted that up a little more. Um, I'll play with this again. Maybe we'll take out one of the mask randoms and then brighten the color a little bit. I'm playing with the opacities now, see how much of these details do I want in there. Check out the light again, and let's see what we have going on. Okay, very subtle in the shadow. I do want I do want this to have a good amount of light in it. I want it to be mostly light. And I think this one's gonna be our best bet. I don't know if the top down is up to the challenge. Uh that was light, too. The so again, I'm playing with the opacity. I'll even check out the final blend opacity as well as the threshold and, you know, just the input sliders. I think it looks pretty good with a smaller normal intensity, and maybe we could start increasing the opacity from there. We have a final color overlay. Let's see if we just want to go gray with this one. And check that out. This is basically our anti contrast. So, again, I haven't looked at the actual three D view yet. We're going to check out and see if we can make this look a little better. We'll start with contrast off. We'll check out what it's doing. Okay. So first in cracks, maybe we need to decrease the intensity. Or better yet. I want to find out which one is adding these very, very small blobbish details. It could be the warp it could be the overlay. But I know there are probably better ways to handle that. So I'm checking out which blend am I just not a huge fan of? It could be the original one. Probably to check that. Maybe to check that. Maybe the overlay will solve some of that. But it might not at the same time. You know, that in between look does not look half bad. I'm not gonna lie. But we're getting there's definitely a stage where it's losing sort of its character. Some of it could be from here. Some of it could be from this blur. And maybe we got to go a little more in between on that blur. And I think that helped solve some of the issues. We still get some of the cracks. Let's see if beveling it looks better. And increasing that position. In a sense, it depends kind of what you're going for. I'm actually going to keep that. I like these larger deformations in there. Now we'll check out the PBR filter. So let me increase the contrast, and I'll even take this back to some saturation. If we could test this out with a higher saturation, we notice that we could even turn on a little bit of filter. I think a slight inflate looks pretty good. We'll take this back to base saturation. 555, maybe even less contrast, we'll see. And sometimes the quantis can help us pick a new palette. And it seems like this rock I'm going for a little bit more subtlety, so I don't think I want these too harsh of quantis in that. I will add some sharpen. And let's see if changing the lightness does enough for us. I think it would look a little better darker. And then the contrast doesn't look half batter right here. I'm just trying out the sloper and we'll see if we'll see if light needs to be adjusted from here. That part doesn't look bad. Maybe we might need more ambient occlusion. They're pretty small divots, so that might not be the case, either. And then at least this adds a little color variation, so maybe I'll play with the hue. A bit of blue to the mix looks pretty cool. So you can tweak these settings around for the rock and see what you think is going to look best, but I'm pretty satisfied with that. And so we can take this very noisy type of material, and we're going to be duplicating it for both the wall for both walls. There's a red wall and there's a white wall. They'll be super similar. We're just kind of picking some different colours for those. So we'll get the wall started in the next video. I will see you. 14. 12 Wall Material: Hey, we are making some progress, if I do believe. We're gonna keep duplicating these graphs, right, because the next three, which is wall A, wall B, and metal, they're all pretty similar to rock in which it's more of an abstract, noisy pattern that we just need to pretty much just nail the colors and PBR aspects of it. So I'm going to duplicate rock and put it in here and call this one T, wall A. Let's go ahead and open it. And we're going to restart with the height map. I don't think we need to take out everything, actually. I just want to start with the brush and I want to try to get a new shape out of it. The answer could be, you know, subtracting from it and smearing it. In fact, that really might be the answer. Look, those two sliders already did a lot, and I am surprisingly already enjoying that shape. I'm looking at what this other brush layer is doing, how it's being warped and how it's being overlaid. We'll see how much of that we want to put in there. I don't think we want to put in much. And then instead of a non uniform, I think I'm more interested in a slope blur. And what I think I want to grab is a clouds to that we then change the size of. So I believe if we make it smaller by 256, increase those samples, maybe set it to minimum. We're going to be able to get some really nice, large deformations. I'm even gonna set this lower to, like, 128 and see what that gives us. You know, it's subtle, but I think it's better than the non uniform blur right now. We'll see how the cracks want to interact with this height Map pattern. You know, I don't mind some. But what we're gonna have to do is plug this directly into the filter, and we can play with this blur separately. Just playing between the difference between the position and the intensity. And, you know, maybe if we have this pretty averaged out like this, and blend it back in. I think if we keep it really subtle, it would actually add a nice amount of depth. Right now I'm seeing a bit too much detail in this, so I'm going to decrease the size of it by lowering the count. And that's not bad. Just checking out what parameters we can play with to add a little more variety to this. The slope smear is a little intense. Yeah, I think I want something much less intense like that. Subtract more out of it. And then maybe the filter node could be the answer, but, you know, it's already at this stage. So let's say we have a blend with some cracks. We're slope learning that by crystals, which I'm also okay with. Maybe we decrease the scale of it. And increase the strength. So I'll check out this filter, and I know I don't want distortion or direction intensity right now. We can unsharpen this, as well, and just kind of go from the top down and see what we do need. Let's see. And I am okay with this slope intensity happening here coming from the original height map. Yeah, if this is the new version, maybe we could add one more detail into here. Let's drag this out and add a blend node. And I think we could be brave and just reach for a brush and see what we can overlay on this or minimize from it. So I can hunt for a preset. And I think with enough depth, something like this could do it. We'll see. I Let's get some random rotation up. I'm actually going to change the slope shape. And so, decrease for this. Now I want a bit more of a rounder shape. Now we're getting somewhere pretty interesting. I'll increase the scale of this. Color random, maybe some mask random. I'm basically just hunting for something to add some different types of variations in here. So I think if I do set it to multiply, we'll see what we can get. We'll test that out and play with that near the end, as well. I think what I want to do is maybe use the blur for the slope. Yeah, and I think I like that more. And honestly, this could be the height for the wall for now. Let's go ahead and check its PBR inputs. This isn't bad, but I want to take out random rotation. I want to make these larger And, you know, maybe we could even slope blur this with the clouds, too. Just looking to get some kind of big breaststroke looking variation into the roughness map. So samples high. We'll try these out and maybe changing the slope scale. And then changing the contrast. Oops, we'll increase the position back. That's pretty interesting looking. I could decrease the opacity. We don't need the strongest blur. I also want it to be that smaller variation. Maybe a little larger, four. Let's see what we want to play with for the final output of the roughness. I'm sure I will want some curvature opacity. But very subtle, actually. Then for Aban occlusion, if we really increase that position, but decrease the opacity, we can get something pretty cool. And then we're just checking out that extra overlay variation. And then I'm just checking out the histogram range so that we have that final control over the roughness. I think I'm going to have to make this a little more interesting. We can increase the scale, and that's fine. I'll check out the normal. Normal looks pretty good. I do want the same brush for this, but I know I also want, like, not too much distortion in. So I'm going to see if changing the scale of that could be pretty good. So moving on to the color, let's change up our mask. I think I just want to increase the position a little bit on the base. Just get something a little more averaged out. I know that opacity was doing some pretty interesting stuff, right? So let's try that again. That looks pretty good. And we don't need two dissimilar colors for now, we're gonna be tinting it at the end. And with that in mind, I'm just making sure that we really take out that saturation for now. I'm probably going to be going back and forth on whether or not I like this contrasted look or the uncontrasted look. But that is pretty, pretty cool. Maybe it just needs some range like that. So, this one, why don't I think I'm going to make this one brighter. But I think I would have to change the mask first. So I'm increasing that contrast. And then I might have to blend this with the clouds, too. Also, assigned to a histogram scan. I don't like getting too busy like this, but I think it's important to blend these two together. So increase the position, increase the contrast and check that out on multiply. Okay. Okay, I am enjoying that more. I don't know if I want it to be brighter or darker. I think for now, brighter looks pretty interesting. And now I'm just gonna be going through the blends and changing up the brushes. We don't need to add too many. We don't need to add too little. We're just going to see and feel out what looks right. So I know we went a little crazy with one of these blends, so I'm going to make some room. Yeah, this was the extra crazy one. So, we know it's leading to this blend. The colorize came first. Just keep bringing this back. So this was the height map. This blend is the height map plus the mask version of it. And once again, we keep switching between that with the blend, just for fun in the colorized node. So I'd like to know what we got going on here still. Yeah, I'm okay keeping this stuff here. That's our height. This is our PBR, and we'll continue on. I'm looking at these brushstrokes onwards, so I'm also going to bring this forward. So I'm counting one, two, three, Um, okay, I guess this counts as four of this masks and five. So we have five brushes that we're gonna change the masks of and change the colors of. And then this is us using that LZ light at the end. So let's go ahead and start with the first brush. For this first one, let's just see if changing the shape is gonna do us any good. Maybe not the shape. Oh, I think we found something. So at four and three, we get these really nice brush strokes. So I'm also okay with how that looks there. See if we need to increase the rate of rotation. I'm kind of okay with actually this specific seed and kind of how it's working. Maybe it doesn't need to be so long or wide, and we can mask out whatever we think looks good. And so if I look into that one, I'll put it at a full copy, and we'll play with the correct tone. Since we have all these dark values, we're pretty much just overlaying lights back on top to try to make that extra messy. So it gets messed up here, and we're going to be seeing if these other brushes can also do us some favors. If we look at the base of this, you know, it's always fun to put a little extra attention to detail in there and focus on the brush pattern yourself and what you're seeing. I do think that looks better. Yeah, pretty cool. And so for a second brush, whether we go lighter or darker, let's try to find a new pattern. Maybe for this one, the secret is to just go really, really large and really vertical or even maybe very horizontal. We can find that out right about now. For the directional warp, yeah, it's good for this big one to be kind of messed up, so it's not too uniform. Just testing out what works best. I like that. And whether it's darker or lighter, like I said, let's see what works best. I want to do a full copy still. Let's play with that. Would the answer be some saturation? Maybe a slight slight difference. That could be pretty cool. Next, let's get something. This is already in a pretty good spot. I think I want to give it more depth, though. Look at that. That one was already really close, and I'll change that sat up by adding some little different counts. And the color. Let's make it extra bright for now. Interesting. Very interesting. Maybe to sort of take in a little bit more undirectionality, actually. Oh, this brush is actually this mask is doing pretty much the same thing. I was going to say, let's add a brush that's, you know, sort of like this but a little messier. But this mask really does give that impression. So the answer might be to take a filter node. Let's see if we Let's see if we can find one. We Let's plug the filter node into the mask node. And I just want to find a way to mess it up a little more. We could even use perhaps one of these brushes instead. So take this down, blurring it a little bit. And I'll see how far I can push that inflate. Yeah, I do think that looks better. So take this into copy and pick a value I. And maybe the answer is a bit more of an overlay type feature on this. We once again have these little speckles, which is always nice for, you know, these types of materials. We just want to make sure we get the They don't always have to be brighter. I think it looks better with a little bit more darkness like this. And then I am going to increase the scale, and then I'll change the disorder on this. And that one looks good. We do have our final overlay color. So we'll have to play with the light first. Let's see. Let's get the final blend opacity first and check it out. What I'm thinking is, unlike the rock, I think Well, this light looks fantastic, but I think I'm going to bring it down because the wall in general is a bit of a flatter, you know, surface. And then with that in mind, again, this is our contrast control. And the only thing instead of covering all this up, the only thing I'm not enjoying is how dark some of the base is. So first, I'll play with this. Maybe it should have even been brighter. Or maybe darker, you know, we'll see. Okay, so this hue might have been fine, but then this one's just a little intense. So let me raise that up. Now, it would be interesting if we could introduce these brushstrokes into the height map. So after this, I'm just going to take one more blend node down here at the height, and I'll take this pattern. And I think I'll set it to subtract. And that's adding all the detail I was looking for in our height map. So the masks node was able to generate this for us, and it's, you know, overlaying that back on top of each other is definitely super powerful. Well, it came from the brush node, but it gives us that nice distortion thanks to this awesome curvature map. So that's really cool to introduce. With that in mind, I'm just going to make a little more room here, and we'll see if we can tint this as well. If this is our anti contrast node, you know, I'm I'm okay with some contrasts for now. Actually, the only thing I want to change in the contrast still is maybe taking down these dots. I'll make it a little smaller and unmask, so just for fun. Now those dark parts aren't taking up too much energy out of that. Check that final blend opacity. Oh, check out the threshold. Okay, yeah, definitely super subtle. And I think we should keep it like that, if you ask me. Okay. We'll take some contrast out of here. And I'll take a new blend node, and let's add a new color. So we're going to try out different blend modes to get the tint we want out of this. So far, overlay seems like it's totally gonna be our best bet. I'm not trying to be too picky over the tone. I know it's like a reddish pink. And, you know, we can keep on taking away that contrast, depending on how much detail you want, be I know we're gonna have to take out some way somehow. Looking at the offending hue or the offending value, if you ask me, and I still think it's this one. And then this noise pattern definitely goes a little crazy, so I'm going to take that down. Now we'll check out the PBR filter. We'll take down the contrast. Let's get these base values back, and I will check out quantis This might be a situation we're changing to hue. I'll just give us better base values. This could be a little tricky because I definitely don't want too much variation. And so, increasing the contrast would be quite offensive. I think the slope ler looks good on this. I think we might just have to increase the quantize on the sky, and that is a okay. So I'm looking at this. I'll check this out. Maybe we will get some scale back into this. Ooh, but that works perfectly fine. Okay, I'm okay with this being our red wall. We kind of rebuilt the height map. We made some room so that we can get all sorts of different nice color and value variations out of this. Even though this wasn't color variations this time, still setting up this system so that they can be straight up color changes, is a great way to work. And our height Map isn't too complex. Easy to use PBR system. We even added a new, piece for the height map, you can keep adding in different blends, and, you know, you could have this scratch into the surface like this. I just don't want to overcomplicate the height and normal map, so I think this is a great solution to that. And we will also get started on the second wall in a minute. So I'll see you there. So really quick for the second wall, we are going to duplicate the graph. Sure, I save everything, and we'll rename it to wall B. And this really shouldn't be too difficult, since the second wall is actually just the same thing unpainted. So if we go back to our original and then play with the seed, we're already getting really cool variations out of there. I don't know how destroyed I want this to be. This one is pretty cool. You know what? We could do something crazy like this, but then just take down the subtraction. And yeah, that is the fricking awesomeness of the power of substance designer along with paint box, too. Once you set up the system, you change a couple of brush strokes around, all these procedural brushstrokes have their own seeds within them, so you're able to get wildly different results with just a couple tweaks. As you can see, I actually I'm not sure how I feel about this hype map anymore, right? So I still have the option to change things around and find out what works best. So for now, I think this one looks pretty good, and we're going to go ahead and hop into the metal into 15. 13 Metal Material: Okay, with the other wall done, we're going to go ahead and continue on to the metal. So I'm just copying a wall B, I'm going to call it T metal. Let's double click it and open it. And I've changed the parent size to 124, and that's because my computer was getting a little bit slow with that. In fact, why don't we control C on this and just double check that our normal invert is connected on all of our materials? That way, we don't feel like we're missing anything later. And I know from here we were using that, so that's all good. And so the metal should be simpler. I'm going to go ahead and hunt for preset really quick. You know, I think, surprisingly, shape one is gonna be our best bet. I just want to look for something that crosses into each other a lot. You know, really not that much information. I don't think metal needs that, you know? I'm gonna take down the grain, increase the depth, and the fade. Seeing if we can get something new and kind of abstract. There's not much that the metal is demanding. I do like how this shape came out, so I'm gonna want a stronger overlay on that. Maybe we'll decrease the position of this main section. It is pretty cool. I'm also okay with how the Cloud is interacting with it, but I'm going to get clouds, too. And I'll set it to negative four, not negative five. Go be a bit sensitive. Let's check out this. Pretty interesting, even at a high intensity. I think I'm also going to introduce the non uniform blur gray scale. That way we can calm down some of these shapes. I think I'll plug it into itself. Let's see if Auto levels will help us. That's pretty cool. Okay, I'll plug that into here. I also don't mind blurring our new effect. See if cracks does anything for us in terms of the look for this. And I don't I don't think it does, so I'm going to delete it for this one. That the inverted shape is pretty interesting, but I don't think we need that right now either. I do want some stronger large, and I want a little more detail in here. Well, let's see if we can get this information back. That's pretty cool. Maybe we try an overlay on that or maybe even a copy. And because now that we're working with just 12k material, I don't mind uprising that so we can get a better feel for what we're doing to this. So, you know what? I don't want that to be the slope anymore. I want something a little bit rougher decrease the intensity. Let's see how it's affecting it. Maybe we change the slope shape. We're just seeing how these different shapes can help us affect the slope a little bit. That seems pretty rough, actually. I'm gonna go back a little bit. Sometimes you don't sometimes you try things to try things and they don't always work out. It's okay. So I will distort it. Pretty weakly, but I will. And Why don't we work with that for now? Let's take a look at our masks. Going to decrease the AO. Just make sure it's all working together. Why don't we try that. Go to Colorize, and I will make one of these darker. Okay, with some contrast in here, I don't know if we need to get rid of some shapes. Kind of like that it's not fully messed up in this warp anymore, but that still overlays it pretty coolly. I'm starting to think that we could use even maybe a duplicate brush. And what I'm going to do is make these a little more rounded and I'll invert it. And I'll blend it right after this first one. What I want this to be is sort of the metal dense. So let's see. Maybe we set it to subtract. With auto levels. So, so so S if changing the scale here does anything for that? Or maybe adding or taking away. I think that is pretty cool, in a sense. So we could see how that final output is being affected a little bit later. I don't think I want a copy on this anymore. But the overlay is still pretty interesting. Let's check out the slope. I'll try make it pretty strong but make the mask position sort of low. I'm just checking that out. Okay. We can go back to our masks, go back to our color yes. Happy with that so far. I might want more range, and we're checking out what these ones did. This was based off the curvature. I'm always okay keeping some of that, but I don't know how strong I want it to be yet. It is pretty interesting in that position. If we see what happens if it spreads through the whole entirety of that map and is then darkened, I think that looks pretty cool, too. And for this one, I know I want to keep subtracting it. I'm gonna see if contrast changes anything. Changing the depth or detail? Yeah, I want something, like, pretty messy. If I need to turn up scale random, that's okay. And color random is looking pretty good. I'll try something like that. So I will mask some of these out. That's not bad. We just don't need it to be so strong. So this brush isn't half bad. Might want to change the base shape of it. Being a little picky, but you want to find something that's not bad. We just don't need it to be so strong. So this brush isn't half bad. Might want to change the base shape of it. Being a little picky, but you want to find something everyone's happy with. It's actually a little bit more painterly and still pretty interesting. We can darken. And for this brush, I don't want to keep it the same horizontal streak. I actually want to take that noise we've been using a lot recently, which is the one that's pretty graphic. Let's see if we can find it. Oh, this one is that might be the one. So let's decrease the scale. I'll subtract it more, maybe even increase the scale of that. Just try to find something new and interesting. Again, going to make it a two K texture. And don't want it to be that grainy. You don't need it to be blurry either. I'm okay with a little bit of fade. And we'll mask these out with some random rotation. So now we have all these, like, kind of messed up looking scratches on the metal. And so with that, we definitely don't need such a strong warp, if at all, but we'll keep it in for a moment and see how we feel about it. Let's lighten it for now, like that. And for this one, I want to really elongate it. Maybe that was the incorrect direction. There we go. This might look a little grainy, but I am okay with that. I'm looking for some thin scratches that'll be pretty fun to put on here. Um, maybe increase the position. Actually, let's decrease it and then increase the contrast. These can be brighter. This one is just meant to be, you know, a little bit messy. We can see if a better AO position does something for us on this mask. I think I like that a little more. Just adding a little bit of life to that, and we'll increase the scale of these dots. But I'm also gonna try to elongate these Now we have all these different types of scratches overlaying on top. Is really cool. So, this would be, you know, our uncontrast node. Maybe I'll darken this a little bit. Let's see how light is operating with this. It looks a little glitchy. It's probably something to do with the normal intensity. So if that was opacity one, yeah, you can put in a pretty small amount at a warmer color, if anything, just white. And I know in the concept art, there is a color to this metal. I'm going to make it pretty desaturated and a little orangish. That could be due to the light, but I'm okay having just a little bit of color information in there as well. And we'll see what the quantize does. Okay, so I'm going to go back through the color. Yeah, I'm looking at the light now. So I don't think we need opacity one per se, but I want to check out what the others can do. I'm okay with some of opacity two on the light and some of opacity two on the shadow. I don't really think I want ambient occlusion in the color map of this. It could be super light, but I would be okay with some, little shiny blotches that are kind of baked into this. Make sure it's not pure white. And I just want to make sure this is completely unsaturated. We'll see if there's something we enjoy with the angle. This is the cast shadow operation. What's in the light. It's kind of, like, a cleaner AO right now, so I'm going to say that's okay. We'll play with this threshold. We don't really have to blur it. But that looks pretty good for the color map. I'm going to unquanti some of this, maybe change the saturation. So something is pretty splotchy, and I'm guessing these two colors are just too dissimilar. I'm going to raise this color up as well. Then we'll play with the final blend opacity for this light. As well, we probably don't need these very, very dark scratches. If anything, it's okay that it sort of matches the lighter color of this. But it is all pretty contrasty. So as of right now, I'm going to sort of blend that in with the base color again, with the base color again. So the slope is definitely a bit strong. I'm going to turn this off. We're going to examine what's going on with the height map. So it has this crazy height being overlaid, but I want to try out the scratches instead. And so with the uniform color of our metal, let's bring it up to one. Okay, so seem to have fussed up some of the colors. We'll increase the lightness of this. We'll check out some of the other details we have going on. Let's see if the slope is a bit forgiving on this metal, and it isn't unforgiving. But we have really deep pockets of both dark and light. I'm guessing it's from this very intense metal range. As well, I want something more similar to this for the overlay. Okay, we're definitely getting there. I noticed in the filter our distortion was a little strong. So I'm going to turn that off and double check on all this again. Okay? That is looking a little bit better. Pretty cool, pretty stylized. And then we can check again on that color overlay blend to it, and you can decide how much color information you really want in this. For me, I'll try to be bold and, you know, leave in the color information that we can. But in theory, you could have that be as simple as possible. It should still look okay. Just go to take one more look at the saturate and everything. Maybe this should be better tinted within the shader. I know a little bit of those hues I just saw right there. It's pretty cool. I just don't want to boost them up like crazy. And let's just try the inflate. And middle is sharp, so we'll sharpen it. I don't know if middle sharp, but, like, you know, it's all about the minds eye. Very interesting. I am okay with this. Lastly, I'm checking out the bit of dark spots we've developed from the cracks, and I'm just gonna raise those up a bit, 'cause we already have the height difference in. So that's really cool. The normal looks okay, too, not too strong. And I'm a fan of that. Let's check it out as a sphere, too. Cool. It's reflecting light in a way that I can appreciate. So, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, I believe we have two more materials to make and I don't want to say toughest for last, but these ones are a little bit longer. It's stone, like the brick stone in that one planter prop. You can use that as the third vertex material when you're blending. We're not going to be making a three material vertex paint blend shader. But yeah, at least having that material will look good on anyone's portfolio, really. So anyways, next up is dirt. Let's get on that and good job with this one. 16. 14 Dirt Material: Okay, let's go ahead and get started on the dirt and the stone. We will start with the dirt because the stone is really, really similar. We're actually just adding some bricks on top of the dirt. So let's go ahead and start with, um, maybe we'll have more fun starting with the Walla B. Actually, probably won't matter. We'll call it T and dirt. So for starters for starters, what I want to do is grab a tile sampler gray scale. And I'm going to use this brush, actually. I will copy and paste it. I'll see if I just want to maybe get some more contrasts out of this. Cause I already think this looks like a pretty dirt like texture. Not bad. Not bad at all. Okay, and so we're going to plug this into a bunch of different sections. We're going to take it to the two below the vector map and the two above the vector map. And this one will be our large one. And so what we're going to do next is grab the rock note that we had introduced just a little bit earlier. I actually didn't use it. And so with the rocks, we have a couple of different sliders, and I'm just going to play around for a moment, see if I can find something fun, maybe a little bit of smoothing. And in the tile sampler, we'll set it to pattern and input and set it to four. That way we can just put all four rocks in here. And for this one, we're trying to get a large, large, rocky surface, which is why you could use this for the actual rock material as well. I just wanted to give us some more brush practice, really. And so now these rocks are just creating a really, really easy and very large shape. Let's see what color random can do for us and maybe some mask random. And we'll just keep messing this up a little bit. I'll rotate it randomly. Maybe I won't mask so many of these. Okay, and, you know, we can go back to it. If anything, I'll actually just decrease Random rotation a little. Okay. And what we're going to do next? Oh, actually, you notice how we have these inputs in here, we're going to start boosting some of these up and see which ones work. So part of this is the color map. Part of this is the rotation map and the displacement map. The displacement map is kind of what I want to play with the most. It's going to offer us some shifting shapes as we blend these two tile samplers together. So I'm going to duplicate it. And I'll make these rocks a little bit smoother. Just change the seed. And I want a large, large amount of these. These rocks are getting a little crazy. Okay. So let's get a ton of these rocks. And we have very similar displacement to this one. We might change this just to here with the shift key. You look at the color random again the color map. And now I do want to get a little bit more abstractness out of this. I know I'm being picky with this one, but it's always worth the effort. So let's height blend these two together. The contrast, I'm okay with it being there. We're just trying to fit in, you know, rocks in between here and in pretty interesting, interesting fashion. Uh, one more auto levels. Looks like it doesn't it doing much? Little bit, little bit. And then what do we want to do? We're gonna blur it just a little bit. Now we're going to take a blend node. Now we're going to make a new version of this, and it's just going to be distorted a little bit differently. What we're going to do for starters is get the non uniform blur gray scale. Go be kind of difficult to grab sometimes. And we're going to take the unblurred version of it as the input and the blurred version of it as the blur map, see if we can find the right spot for these guys. Yeah, I'm not looking for too much rock detail for this version. And now I'm going to grab a directional warp. And with this as the input, I want to warp it with pretty much like the substance designer default paintly noise, which is us just putting a non uniform blur and slope blur on the clouds too. Let's slope blurt. Now I want to start warping that around a little bit. Oh, I actually want to switch these around my back. I'm basically looking for this pachllly noise to be warping around the height of the original height map without getting too much distortion. So that's why I'm playing with the blur as well. So I'm going to plug this into the foreground, actually, and our original height map can go into the background. Let's see if we want to change the warp angle of any of this. So I'm just going to set this to multiply or maybe overlay. Overlay looks pretty good with that. Now we can start distorting this up a little bit. We'll start with a slope blur gray scale and purlin noise. It's one of the more natural and smooth ones. We're talking really subtle. Maybe set it to minimum, too. And now we can get another sloper gray scale. And this time, I will get a brush. Let's just take this brush. We'll steal it. I'm going to set it to preset one start looking for the details I want. Just set this one a minimum. And let's just for fun, see if another preset works well. That was probably our best bet with that first one. It's pretty much meant for that anyways. Okay. And we can distort it one more time with a slope blur in that same clouds from earlier. Set this one to minimum, too. It's starting to look interesting. Okay, maybe we'll take one more brush, and I'll take a blend. Maybe we just want to find something, yeah, a little bit a little bit dirty, almost as if some people were walking across the surface. So I'm almost imagining this breast stroke to be like little tracks, and that means they'll have to be pretty massed out and a little bit of random rotation. Let's see what happens if we set it to subtract. Maybe we need to slipler this. That looks pretty cool. So as long as that's not too, too apparent, it should look pretty good on dirt. Another thing we're going to grab is one of these pebble generators, and we'll actually delete this height because this is our new height. So we'll grab the pebbles. Suppose we could use a new one of these. Um, yeah, let's replace them this way. Just plug everything in. I change the see to this for fun. Okay, so we definitely need random rotation on both of these. I'm going to turn down the displacement for this one and put position random here. Check that out again. That's cool. I might increase the amount of this for the dirt. Let's see where it ran off to. Cool, we're starting to get a little bit more interest out of there. We can even play with the pebbles height. And so we're back here, and what I want to do is blend this with this. And I just want to add some pebbles. So I'm gonna be making these smaller full position random, and most of these definitely masked out. Hmm. What I am thinking is that maybe we want to te blend them instead. And so with that in mind, what I might do, I might take a levels node and find that gray point for these pebbles. Let's try out both versions. We'll try a regular blend, and we'll try out the height blend. I think this one does retain detail better, but this one gives us the mask. However, it's actually a huge point. That means I'm going to lower this gray point value. And I'll keep it like that. I'll use the height blend for this just so we have access to the height map mask. I don't think we need to put a histogram range on it, but I will get an auto levels. And I'll also just slightly slightly blur this. So with the auto levels there, it is showing me that, you know, there's a way where we can get some of the gray values back. It might depend on changing the height of this a little bit. That's probably the case. Yeah, and we'll just be able to change the color for those little ones. So with our height map completed, let's organize this a little bit. I'll frame it. Call it our height. I don't think we need these. So I'll just plug this. Let's see. Let's plug this into the background here. We'll plug this into the connector here. And I already kind of like that. I just want to see if maybe we need less AO. Okay, that's just pretty cool, huh. So I'm gonna find the appropriate colors first. We're gonna want to find some browns. It's a little too yellow. Let's get this color again. Already, not bad. With this, this is our little extra curvature mask. Let's change the Yeah. Yeah, let's actually decrease the contrast, change the color. Maybe not so bright. I'd like to see if no, let's not go redder. We'll stay around this tone. We'll figure out what looks good over here. I want to get some less contrast. Change the press strokes. You know, not too different than the original one, really. Let's see what it looks good. See what happens if we desaturate this but keep it at yellow. It doesn't Theodor Dexter doesn't seem to enjoy the lack of saturation, if you ask me. Maybe it's time to go bolder. Yeah, we'll keep it bolder right there. So we could play with the random rotation of this one. And I do want less directional warm intensity on that. You know, all similar tones, all similar hues, if you want to change the hue up a little bit. For example, I don't mind that, and that's pretty cool. Even a little bit of graze in there. Think about these, though, to be, like, a darkish brown. Maybe change up the seed, see if that does something. What did we just change? The fade? Yes, we did. That is pretty cool. Okay, now let's lower the precision. Up the contrast. That's pretty cool, look. No, you know, these could act as a little subtle pebbles. So now I want to check out our hype blend. And if this is the original one, let's find the original hit mass. There we go. So I'm going to take this down. Whoops. Let's take this down, press Alt, drag it out and press Alt. And for the blend, we could put it right after the colorize. So I'll take the opacity for that. And let's see what colors gonna fit best for the pebbles. Not much to say other than that find that gray value that makes you happiest. We've covered it up a little bit. You know, same with this mask. I'm actually going to bring it up this time to drag it around and bring it down. So I'll get a blended between here. The exact order doesn't really matter. I'm just getting a new color to pick from. Maybe the darker pebbles work better for this. So now one of my favorite notes, we'll check out light. Let's go to the final blend opacity. That halfway normal intensity doesn't look too bad. But I like less of that threshold. So we'll check out our opacities now. I always like to reset. Check out light first. We can put a little bit of light in here from a top down. I think those always work better for the landscape materials, and I'll set it to something a little bit yellower, maybe even reddish. Okay, that's fine. Then I'm okay with something a little bit stronger at the top. Once again, we'll get something on the yellow side. I'm gonna try a little bit of blur on that. Now, Ambien oclusion? Not a fan of that AO, which means we need to play with either the normal intensity or the threshold. We're gonna find out what's going on there. This should be a pretty complex map. And so should this, which means this is plugged into here. Yeah, our AO. Oh, it's probably our AO position. Whoops see. There we go. My mistake. Playing with the shine is always fun. And now I just want to add at least one strong shadow color. Maybe it belongs to the case shadow. I guess I'll hunt for something a little bit redder. That is pretty cool. Now, just to test things out, we'll check that final blend opacity. That's a fun fun amount of detail thrown in there. It's a little bit dirty. So let's see if first increasing the saturation of this will And we can always lower opacities in some areas. I might try to be bold and increase this. We'll try to make it a brown. We're gray, you know, I just want to see what that right balance is between these details. Or that darker brown go. There we go. Okay, so with that light baked in, I'm gonna bring that final blend opacity down. We'll check out what color we want to blend with it. I do like this base orange a lot. Okay, a little bit of blend within there. We'll leave the overlay alone. So let's check out this color. Do I want to boost the saturation? A little bit of red added to that by change of the hue is pretty cool. And then I don't know if Infer inflate or Smear is gonna do anything for us, but we're just trying stuff out. This one does not benefit too much from quantis, so we'll try to not push that one too hard. But it seems like sharpen definitely benefits something like the dirtier landscape materials that you kind of want more detail packed into there just by changing the sharpen. I'll try contrast, then I'll just try playing with this copy node, and then I'll play with the light intensity. And that's pretty fun, too. Now we can see some light reflecting off the rocks, which is pretty fun. Just to double check, I'm going to go to Edit material, check out the scale. And yeah, we're getting the rocks still poking out while blending in, while also being abstract. Very, very cool. Increase the amount for both of these. And that is pretty cool. It looks like we can use a little more shadow now. Very cool. So we're going to be taking something similar to this dirt material, and we're going to be blending some bricks into it in just a minute. But this one is just really, really fun. I always enjoy making landscape materials, and, you know, we're gonna be changing the tints in the shader, but we're almost there. So let's get ready for the bricks. Um, 17. 15 Stone Material: So with our dirt material done, the last one I want to work on is the stone, so I'm going to go ahead and paste it here. Okay, so we're going to add another height blend. What I'm going to do is grab one of these brushes. I'll paste it here. And one of the last presets are these bricks. And so we're gonna have to kind of fix them up a little bit. We're gonna turn off the distortion, and we'll change up the scale. And now I will you know I'll leave these at color random like this. We'll see if we want to change any of these other details. I like adding a little bit of depth to them. We're gonna see what the slope shape is doing. And I don't think I want to deal with the slope. So I'll take away the detail, and we'll leave that there. And I'm going to get a filter note now. Let's see if we could find one somewhere. Here's one. Oh, so before we plug it into the filter, actually, what might be interesting is taking a new node. So I'm going to go ahead and grab one of my folders, and in the paint box folder in the nodes SBSR, I'm going to go to either generators or filters, and I'm looking for the carve node, and I'm going to drag it in. And I just realized we should probably lower the scale of this a little bit. And then I'm also going to take away that depth. I want these to be pretty solid when I plug these. So I'm just looking for a way for us to access these bricks. Oh, I think we actually just need to take this out of the slope and put this into that but there we go. So I'm going to this carve node is detecting these solid shapes, and then it's kind of carving away at them depending on the position and the contrast. So I'm actually going to increase that make sure that the range is not being messed up. I think we're going to want that at full opacity. Yeah, we are. So I'm cutting away at some of these bricks. And we can even change the sat of it. And this has a built in random gray scale, so we're able to change how these are being affected. Let's see. For the slope, why don't we see if it could still detect this with the depth, and it can, which is good. Which means I think I want to just plug this into the filter and maybe we'll grab this brush for the slope input. So I'm just changing up the slope intensity a little bit, breaking up these bricks, and I'll put it in auto levels. So with this p blend ready to go, I'm just gonna plug this into the top. We'll see what we like the most out of this. Oh, the grey scale should go in there. I'm gonna be checking out. Yeah, I did not want inflate active because I still want these carvings to be pretty crazy. So back in here, back in here. And we'll even try to see if we could push the scale a little bit. I'm gonna boost the position a little bit. And now we're getting some different heights in our bricks without them being too random. Let's go ahead and change the connector inputs. I'm going to go ahead and see how that looks height wise. I think that's given the right impression. If anything, let's see if Smear does anything for us. It's kind of cool, and then I'll take down the slope for this. I'll see what our height mask is doing. That does look pretty good. So we'll check out our mask. We're ending up creating a pretty polished, like, template to where we end up not needing to change too much. Okay, so first, let's clean this up and put this into the height. We know that these are our brickstone here. Why don't I put a little note here? Let's check at our PBR. What are we blending into here? The nice little differences. And I do like that it has the potential to go over those bricks, so that's pretty cool. I think I'll leave it at a similar intensity. So I definitely want something a bit more interesting here. I'm just going to break down the scale of that preset. Scale randoms okay. Yeah, I'm already okay with that, and I'll overlay. See if we want some contrast with that. Why not? Scrum range. I'm okay with it being there. We'll actually make this larger again, and we'll do less random rotation with that. So firstly, firstly, instead of using these pebbles, let's see what our first unique mask is. I believe in the original, we had a mask going to the color, but this time, we're going to make some room for this and add a blend in between. Oh, it looks like we do have this extra blend coming from the original dirt. Do we want to keep that? Yeah, we do. So yeah, let's make one more blend node. I'll add one more color. And for this one, let's get the height mask from the bricks. See what happened here. Okay, yeah, that's pretty good. I'll bring that into the opacity of this new blend, and we can go ahead and change the color. I might want this to be less saturated. Gray is plenty fine. I'm also going to change the seed for this dirt in the first place. That one's a little intense. This is not bad at all. Okay, for now, we'll stick with something like this. Let's see how these colors are operating on here. So it does seem to go around the bricks, which is not bad, which means this could be active as a sort of, like, dust layer. So I'm going to brighten that up a little bit. And I'm totally okay with this. I think I want the same directional warp on this brushstroke, as well. Maybe a little less intense. But we're seeing it distort over the height lap now. I think I'll change the tone. A little bit more grays in the mix. We can brighten this one up. Let's see what this color does. Oh, it's one of our more random brushstrokes. So don't want that too saturated, or maybe I do. We'll see. Yeah, maybe that should be our darkest color. We're examining, trying to see what works and what isn't now it's time to get kind of a new shape out of this. Let's double cluck this one. Put in some detail in there, some depth. I think we need to mask leites scale random. Just trying to find out if we can get something good out of this. Let's start off random rotation and just start changing the shape. Okay, maybe something from there. I'm just going to keep going back and forth between valleys until we find something new and pretty cool. And it's the motto. Maybe we could use a filter to see if we can bust this up a little bit. What master I want to use? Let's use this. So we have this brush, plugging it in here. Yeah, and that's definitely a little better. Okay, so we have that being masked out, too. I'm gonna decrease the contrast. Okay, let's see. It's kind of just a regular dirty overlay, now. Maybe I'll get rid of these clouds and boost up the position. Okay, let's see what color we like. Okay. So I'm going to get I'm going to duplicate that same blend we did for the bricks just to subtly get that color back in there. So I'm doing Control C, Control V, and I'm just plugging this in in between here. Just make it a little room. Okay. This doesn't have to be at full opacity, but in playing that they weren't fully covered up, it's always welcome. Okay, good enough. Check out the light. So I'm gonna check out the top, maybe lower the base, lower the cache shadow, maybe increase the ambient. And then I think I just want to lower first of all, change the normal intensity. Looks like the shine amount should maybe be white and same with the light. No, maybe not the same with the light. And I'll lower the shine position and the AO position. So then I'm going to take the final blend opacity, find that in between value that we might like the most. Don't think I'm going to play with these overlays. Maybe I'll desaturate it. So, so, so. I'm okay with it keeping at the sharpness. Can we boost the quanties a little bit? Not much. I kind of trust it around 25 to 35. I'll take a look at how the slope is treating this. That's perfectly fine to me. Pretty subtle, but pretty cool. So let's go ahead and just give it one more quick look, seeing how these all operate together. I'm okay with this. The ambient occlusion is not bad. We have all our masks, and we'll test out the height for this for fun. Cool. That actually does look really good to me. So congratulate yourselves and really congratulations to me, too. You and me have created ten really bad *** materials that we're going to be able to use as tiling textures for an entire environment. So there is one or two more boring things we would have to do first. The first one is to make a new input called Albedo, and I'm not going to give it a usage, and I'll just recall it Albedo. And we just want a version that could export as, um, both the SRGB version for Blender and then a linear version for Unreal Engine, because we at least want to preview these materials in blender while we're UV mapping to give us a good feel of the texturing process. So I'm going to speed this up a little bit, and I'm going to copy and paste this albedo output into all ten of these materials. And so we could export this as one K textures or two K textures. I am okay with my computer running these as two K. So before I go ahead and set up the folders for export, I'm going to go ahead and set these to two K as well. Okay, so going into the task Explorer, I'm gonna go into our project file. And we have our projects. Now I'm going to go to the Textures folder we created, and I'm going to quickly create folders that copies the name of every single one of these materials. So let's give us a second to do that. Okay. And now for each one of these, I'll go to the material, and I'll right click on the graph and click on Export outputs. And I'm just going to double check on all of these. For the albedo, let's go ahead and set that to linear and make sure we do that for every single one. Double checking for the normal, comparing it to the actual normal, and I'm okay with the rest of these being at raw. So yeah, let's just make sure that our albedo is set to linear. You know, you have the option to either say, okay, the base color should be linear. I'm okay with that, too, but the fact that this defaults at SRGB, we can keep it at that. So now I'm just going to double check the folder in our village textures, and this one is grass, so I'm going to select grass. And when I export, it should export everything we need. I typically click Export, save, and then close. So, you know, this is one of the boring parts. I'm going to do that for each and every one of these. So, you know, let's do that together. And with our textures ready to go, I think the next thing that we probably should tangle before we actually get into the, you know, bunches of village pieces is getting one more type of asset ready, which is the rock asset. For the rock asset, we we'll block it out. We'll sculpt it, decimate it, UV map it, and then we'll use the rock material to texture it within substance painter. Speaking of which, if we want to make any last edits with this one, we can. And we could always re export it. And then for this specific rock one, since I'm going to be using it in substance painter as well, I'm going to right click it or actually, I'm going to make a new package, and I'll copy this rock, and I'm going to paste it, and I will save it. And I'll call this Hm. Let's call it Rock SB SAR. And I'll save it as Rock SB SAR. And then I'm going to publish by right clicking on the package itself and clicking Publish SBSRFle. We can generate it, and it is in the correct folder. And I'll publish it. So so for the other ones, we were just exporting the texture images. And in order to export the material itself, like for use in substance painter, we typically have to have our own packages as far as I know, I've tried to do my research on that. So we've created our own for that. Let me rename this to Rock SPSAR. I'm actually just going to republish this. Okay, that way, we know what we're going to be using in painter. Alright, so ten hole materials. Next up is the rock asset. After that, we will get into modeling the village, and we will get into modeling the village, and then we'll have a ton of assets to start populating our scene with an unreal engine. My production style is to go deeper within the assets first, and Unreal Engine is where you're setting it all up together, right? But we can't build our Lego set without legos. And so, you know, you're going to grit your teeth a little bit and build your legos first, and then it'll feel super satisfying once we get to build the set with it. So that's ten materials. Awesome. We'll do rocks, and then we'll do the village. So I'll see you in the next video. 18. 16 Rock Sculpting Introduction: Is before you start to hate me for keeping you stuck in substance design or purgatory, I think we should start working on a simple rock asset. So I'm going to go ahead and open up lender, and I'll start a new project and delete these. We can save it in our village. I'll just call this Rocks. Now, for me, this might take a bit because I like to sculpt my rocks in Zbrush, but I do do my simple blockouts in blender. Now, if I go to my concept, we can see that the rocks are pretty simple. So I don't want us to stress and overthink this. There are plenty of concept art with the world's most incredible rocky formations and giant cliff structures. But I really love this concept piece because it is just the perfect beginner's palette to start exploring a lot of elements of environment art, including these rocks. So they're pretty flat at the bottom and rounded at the top. I think I want to make about three different rocks, and it should be easy to get the base shape. So I'm going to add a cube with shift A, and I'm going to subdivide it. This should already be pretty close to what I need. I'm actually going to grab these faces or the faces below, sort drag them down a little bit. I'll scale that. Maybe we'll take the four corners and bring them back in a little bit. And if I subdivide this, we're already getting close to the base shape, but I kind of want for the smallest rock. Honestly, that is pretty close to exactly what I need. These are gonna be really simple. So we'll get another one. I just duplicated. I'm going to go ahead and widen this one S shift Z. I'm going to flatten it too. Maybe we can extend this on just this side. We'll see if that shape is a little bit different. I'm turning on and off wire frame in the overlays right here. So I'll turn both of these up, maybe even to three. I'm going to do two for both of these. I wanted to see if adding another edge loop will give us some different types of controls. And I think I'll just leave it as is just kind of pushing the limits of that a little bit. We always try out new things, see how round or flat we want these. That's pretty cool. So if this were a small one, we can even scale this out this way and apply the rotation in scale. This could be our biggest one. So I'll scale it bring these edges down, bring these edges up. No drag this one up, scale it in. Then I'm getting a little bit more irregular with this one. So I know I want a loop in the middle so we can keep some of that geometry. Now, I'm looking here, and I might try to extend this out if I can. I notice it gets a little too flat for my liking. And I could start carving around this a little bit better. Think if I just scale this out too. If we want, we could change it on this ankle, too. But, you know, I might save that for the Zbrush deformation phase. I'm trying to see what is upsetting me about this specific silhouette. Maybe I just need to lift this up. Maybe we should extend this one out. That's a bit better. I think that would make for an interesting largest rock. Let's see. So we could actually name these. I'll call this Let's go by smallest to largest, so this could be Rocko three B for blockout Rock oh two B and Rock 01. B. Now I'm going to reset their locations. Make sure everything is ready to go looking good. I don't think we need to triangulate it. We'll double check face orientation. Looks good. We're at the right scale. So with everything selected, we're just going to do Export. Let's go to our village, find our FBX. We'll call this rock blockout. That quick mesh is the same setting we discussed earlier. I'm just doing mesh, selected objects and set it to face. So I'll go ahead and export this. So you have the option to also go into the sculpting mode in Blender, and you can use a bunch of different so you also have the option to go into Blenders sculpting tools, and, you know, you could actually make sure I just have this one selected. You can go into sculpt mode after you've applied the subdivision surface. I actually don't use blender sculpting tools often. But you can make your rock inside blender and just start deforming it from here with your brushes, and then, you know, actually keep it duplicate so you can keep the low poly, but I'm going to be doing my sculpting in ZBrush, and that is simply because I've done a lot more of my practice in ZBrush, and it can handle a lot more polygons. And I'm a fan of kind of treating my sculpted objects as much as clay as much like clay as possible. So I'm even bringing back that subdivision surface as much like clay as possible. So I'm even bringing back that subdivision surface. And I'll keep these as in. So now that these are exported, I'll see you guys in ZBrush. Okay, so now I'm in Zbrush. If you own Zbrush, you'll realize mine looks a little bit different. And in the resources folder, I've actually provided the same user interface. So you can go to preferences configuration and then load that same one from the resources folder. It's actually just double check and make sure it works, and it does. It's the exact same one. Zbrush has an issue where some of the brushes don't pop up, but there are more here, and then we need to go to our light box. And I like to click on Dynamo Sphere 128 as my default project because it lets me access Edit mode in ZBrush immediately. With that in mind, let's go ahead and try the Import tool. And let's go to the Village FBX, and we'll import our blockout. We'll just click Okay. Oh, wrong blockout. Why don't we try the rocks? Be a little easier to handle. If we check out our Subtool, we do have all three rocks, which is pretty great. If I click on the second one and then press W, we're in transform mode, I'm going to move it. I'm going to click on this one. I'm going to move this as well. If I hold Alt, we can move the Gizmo. So I'm going to click to unmasked let's say, unmasked Mesh Sender. So I'm going to do the same thing for these ones. If I hold Alt and click on a Mash, I'm actually switching the Subtools without needing to click here. So I'm holding Alt clicking still holding Alt, I'm clicking that I'm resetting those positions. You know, click reminder and Zbrush. You're going to hold your left click to orbit if you're orbiting around and you hold shift, you'll start snapping. I'm going to let go of shift, and I'm back to regular orbit. And typically, at the end of my orbits, I'm holding shift right at the end to snap to a build Alt while doing it, I'm panning. I'm not holding so now I'm orbiting. And then last, if I hold Alt and pan, and then I let go of All, then I zoom. That could take some time to get used to, but that's the way it goes for Z brush. And I think blender chugs a lot when it comes to high polygon content, and as well, I don't typically enjoy how their brushes work as much, but I think it's a much better modeling tool. You know, with that in mind, we can start with the largest rock and just go ahead and start challenging ourselves. I don't think we have a large use for the blackout shapes unless we do. You know what? Let's make a new folder. Let's see where we can find that. Let's call this blackout. We might want to keep these just and try out the difference between a remash projection and a decimate later on. For now, I'm going to click on the gear, and I'm going to duplicate the folder if I can. There we go. Scroll up, scroll up. I'll hide this one, and I'll rename this folder, and I'll call it sculpt. So we're looking at our first rock Okay. It looks like I was working at the side view in Blender, and, you know, we can change the orientation later on, so or should we change it now? Maybe we should change it now. Let's see if I can select everything in here. Oh, I see what had happened. Okay. So I'll grab these. I'm just gonna move them to the appropriate set. I'll turn off, transpose for the entire set. Oops. And I'll move this. Apologies. Come all out again. I'm gonna turn off dynamic perspective just to make sure they're still on the same level. I just want to make sure they're at a similar space. I had moved it in a non orthographic view. Okay, I'm going to hide the other two. Or I just want the large one perfect. So I'll start by just kind of subdividing this. Divide once, twice, three times, and I'll delete the lower. Now, I rely on the dynamesh a lot when sculpting, so I'm going to see if this resolution feels good when I click on Dynamesh here. I'll probably Shift F to see the wireframe. 4.8 million polygons. So I don't think we need to go that high. Okay. Still a little bit steep, so I'll try something like this. We'll try something like this. And we'll get something in between. Okay, I'm feeling good about that for now. And I have my silly little Wakem intos tablet out, and I'm going to press Q to go back to draw mode. I'm going to test X if I need to Silcal transformations and local symmetry. I'm guessing that I'd have to bring this back to the world origin. So you saw alter orientation to unlock? Let's see. I'm just trying to reset this. Oh, I see. So the local symmetry is on here, but I want to take it to the Unmasked Center. I want to see if I could bring it to the world origin. Oh, it's fine. Okay. We don't typically need to work with symmetry anyways when dealing with rocks. So if we scroll along here or brush if we hold alt, we go the opposite direction. The brushes I do want for this rock are trim dynamic, H poldish. And as well, I'm going to go into the brush section. And I'll go to the trim brushes, and I'll click on Trim Smooth boarder. Luckily, it did pop up there afterwards. And another brush I'm very much into is in the orbs pack. So this is the one I told you guys to download earlier. If you look up how to install Zbrush brushes, it will direct you to the correct system folder and you just slap it in there. But a lot of these are really good, including flatten and orbs cracks. So these two did not pop up down here, but, you know, that can be a little bit buggy. So we do start with the H polish. In my experimenting with a little bit more subtle rock shapes, I thought this was nice and subtle. Like, starting with that one is fantastic for cliffs, but it kind of destroys the topology a little bit, especially if you're going for a nice smooth rock. So I'm really just lightly scraping against it, thinking, how would nature go about deforming this? Kind of like our substance designer practice. We're just looking to create an interesting yet appealing noise pattern, you know, nothing too crazy. We'll even consolidate some of these flattened edges. You know, I'm not a fantastic sculptor. I'm not a fantastic modeler, and I'm not a fantastic painter. I'm just a guy who's just passionate about game art in general and is really happy to be showing you guys what I've learned about that along the way, if that makes sense. Cyberpunk, Japanese samurai character sculpting, Zbrush, and it's like 1 trillion polygons. Maybe I'll call myself, like, an official badass artist. You never know. But, you know, today we're doing nice, gibbly simple beach rocks. And it's not as hard and it should be relaxing. I'll be honest, my first practice attempt at this was not relaxing, but that's because no one told me, you know, kind of the process. So I'm here to tell you I would recommend scraping along with the H polish brush first. That's my biggest tip when starting out with this softer style. As another demonstration, and we will use this brush later for trim smooth border. This is really good for cliffs because if you want this vase to really extrude itself inwards, especially with a square Alpha, you're going to be able to really carve into these shapes and then you can continue to dynamesh. And we'll touch up a little bit with this trim smooth in just a bit, really. But the first stage would be some He polish. Intern dynamic works kind of similarly to this, but, uh, to me, it's a little bit more destructive than what I'm aiming for. So I'm already kind of going back 'cause I don't want to destroy too much of this. Although I don't want too much bumpiness. So if that means I need to carve away at parts, that's fine. Okay. Minimal detail over there. So now we can take it to that little bit of some second stage with some stronger trim dynamic, and I might try it with a square Alpha. Depending on how it's forming into it, I might increase our dynamish a little now. Okay, trying something around 600 now? Let's see. Okay, yeah, it's still working for us. So as you can see, I'm not looking to really, really mess up the shape, but this is where we're gonna get some nice breakup h. And this will be captured in the normal map. A lot of the beginner rock sculpting tutorials that I come across, don't get me wrong. It's the only reason why I'm able to do this. They kind of go really crazy on the details because they want to get the point across. And so I'm here to show a bit of a different type of demonstration to show how subtleti can be our best friend, man. We're not looking to be overwhelmed by a ridiculous amount of detail. We're looking to find an appealing and fun scene. That's the best part about stylized art, if you ask me. Of course, some styles are harder than others, but As you can see, my brain is a little less cooped up. Now that we're out of substance designer, I hope you're happy to be out of that program, as well. Really, I'm just going across here, clicking and dabbing. If I pressed Alt, it would protrude forward. Maybe I'll see if that has a place in this sculpt. And we can sort of fit that in just by doing light layers over. It's giving us some very subtle but nice detail. So I'm going to go ahead and scrape along a little bit with this. And I might be a little less detail oriented on the next two rocks. No entirely sure, but, you know, they're smaller at the end of the day, so maybe they'll be even easier. I'm willing to bust up this rock a little bit more in the back. Maybe some diagonal aging happened around this part. I do want to still clean it up a little afterwards. I definitely don't have to do it to the whole part because we will add a little Alpha at the end. I'm not looking to create huge, huge messed up shapes, but this will catch the light pretty nicely in the normal map. So still just clicking around. And I go one brush at a time. You know, there are definitely more free flow approaches to this. There's so many different ways you can tackle this, especially for the sake of educating you guys and breaking this down into a bit of a simpler system that could still look pretty darn good. I'm working one brush at a time, right? So we went through our H polish phase, and now we're going through the trim dynamic phase. And in a moment, I think I'll play with the trim smooth border. Yeah, that way, hopefully some of these processes are a little easier to remember. So we're blocking out. Now we're sculpting. And so I will grab that trim smooth border brush next. Well, keep that square Alpha on there. Maybe these should be really small. But not every detail is going to be captured on the normal map. So it's important to add a little bit of, you know, sharpness to it. Maybe I'll consolidate this a little bit. I'm just lightly scraping against it now. Now, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap. Seeing what looks good and one doesn't. There I held Alt to go in the reverse direction. That gives me some extra room to start carving extra detail. We'll see if we can make something a little bit edgier work over here. It's a little messier than the other parts, but it still reads nice from afar. I'm starting to add some funner details where I can. I don't want to go too far. Sometimes up, sometimes down with this. I don't really want to time lapse this because there's always little small details that you might catch in this, but I'm really not trying to change my brush too often. This next brush, yeah, now that I'm reading it from afar, I still want to get bigger details in there. Okay, Flattenge and orbs cracks actually had come out. Flatten edge it doesn't seem like we need it unless we really want to clean up some of this trim smooth order, but I actually like some of these extra details, so I'm going to leave flatten edge alone. And orbs cracks can definitely take some practice. We could try to do one crack through here. Sometimes you have to scrape along a couple of times, and then we're going to pinch it, trim, smooth border it. You know, whatever feels the best. And then it can be pretty tough to find the right wraparound. But we're gonna try anyways. Let's think how we do want this to wrap. Maybe it should converge back with itself. We'll see. You know, perhaps we could find something smaller and more subtle. I'm not trying to go for too curvy of lines. We'll get some variation in here through the pinch brush in just a little bit. I'm okay having that sort of crack on that side. It kind of gets weaker as it goes across. We don't need it to meet the whole mesh. So I'm pretty interested in that. And like I said, I will take the pinch brush, which is BPI. You especially want to converge in the middle. Or maybe even the other way. We'll see. Oh and now I want to try one more brush within the light box, and I believe it's in the mallet section. Haven't messed with it in a while. I think it's mallet fast, too. We're going to go ahead and try to get in there. Let's see if increasing the Z intensity does it for us. And that's not bad, but maybe another brush will do the trick better for us, so I'm going to go back to brush. Maybe we'll go to the orb section, and I'm going to select clay tubes. I think this works a little better. I'm looking to create little small holes. This is our fun little tertiary detail. In fact, we can get some actual, like, small carving patterns out of here. So, for now, I think circles look best. Not thinking too hard about where I want to put these. I'm just kind of feeling it out. I think I'll take a double up here, though. And okay. I'm happy with that being our first rock. If you want, you could always go to the rock detail brush, and this one is so subtle that, like, I don't blame anyone for using it. I just want to decrease the Z intensity. Um, or just E intensity. We're just make sure I'm not changing the silhouette too much. And I like that a lot. We're going to keep that. Yeah, we could have made, our own rock detail pattern within substance designer. We could put a vignette on it, import it as an Alfo and then use that. But I find that the one from the orb is very well crafted, and it totally meets the purpose of these rocks. So that was polish and then trim dynamic trim smooth border, a little bit of orbs cracks, and then a little bit of the let's see. Let's double check its name. The orb clay tubes. 19. 17 Finishing Rock Sculpting: So that's rock number one, and let's find rock number two. At least we have a bit of an easier reference this time around. So I'll subdivide this a couple of times again. I'll do it one more time, delete lower. And let's go ahead and test out a dynamesh around 600 once again. Oh, in fact, for this, we could try to we could try two different polish methods on this. Let's try the polish on the dynamesh. And that's not bad. But first, I want to try out this clay polish, as well. Okay, I'll check out the topology. And yeah, nothing's distorting like crazy, so I'll go with the regular clay polish for this one. So I'll dynamish this. There we go for this rock. And like last time, we're just going to start with polish. I'm not going to try to use too much on the regular polish because it can kind of overly distort the shape changes we're going for. So, you know, we start soft, and then we start getting deeper and crazier. Looking for ways to kind of wrap it around the rocks. Oh, I'm not only doing big circles the whole time. Takes a little longer, but I think some directionality is always worth it. Even if it's not perfect. For example, I'm not looking at a bunch of references next to me. I'm just kind of feeling out, what would look good. I know these rocks are sort of close to the river in the concept. So they're a little bit smoother due to water type erosion. I don't know if erosion is the right word for that, because it's not eroding from sand. But nonetheless, they'd be smooth ish. And I know the other rock is getting in the way here and there, but, um, it's not like we're working on a character, you know what I mean? Okay, so that's a bit busted up for the H polish. I'm okay with that. Trying to get a good angle here. Um, yeah, I'll keep that reference for now. For some reason the thickness is still bothering me on the crack. So I'm gonna go for the pinch brush again. And then I'm going to try for the maybe the trim dynamic. I kind of bust up the crack itself. Going in and out. A little more subtle that way. Okay, so continuing with that. Now I got the trim dynamic brush on me. Don't be careful with the alt key, but I do want to add a little bit here and there. Not being as careful as I was last time. But it's still coming out, pretty good. You know, if I'm gonna be repeating the same process, which again, is H polish trim dynamic trim smooth border, little bit of cracks, flattening and clay tubes, then I'll really just use this opportunity to say, first of all, thank you for getting this far in the course. Know it feels a little dorky because TDR is totally my thing. I really, really, really enjoy doing it. And as a small creator, the opportunities to do something like this for you means a lot. You know, I know I haven't been working in the games industry for many, many years, so to have the trust from incredible creators like Emil and many others within the community is one of the biggest privileges of my life. However, it's not to say, I'm not gonna try to hide the fact that this isn't difficult, you know, this stuff is hard work, and if you're doing this along with me, you probably know that. So, you know, not only am I rooting for you, but at times I hope you guys can root for me, too, you know, I like it in person. I really want all you guys to succeed. And one of the things about my style is I want us to be able to accomplish a lot with a little. You know, it's not fun to have to buy add ons or packages for uh, you know, accomplishing the art you want to create. But it's because at least to me, there are tools out there that still need to be made in terms of how you approach game art. I think we found that out the hard way through substance designer. Luckily, the lazy brush nodes and those filter nodes really came through for us. But as well as the light and the filters, I couldn't imagine how I would have done that without the hard work it takes to want to be a better game artist. And at times, you know, sculpting 100 rocks isn't the most exhilarating thing ever, but the final piece of it all is always more than the sum of its parts, and that's one of my favorite things about this. So now I'm going to Trim Smooth border, and I don't want to mess this up too bad. So I'm gonna be real careful and try not to tackle every single edge. Just feeling out where it might need more detail, or maybe some storytelling occurred, even if I don't know what that story is. And I really love Zbrush, and I love sculpting, to be honest, even if I'm not fantastic. The issue is that if we're going to be creating a whole village with this type of pipeline, we will add 20 hours to the course. And whether or not you like my voice, we just don't have that time. So what we're going to do is for these extra organic shapes like the rocks, they definitely deserve the zebrus treatment, but we're going to go with a bit of a retro we're going to take a bit of a retro take on the village assets using weighted normals and mid poly assets, which still come out looking fantastic at the end. So that's pretty okay with that being the second rock. I know, for a fact, I don't want cracks. I will take the clay tubes. Get some dots up in here. And my Wakem is very old and dusty, so there are parts where getting a little sensitive up in here can be a challenge for me. But these rocks are, you know, a little bit, a little bit gibbly, a little bit Genchin impact, a little bit heroes of storm. It's just It's a mix of those styles, and, you know, I think that's a little bit of my style. I really like all of those coming together. And so that's rock number two successful, and I'm happy with it. So we'll get on to this third rock. Okay. Okay, so I'll move this rock first. And I guess I'll hide our original for now. Use disguis reference. So let's just go ahead and do the same thing the vitam. Delete a lower, and let's try a 600 dynamesh. And once again, like last time, I'll actually go to this one and give it a quick clay polish. Yeah, totally okay with that. I'll just start with each polish here and start scraping. I don't want to match the exact same patterns as last time. So I'll try to get some more squarish rather than rectangular plainer cuts in here. So it's a little more chicken scratchy, but this won't be demanding much detail from us. I wish we did have the time to be able to sculpt all the village walls and wood planks, but, you know, you never know. There could be future tutorials where we're mostly sculpting and taking our time on less assets. But we have a lot of assets to make. I guess, not a ton, but I want to keep this educational. And there's no point in using these same four brushes on 1 million cubes. Let's be real. Luckily, there are other ways around that. There are solutions. You know, there's quality graphics mode, which is this and Z brush. And then, you know, there's medium and high mode, and it makes your game run better. It still looks great. We'll find out what that workflow is very, very soon. Okay, let's start busing this up a little more. Now we're at stage two. I'm just kind of going over where I think it gets a little bit dare I say boring. That way we get better and different size variations. You know, I'm not gonna try to go to tots on trim dynamic because I want to save a little bit of room for that trim smooth border. Keyword is try. Okay, let's get the trim suit border. Now, these are like, you know, our sharper tertiary cuts. Remember, we can press Alt to add some surface detail, in fact. You can always add a couple more here, too. I'll go back here. You know, wherever I feel like I went too crazy with trim dynamic, I could start squaring that up with trim smooth border, and other parts can be a little more messed up than others. But maybe we get some more variation when we rotate. Trying to see if I can find a more interesting large shape around here. Go back to H polish and smooth that out. See if we can pull off a little crack here. Okay. I'm just making sure we, this one could wrap around. I'm pretty okay with that, too. Um, I'll do one more little pass over the center, make sure we get that detail in there. And now I'll get the pinch brush again. Get a little variation in there. Once again, use the trim smooth border. Whoops. And I think, as far as I know, we have three rocks. So let's see. Let's see. Let's see. What I'm going to try to do is it looks like because we moved stuff around, we're gonna have to move stuff around some more. Oh, oh, oh, I apologize if that made you mad, Dynamesh. Okay, so something is very upsetting when it comes to that. It does not want to move. I'm going to turn off Dynamesh. Make sure the mask is off. And it just seems like some polygons were masked, and it was not happy about that. Same with this one, it seems like. Okay, and so now for the blockout, I'm actually gonna turn this on. And I'm gonna try my very, very best to just match these within sebush. Looks like I rotated this one. Double check that. We'll lower it. Same with this one. Check the top view, bring that in. So what I'm gonna do now is merge both of these. I'm gonna merge this folder, the blackout. Let's merge that folder, and then I'll merge the sculpt folder, too. Let's move some of these around. We could hide both of these. So let's rename this sculpt. And let's rename this. Blockout. And if we want to move individual pieces, I'm going to click on Auto groups for both of these. And I believe if I click Shift F, go to my blockout, and then, let's see. Control Shift. Yeah, so if you control shift, you'll isolate one polygroup. You can hold Alt to reset both of those, and you can move just one piece around. We'll practice that again, Control Shift Alt to bring those back. And then I'm still holding now I'm letting go. I'm just trying to match that. Okay, so for the blockout one, what I'm going to try to do is go to Project. I'm going to click Project A. Let's actually unmask everything. Click Project A, and let's hide the skull. Let's see what it did. You know, the poly coount isn't bad. In my original test, we just did a decimation, but, you know, with the blockout shape, it is pretty cool that we have all quad topology already without distorting all of this. If I want to be brave, I could subdivide this, delete the lower, and then try this again. It's pretty cool, but I think it's a little high. Hmm. Tough to pick, huh? The silhutes pretty good like this, and I'd rather have us practice getting the most out of our topology. So I think I'll stick with that. One more time, I'll click Project A. Now on the sculpt, I'll double check that this is clay polished. I'll try to make sure that I'm not destroying too much information when I click this. It can handle one pass. However, let's see. If I click Auto groups, let's press Shift F. What happens if I control shift here? Okay, it isolates that Auto group, which is awesome because I'm just going to go back to the light box and get the rock detail. I'm really not a fan of when it changes the whole silhouette, so I have to be kind of careful. Yeah, see, it did it quite a bit. So we'll have to go with smaller details. Just going around. We'll do one at the top. Okay, good enough. So yeah, by holding Control Shift, and dragon. We can invert that selection or I can click and bring everything back. We put it on this one already, so I'll just go ahead and isolate this one. Get that rock detail. Doesn't have to be everywhere. Okay, Let's bring them back to the front control, click and drag. That's pretty cool, too. To be nicer to blender, though, when we import it, let's go ahead and go to decimation Master for this sculpt object, and let's click preprocess current. Depending on the message size, this could take quite a few minutes. However, on my computer, it seems to be making pretty okay process. And so I'm not trying to decimate this in an insane way. In fact, we'll preview the wireframe. I just want to get it down a little bit, so we're not exporting this many polygons. We could try 20%. And if I press Control Z, we can preview that. And, yeah, that's definitely a lot better. I'm going to put my little pen down, and we have our blockout, and we have our sculpt. I am just going to export everything as is. Let's press Control S, make sure we save. I'll go to Village Projects. And I'll save this as rocks. Okay, let's go ahead and export everything we see, so that means we're going to go to FBS Export. Visible is totally okay. The rest of these options are plenty fine. And let's click Export. Go to Village FBX and call it Rock Zbrush. Well, I think I can go ahead and close Z brush now. Yeah, the Zbrush section of this course is not that long, but I introduced you to the brushes that are most used when it comes to getting those rocket details. Sorry, stylized details on not only rocks, but wood as well and ground details. You're really just trying to bust up that original shape with the trims. You can extend the shape with trim smooth border. You know, one more trick you could do in the future is if you wanted to make let's actually make this smaller, we're not going to actually do this. But let's say you painted a bunch of holes with the mask, right? I'm holding control. If I invert that selection and then use inflate, that's how you're going to get a lot of the basic extrusions that you would see in blender, and you can go pretty crazy from here, remshing it and everything. But this is a very, very introductory take to Zbrush. And at the end of the day, I know you had a custom UI, but it's really because these buttons, you shouldn't have to navigate these menus over and over and over again to do some simple stuff like sculpting rocks. So, you know, you always have this video if you need it for some sculpting tips and yeah, try to apply this to wood, as well. Just get some deeper cuts in there, more plainer changes, and I wish you the best of luck on your sculpting journey, too. Now, in the meantime, let's get this back into blender so that we can get it ready for U VN wrapping and baking. 20. 18 Rock Asset Texturing: So here I am back in Blender, and this was our rocks Blender file. This collection was the blockout. So I'm going to name it that. And for now, I'm just going to hide that. And I'm going to go ahead and important FBX and I'll select the rocks from Zbrush. They're looking good. Let's put them in a place we like, and I'll rotate them towards us. So I am going to separate these by their selection. I'm going to select everything and press P, shoot shoot. Not by the selection. Apologies. By loose parts. That way it detects each rock. We'll do the same thing for this one. So let's move this small rock. And let's rename everything. I guess going backwards in this sense, but it's gonna be low and high, so rock oh two, low, Rock oh, one, low. Or, actually, these are the sculpts, huh? So this one would be high. The high would be the sculpt. And we're naming it like this because for substance painters baking process, it wants that lowercase low and high. So I'll do the same thing, Rocko three low. Rock oh two, low, and Rocko one. Let's fix this. This would be Rock 01. Whoopsi Daisy. Okay, so let's make some new collections. Let's call one ow. And let's call one high. I'll put them in the correct collection. And for now, these should all have the should all share an origin point. So I'm just going to select everything and press Control A and all transforms. So I'm going to hide the high poly for now, and I want to try to find a way to get just a couple UV islands out of these. And this should be pretty easy because we have all quads. I know I definitely want the bottom to be UV map seemed. So I'm going to press Control E and Mark Sam. And I'm trying to think about where else I would want it without too much stretching. So I'm going to make a seam down this edge and we'll go to UV Editing mode, and I'll press Unwrap I'll press U, and then click Unwrap Angle Based after selecting everything. That's not too bad, but we may need to alleviate some of it through this side as well. I think that's a little bit better. It's not There's no perfect unwrap where you're not going to have any seams on your model, but the bake should still look really good. But for substance painter, we're going to select all the seams, so we're going to click, let's see. I think it's Shift G. Yeah, let's select a similar seam, and then we'll press Control E and Mark Sharp. So now they're sharp and Sam. They look a little awkward in this version, but once it's baked down, it should look okay. So we're going to do the same thing with this one. We'll get to cut here and a cut here. Mark Sharp and Mark seam. Let's do that one more time for this guy. Vertical edge here, a vertical edge here. And again, I'm using shift and then Control click to just quickly select the edges in between there. And I'll mark the sea with control. You know, Mark it Sharp. So I'll select all three. Select everything, unwrap it. And I'll select all the islands, and first of all, average island scale, and then I will click on Pack Islands. Let's see. I'm okay with it being rotated anyway. I think I want a larger margin. That might be huge, but we'll see. No, if anything, if anything, let's pack it again with 0.02 or three. Okay. So that UV map is what's going to be taking in the normal information from our sculpt onto this low poly. It's double check face orientation. That looks okay. I am going to put a triangulate modifier on this. And I'm not gonna apply it, but I am going to let's export all three of these. So I'll select all three. I'll go to Export FBX. Let's go to the village and call this one Rocks Low. Just mesh, selected objects. No animation and face. And yeah, we'll keep that one as the low. And then we'll grab these same three. Or let's double check that everything is in. Yeah, actually, it was. We applied the transformations. Just go ahead and make sure you do that. I'll export these three as rocks high. And, you know, once we're in the baking process, it'll tell us if we mess something up, but next up, I'm going to be hopping into substance painter. We're going to import the low poly model, and then we're going to bake the high poly information on there. So I will see you in painter. I did make one little mistake. It typically punishes you for not having seams on your hard edges, but you don't necessarily need hard edges on your seam. I had gotten that mixed up for just a moment. So I'm going to go ahead and select one of these and brush Shift G, select all the seams. I'm going to clear the sharp. So all of these should actually be smooth, and I'm going to go ahead and export this back to the low poly. And now I'm going to go ahead and open up Substance Painter, so I will see you there. So now I'm here in Substance Painter, and I'm going to go ahead and make a new project with File New. And make sure you select the Unreal Engine template. I'm okay with two Ka resolution. I'm going to go ahead and get the low poly. I'll click Okay. And, yeah, like I said, we don't need hard edges on the seams, but whenever you have hard edges in your model, you do need a seam there. So don't get that twisted. I'm going to click on that croissant button up here, and it'll take us up to baking. And for the map itself, I guess for output, we'll keep it at two K, and let's go ahead and find the high poly you know, I'm not seeing any egregious errors, and what you want to try to do is pull off a shorter max frontal distance. So that's going to be the best we're going to get there. In the match section, let's do Bmesh name. Let's see if it flips out on us and knows it's lows and highs, so I think it's good there. And we'll do some high anti aliasing. I'm pretty much okay with trying to get all these maps. Yeah, let's just click on BC. And if we're lucky, hopefully, this should look good in the first pass. So far so good. We can go back to painting mode and check this out. Let's see. Shift right click. Yeah, if we go to the masking section, we can check out the topology, and we can see just how that bake is interacting with our wireframe. And if you ask me, that's looking really, really good. And the triangulate modifier is to make sure that these are all shared the same way across all three. Oh, speaking of witch. Let's do some live troubleshooting, actually. It looks like we forgot to put the triangulate modifier on the other two rocks. So let's select this one, this one, then this one. I'm going to click Control L and copy modifiers. So with all three selected, I'll do File Export FBX. Let's go find that Village again. Village FBX, Rock Slow. And I'll do my preset and click Export. I'm okay with just closing that down. And then let's see if Import Mesh does the trick. And it does, but it might have messed up our BAC. You never know. So I'm going to go ahead and click on BAC again. And yeah, it's just a good habit to triangulate it before you bake. So you have something consistent to work with. So we're turning to painting mode. Very cool. I don't typically work with the paint layers in this scenario, so I'm going to get rid of this layer. Now, the base layer that I actually want to get is the rock material that we had worked on. So let's go ahead and find it. I'm going to go to our village, and let's go to the textures, Rock SB SAR, and I'm going to import it. It is a base material. We'll just put it into this project. I'm gonna go ahead and save this. Um, let's go to our village projects. We call this rock texture. Okay, so we're going to kind of do this live, try to feel it out and see what looks nice. So holy moly. The rock material, least we've made in this demo, is doing quite a bit of heavy lifting. This seems to be a little difficult to get rid of. I'm going to see if changing the tie does anything. Oh, I think I know what's going on. When you see these seams from importing your own material, what you should do is probably turn off the height. Yeah, I think that just is breaking up the padding a little bit, and it's not necessarily something we need. Unless we are able to change the strength of it. No, I don't think so. So I'd rather have less surface detail than to break up that scene with a height map. And I don't not entirely sure if triplanar projection will fix. I kind of did in the scenario. So we're going to be happy little campers and stick with triplanar projection. We can find out if some tiling works better than others. I already looks pretty good at one. And, you know, we spent a lot of time on this material, right? So we don't need to do too much. We're just going to look at the base color and try to think how we can push this a little bit further. And so one of the first ways that I want to do that is by grabbing the curvature of our skull. So I'll make a fill layer. And, yeah, I'll set it to only color. Even this color is kind of fine. I just want to go into the smart masks. And, you know, we're not trying to be too lazy, but at the end of the day, all these generators is just the combination of noise, curvature, ambient occlusion, position, and thickness. These are all different variations of combinations of those types of elements. So at the end of the day, there's only so many smart masks that can be made, and don't let anyone convince you otherwise. So let's just find something with a strong tunish curvature. I kind of want to keep that one for later, and I'll keep this one for later. But right now, we're looking for edges strong, and if we're feeling brave, maybe edges strong, scratch. So I'll try to put this into the mask section of this. And already, we can see that curvature growing on it. You know, if you remember how we were operating in designer, you'll know that even though I really like these patterns, I don't want them to be too strong. So I'm going to turn down the opacity of this. That's my thing is, like, don't overdo the elements you're doing, and they'll all add up at the end. Right cool. So I also don't mind just getting another random artsy fill there. Let's make this one darker. And I kind of am just looking for a texture, really, like a random fill. Let's see. We're in the texture section. I don't know if I want to find a grunge. I'm looking for something to where we can clamp it down and just have a couple dots on here. So I'm going to try this, and it does look like it has some balance controls we could play with, but not a ton. Not a ton, so I might try a different texture. Okay, maybe instead of dots, I'm okay with these different brushstrokes. I just don't want the exact same tile across the whole thing. That's pretty cool. I might put it underneath this first one. See if we can get away with pushing any amount of saturation. Not bad. Or maybe even green. No. Let's do reds first. Let's get some browns in there. Call this dirt a one. Let's duplicate it. Let's see if we can actually just change this one around. You know, just increasing the contrast of that a little bit. This one, I want to have a little color in. Maybe a little yellower. Okay, and this one was the curvature. And back in the smart masks, I saw a couple that kind of interested me. So I'm going to go hunt down. I think we'll do Let's start with ground dirt. Let's make a new fill a, and let's start with ground dirt. We'll go ahead and play with the settings if need be. Let's preview that. Okay, it's that white. Let's make it darker. And what I'm going to do is use the mask editor to find the position and raise that up. I don't know how much of these other parameters we need. Balance is probably important. You know what? We're gonna go with some higher contrast or more powerful looks like that. And then, Oh, how much contrast do we want? That is a fine amount. I just want much less opacity. And we're gonna make another dark filler. Oh, first, we'll call this one ground dirt. And this one's gonna be the AO. We're gonna make this pretty dark. If we want, we can add some tone to it. But we're gonna get a I don't know if we want to use one of these since we're looking for something pretty simple. But dust seclusion could be pretty cool. Let's try. So that actually does kind of work in the sense where if we changed it to a darker tone, we'll get some better luck. Where we could have some offset color there a little bit. And that helps its interest quite a bit. As far as I knew, I was already using grounder, and then there was grounder one and grounder two. You know what? Let's try the other one. Actually, a bigger fan of the first one. Look at that. You got to try stuff out sometimes. And then maybe if I make a new filter and put Ms from top on this one, maybe instead of using it as moss, we could switch it to, like, an ad layer, and we'll play with the levels, find that right amount of grunge decrease the curvature. And in a sense, maybe if we really take down the opacity, this could just make for some nice fake aging at the top. Now, I'll check it back in the material mode. These are starting to look pretty good. However, I want to show a nice little trick with paint box. So what I'm going to do is go to paint box. And what I'm going to grab is the filter. And I'm going to get the filter PBR. Now, what I'm going to do is make a new paint layer and I'm going to put this filter on it. I'm going to set this mode to pass through, as well. And now that same filter from designer in paint box two is working in painter. And what's really cool is the lazy brush node also works in painter. So you can kind of overlay a ton of noises in painter, as well and make a material that way. But I wanted to show you how to do it in designer first. So yeah, paint box just keeps on give it and give it, doesn't it? So I'm going to go ahead and check out some of these settings. Probably don't want that much quantization, but a little bit never killed anyone. Yeah, so now I want to start giblfying these effects. So we're going to need a slope blur input, right? So this could be a situation where we're just going to get clouds, too, and maybe we need to change the scale and we'll check out the intensity. I just want to see how far I can push that scale. Okay, and then we always have the filter blend. Checking out the sloper intensity. There we go. Pretty cool. Change the contrast. Now we've got something very unique, very paint chilly, very fun, very gimbly and very awesome. So, you know, that was live, too, and we're able to play with some of these colors and still see what looks best. I can even go back to base color and just really double check on what values I like the most. I might duplicate the light, and then I'll add a fill. Whoops. Let's add a fill effect through here. Mm, it looks like it has to be a It might be a paint. So I'm going to set this to black and fill this whole mesh with black. So on this second light, I wanted to be stronger, and I wanted to hit these other rocks as well. Can I turn that off? Yeah, now some light is hitting that, and I can even increase the amount like that. Cool. Now they're all sharing a little bit of different information. We'll call this filter. Is there anything else we want to play with? We could even try sharpen a little bit. Well, and I'm satisfied. I'm really happy with these rocks. I'm a little bit of a chicken, so I'm going to desaturate this. In fact, now encourage it because we are going to be doing some landscape blending in the shader, so may as well not double layer that too much, but I'm really proud of everyone involved here for helping us get these far with these rocks. Last thing we'll do is just quickly test this material and blender, because we still have more assets to make, so we may as well make sure that these textures look good in blender. So let's go ahead and export the textures. And let's go to desktop, Village textures and let's make a new folder called T Rock Prop. Let's select it. That's pretty much all we need. So export, Save. Let's save the project. And so in the Village folder, I'm also going to make sure that in these textures, they have the desired name we want. So I'm going to call this T Rock prop base color. T Rock prop ORM, and T Rock prop normal. Now, let's go ahead and open up blender. We'll open up our rocks, and we'll start with the low, but I'm actually going to duplicate this collection. We'll call this final. We'll just get rid of these suffixes. Okay, so we got our three rocks. Now I'm going to do object set origin origin to geometry. I'm going to Edit mode just to lift these up a little bit. And I'll press Alt G for now, but then I'll move these a bit. So now I'll enter into shading mode, and, you know, we're going to keep doing our basic materials in blender before we start diving into the real complex stuff with unreal shaders. So let's make a simple one. When you open it up, you might get your original Zbrush material. All this is fine, but let's turn metallic to zero. And we do want the principle. We do want this normal map node. You can always press Shift A to add something, so there's the normal map. Let's go grab these textures. O. So because this is the unreal engine version of the normal, we have to do some silly silly math. I'm going to press separate XYZ, and I'm going to set this to non color. Now I'm going to add a combine XYZ, put it over here. And for the Y channel, kind of like earlier and unreal, we're just going to invert it here. So that is the inversion trick for that. Plug the color into here. If we preview it, yeah, that normal is working correctly. Awesome. So that's the blender fed version of an unreal engine substance painter export. And then for ORM, let's do a separate Color. I'll set this to non cour, though. So if red is O, that's the ambient occlusion. It's probably best belongs in a mixed color, since this doesn't have a dedicated ambient occlusion node. So if I take the base color, this maybe the red channel can go in here and be multiplied. Okay. And then green would be roughness, and blue would be metallic. We go back to layout, get a feel for that. Here's our rocks, material mode. Go back to layout, get a feel for that. Here's our rocks, material mode. And awesome. Very awesome. Let's go ahead and put static mesh prefix in front of us. Cool. So we're going to be doing more shader effects to these rocks in Unreal Engine, which includes runtime virtual texture blending, as well as some world space paint based stuff. You know, this just keeps getting crazier and crazier, but so far so good, we got some really cool rocks. I have decided that, you know, we're going to build pretty much the entire asset library before we hop back into Unreal. And I think before we go into a ton of the village modeling, I think I want to do what I was going to do after, which is the foliage. I think we should tackle that first, and I think we'll learn a lot, as well as we'll educate ourselves on tree box and how that operates within blender. And this will be a huge, huge deep dive into foliage, but we'll break it up, dive into foliage, but we'll break it up, right? So I don't want to go straight from a bunch of trees modeling to a bunch of trees shading. So let's do some foliage now. We'll take care of the village modeling right after. So 21. 19 Drawing Foliage Textures: Okay, so now that we're done with the rocks, I've decided we're going to start working on our foliage a little bit first. And the first step to that foliage is Photoshop or the drawing software of your choice. We're actually looking to just create these simple black and white masks. You know, if you want them really sharp and accurate, it'll take you longer if you want them messy and you want to use some messy breast strokes. You can totally do that, too. For me, personally, I do want to go for something a little bit sharper. And with that in mind, I've decided to record this um episode a little bit differently or this chapter. I'm going to commentate on why I'm going to do what I'm going to do, and then I'm going to just speed it up a little bit to make for a user friendly time lapse where you're just watching me draw some very, very simple black and white mess, and then I will come back to narrate for a little bit, and we'll go back to drawing. That way, I'm not talking your ear off during the entire process, as it is just a bit of one of the slower tasks in all this. It depends on your practice and how much you've done this before and the quality you're going for. So I want to make something nice for you, and there's not too many concepts outside of what I'm about to show you here. So the file resolution I'm going for is one K. I'll call this foliage and I'll create it. So for the background, I think we can delete this. We'll have to make a new layer first. This is a bad habit. I just always delete that background layer. And I want to set the background, the true layer one to just black. And I'll add a new layer, and I simply just want to draw white in the same shape as my foliage. For me, in the free Photoshop brushes, let's see where it says, Get more brushes. It'll take you to the Photoshop web page. And I looked for one of them called the Megapack, I believe, and there's a really good brush in here called To Smooth to be forgotten. There's plenty of brushes. You can go with any style you want for this. I just like how this one's a little bit more pen like. I think for testing purposes, I boosted up that smooth, but I'll switch to my pen in a second. And get any grass reference that you want, find any picture of stylized foliage that you enjoy. You could look up grass texture. You can copy that. You can trace that. I'm just looking to create a stylized grass blade drawing. So there's no other information to give you other than enjoy the drawing program of your choice. In Photoshop, I'm drawing, and I'll change the size with the brackets. And I'm not looking to cover this information with Black, so I would switch to the straight up eraser tool if I want to get rid of some of that. We can switch to a hard brush for that easily. So that's pretty much all I'm doing when it comes to silly grass blades. I just have to take it a little slower because I've been pretty busy with three D, and I don't have a ton of drawing practice recently, but I know what the artistic goal is. So get your drawing hand out and you can follow along um, Okay, test test. I know I'm on. So we finished our grass blade. You know, for now, we can keep poking away at it, making edges sharper. You could be using a different brush and going for something a little more painterly and messy and half opaque. But I want to work with something pretty clean here, and I think I am okay with this. This one is a little bit tall. And it's okay if it takes you one, two, three, four, five, 678910 tries. You know, this is how it goes. I know this looks super simple, but in my experience, Photoshop was pretty fussy in the drawing experience. This brush helped me out a little bit with that, though. So I don't know if it's best to handle this within Photoshop right now because it can kind of mess up our channels. So we might do some extra layering within substance designer. I'll think about that, but we still have more mass to draw in the meantime. So for now, I'm just going to add a new layer and hide that original one. I'll show you a quick sketch of what I'm trying to aim for in terms of this next texture. It's basically the tree canopy, and let me make my brush bigger. In a sense, we just want something a little bit messy. Oops, let me not set it to the eraser. We want something messy that kind of goes outwards. You can imagine you're looking at a bunch of tree leaves from a top down view, and we don't want them to be perfectly square against each corner because then we can tell that it's a square texture. But it's always it's always good to fill up as much space as you can at the same time. So that's where something like this can get a little bit tricky. If you're going for extra stylized, sort of closer to Fortnite or Valorant, one of the tricks is to really fill up sorry, fill up the middle of that space and then work with what you have around it to give off the impression of more leaves. And there are more advanced ways to do this. I mean, Geez, I shouldn't even be saying that in the context of looking at this, but what I'm trying to say is you can create this in substance designer if you want to. You can kind of create this from a sculpt within Zbrush or blender and then bake it down to give it the alpha maps you need, and that way you have that normal information. That's why we went through Zbrush earlier so I can show you a bit of the high to low workflow. But this is one of the more painterly approaches to creating tree leaf canopies. I say, the most photorealistic way you can approach it is in speed tree two. You know, I'm not here to try to, um, they feel like you guys don't deserve to know more about the foliage creation process because this is one of the most beginner friendly ways, but the result still comes out great. So if I were to ramble for just one more moment, I'd say, if you want more detailed tree leaves, what I'd suggest is to create a top down view of some sculpts of trees within Zbrush or blender and get your Alpha and normal out of that. You could texture that in substance painter and then you'd basically put all that together. So we're doing the same thing here, with simple black and white painted the masks and I want us to get a little bit of drawing practice, too, so I'm not forcing you to use substance designer anymore for this course. Maybe unless we want to export this with a little wind feature. Again, just maybe look up stylized Genchen bush and you'll kind of see what textures we're aiming to achieve. So I'll clear this original layer, start from scratch, and we'll see if we speed it up or not, but I'll see you guys with my voice in a couple minutes. O I'm going to consider that finished for our tree leaves genuinely. Happy with it. Just make sure we have our layers correct or grass or tree leaves. And, you know, in your drawing software of choice, you're basically just duplicating your layers and putting them in the correct place. I hope I didn't need to over explain anything like that, but hopefully you saw the process. I was trying to come up with a more natural way to distribute these leaves, and sometimes that goes terribly wrong. But luckily, in this course, we had a pretty good attempt at it. One thing I'm going to do is make one more, and we're going to do the flowers. All I'm looking for is four very, very simple flower shapes and a square at the bottom. That's going to be the stem of the flower model. And so come up with any shape you like. You can look up flower shapes you like. They could even be just, like, really random braststrokes, and those still those are still flowers, especially in this style. But, yeah, I've decided that we're going to be doing the RGBA masks for this foliage in substance designers, so we'll import them in thereafter. So all we have to get ready in your drawing program is the black and white mask. So we've gotten one done with the grass, tree leaves, and, you know, like I said, super simple, super cartoony. And you can watch me work on these flowers right now. So I went a little bit more stylized here for the flowers, and I'm very much okay with that. You know, it's nice to always get a little bit of fun and color in your life. So for this stem, I'm really just looking to create a box and fill it. We'll take that first layer and just give everything the room it needs. I'll go ahead and group it and we'll name everything. We have flowers, and we have a tree leaf. And we have grass. So we'll do the boring bits, and we'll export these. You know what? I don't want to immediately export them. Let me think. We're going from Photoshop to substance designer. So in that sense, maybe it does make sense to have the full resolution first, and we can export that at a different resolution in designer. So let's definitely go ahead and get the main ones. So go ahead and just start grabbing them from the desktop. I want to make sure we don't overwrite it. I'll even rename this. Not too concerned about the final naming convention, as we still have some processing to do. We'll call this flowers. So within our village folder, I'm going to go to our textures, and let's go ahead and make a new folder called foliage. And just for fun, let's make one more folder and call it Dev because these ones aren't going to be our final ones. Well, close, but these aren't the ones we're actually going to import into Unreal Engine. So I'll save this as well. I'm going to Save As, make sure it's inner Village. And let's go to Village Textures and Dev. Why not? So foliage is okay with me, and I'll save it there. So I'll hop into substance designer, and we'll go ahead and get started with adding a couple extra RGP maps. Now, with Designer open, I'm okay going back to our original village materials. Go ahead and move my pen, and let's make a new graph. I think I want an empty graph, and we might be exporting this at 512, but for now, we'll leave it at one K, and we'll call it we'll just call it foliage. Okay, so we do need an output node first. Let's add a node. I'll type an output. And we can have multiple outputs in one graph. So maybe we can make one for both the grass tree leaf and flowers in one graph. Maybe we can give the outputs the correct export name too. So I'm going to put that T in front of it. So that is both for the identifier and the label. Sometimes you have to double click to refresh them and we'll do grass card for this one. And so with everything there, now we can go ahead and find those original textures. I'll drag all three in. I don't need to do much. I just need a way for there to be a stronger wind effect on some parts of this texture rather than others. And I know that's going to be done through merging RGBA files. And let's think if we want to put a separate one for each one of these, we can and should. And the base black and white, seems like we might have to do a grayscale conversions do that for all of these. We're kind of figuring this out live right now. So with all three of these, ready to go. I know I want the black and white one to be both the red channel and the Alpha, just so we have it in both of those spots. For this course, I'm also going to put it in the green channel. For more realistic foliage, I would actually recommend putting a unique subsurface map in here. So we could blur this and bevel this and then plug that into the green channel of the subsurface. But I don't think this particular concept benefits from unique foliage subsurface scattering. If we want to be brave and try it anyways, we can. But in the final iteration, we'll have to see how we feel about it. I will be nice and do it as an example. We'll take a threshold and check it out, and why don't we try to bevel it inwards. Better yet, instead of a bevel, which is a little bit harsh, we can look for a non uniform blur gray scale. We might need to invert this. We'll check it out. And it doesn't seem like we do. We'll try that first. And what I might also do is take this mask. So I'm enjoying how it gets it has a change of effect in the middle. First I'll invert this and what I'd also like to do is blend it with this original threshold. I think that'll give me the true mask that I'm looking for with a multiply node. And that is sort of what I'm looking for. When it's a denser in the middle, I actually don't want as much subsurface. Again, we'll see if we want to use this in that final material instance, but I do think knowledge is power. So now you have a little bit of understanding of how we would take this and turn it into a subsurface map. Now, for the blue channel, that's what I want to use for the wind. So I'm going to look for a gradient one for this grass. And I do like putting a little love into each mask, so we will take our threshold again, and I do want to blend it. I'll try and multiply. I think this is good for the engine to say we want less wind at the bottom and more wind at the top. So we'll plug that into the blue channel. For each one of these, we'll bring some room back, and we could try actually duplicating this section for each of these different bitmaps. One and two. So the flowers are a gray scale. We're going to check out the subsurface. We'll see if changing the intensity. Benefits us. I'm totally okay with that. I'll plug that into the green channel. Again, the original one can go into both the red and the Alpha, and we'll see the blue. So for the flowers, I'm going to want the stem to maybe start here and rise up this way and get more wind. So first, it might be beneficial to get a shape node so we can mask out this gradient. We'll make some room over here. And first, what we'll do is we'll rotate it. I think I'm preferring to go the other way for this one. So then I'm going to take the shape note. And we'll start by decreasing the scale of this and I'll transform it. I'm also going to set it to absolute for the tiling and set it to no tiling. I'm holding control shift to drag it from the center, and I'm dragging it out. So now I'm replicating what area I actually want this gradient to be affected by. So in between here, we might take another blend node, and we'll try the multiply or the subtract. Give that a shot and plug this to here. And we are affecting that strip in the way I intended. Yeah, and then we'll have to get one more blend plug the opposite mask into here. And now we have both of these combined. A little bit of a brain twister in terms of the blending, but it is looking the way I intended. I'm okay with change the intensity. And that's not looking half bad for a more naturalistic subsurface. Can't stress it enough. Don't know if I'll use it, but why? No? So we have a tree leaf, and so we'll get the output. We have our flowers and grab this output, we'll grab our grass card and grab that output. I think those are the only three we need for this wonderful concept. So I'm going to go ahead and right click this and click Export outputs. These are labeled correctly. We'll change the folder and just put it in foliage. Click Export outputs, and that's awesome. Next, we will be taking these grass cards into blender to build our foliage. We're not going to need the tree leaves for the blender demonstration because we're going to be using the default tree box leaf texture as we develop this. However, these are the ones that I want we're going to be using the default tree box leaf texture as we develop this. However, these are the ones that I want to throw into unreal because we made this ourselves, and that's always preferred. So good job creating these textures. I will see you in blender in just a moment. Hey, so before we continue, there is a quick fix that I want to do. For the flowers, I don't think we need to change these masks, but I have decided that it might be best if we also give the flowers a dedicated color map. That way, we're not kind of bloating our shader with a bunch of different masks that need to color each of these flowers differently. Sometimes older approaches are the best, and that older approach would just be to give it a nice color within Photoshop itself. So I am going to open up Photoshop. Let's see if I can take care of this before this video gets too long. It should not take long at all. So we got foliage right here. And I'll group this before this video gets too long. It should not take long at all. So we got foliage right here. And I'll group this for black and white. I'll duplicate this and call it color. And all I want to do is add a new layer and put a clipping mask. And we don't even need to add a gradient to this unless you want to. I'm just going to find probably the most universal shade that will allow us to hue shift this without making this absolutely terrible. So you do want to be kind of careful with your colors here. So I'll be spending just a moment being a little bit picky with this. I think I'm pretty okay with that. I'm not even interested in a gradient going downwards in this specific style, but there are plenty of awesome art styles that do involve a ton of gradients. For this, we're going to keep it kind of simple. So in this clipping mask, I'll just skip my brush. And we'll pick a yellow gradients. For this, we're going to keep it kind of simple. So in this clapping mask, I'll just get my brush, and we'll pick a yellow, orange, pink and purple. I guess we can keep them sort of bright. Sometimes I struggle picking the right yellow. The best way to pick the right yellow is to compare it to the correct orange. So I guess I'll let our orange be a little darker. Then we'll find a purple. Don't know how strong it wanted. And now I'm looking for a pink because these shapes are pretty abstract, we can also build these in interesting ways in blender. I let this pink be a bit brighter. And I think this shows off the four shades pretty well. And I will double check if I want to make I think this shows off the four shades pretty well, and I will double check if I want to make our orange a little bit redder. Getting a little bit more difference between these. So I'm pretty okay with that as well. I do see the thinnest, like, you know, micro pixel disturbances in these lines, but it doesn't really matter. So let's go ahead and export this one. We'll put it in the Village textures. And I'm okay with this being the You know what? We shouldn't. Let's put this in here as flowers color. And in our foliage, designer graph. We'll go ahead and throw it in here. And the reason why is because I wef. We'll go ahead and throw it in here. And the reason why is because I want our outputs to share the same resolution. Uh, yeah, we'll put a hyphen there. Or an underscore there. Tea, flowers color, just in case as well, instead of having this subsurface mask, I would probably, I'm being a little indecisive. We'll keep the subsurface in there. I was wondering if we wanted to have a dynamic mask for this green stem, but it's probably unlikely we'll be changing the color that stem too much anyways. However, I am, okay. Taking the same mask and blending. That way, we can pick between let's take this into the opacity. We can pick between the original colors and Hue shifted one depending on this mask because I know I want to keep the same color. Let's take this into the opacity. We can pick up between the original colors and a hue shifted one depending on this mask because I know I want to keep the same color. So put this in here. I'll get the HSL node. We'll zoom in on here and we'll check out the node. And it's not going to work so much in there. So we'll have to live with that for now. That's why, you know, you should be careful with your colors, but it's not going to be at the end of the world in this situation. We can always go back into Photoshop and change it. So now we have four exports, and now is a good time to change all of them to 512. They don't need to be one K at all. In fact, we could push 256 and see how it looks. I understand that it's still outputting them at 2:56. So I'm going to check this out and see if we can change the size from the root. Let's try 512 and see if we can change the size from the root. Et's try 512. I'm just kind of previewing it how these look. Okay. And we're going to leave this at a 512 export. We do want to export it as its parent size. Should be detecting that. We have our outputs, textures, foliage, select, grass, tree, flowers and flower color. We're going to export these as SRGB, as well. Mm. Okay, maybe just the color map. It's fun deciding because we do want better resolution in our individual masks. So I'll go ahead and export, save, close, and thanks for dealing with that little hiccup with me, but now our flowers have color. Again, we can change them soon. So now we'll hop into blender and start modeling. I'll see you there. Hiccup with me, but now our flowers have color. Again, we can change them soon. So now we'll hop into blender and start modeling. I'll see you there. See you there. 22. 20 Small Foliage Modeling: So now that I'm in blender, we're going to go ahead and start on the foliage. I have ae project. I'm gonna go ahead and save it in village. Let's go projects, and we'll call it foliage. Now, before we get started into the whole tree box dilemma, we should go ahead and finish our grass and flowers first. So we'll go ahead and get started with the grass with a plane. We'll go into shading. Let's start with this basic material. I'm going to add an image texture, and I'll open this up and hunt for our textures. And let's get our grass card. Might be easier in the future to just grab them from the folder. And we can duplicate these in a little bit. So for this grass card, we could separate the color, set this to non color. And I'll just plug the red into the Alpha, it's already working. Like you said, we defined that within substance designer. I'm going to decrease the padding a little bit. And to me that looks a little bit better. So I'll go back to my layout, go to front view, and I'll rotate it towards us with RX. Let's try RX, something. Okay, it would be RX 90. I apologize for the little goof right there. I'll bring it up a meter. We don't need too much topology on this, but we can add some for sure. So I'll start with two loop cuts, and I'm going to turn on options in the tool panel and click correct face attributes. So we can move these vertices around without destroying the texture. I'm gonna start moving it around so it has a bit of a tighter curve or a tighter threshold around this grass mesh. So we're not wasting too much transparency. I'll just put a loop cut down here. Let's see if putting this forward looks good. We can even get away with just two loop cuts. So I'll merge those vertices, the ones we slid down. Now, I'm just trying to see if I could smooth this all out a little bit in different ways to make it look organic. Seeing how do the grass correctly, let's move this forward just in case, actually, create a duplicate in case we mess everything up. Who knows? I'm okay with its origin point. I'll bring it forward. I'm just going to duplicate a few of them. We're just looking to fill some volume. I don't even know if we need them to face the opposite direction because we're going to have so many grass cards that the random rotation of those might do it for us. So I'll even bring the center one here and here. I don't want it too symmetrical. And so now I want some random size, I'll go to individual origins. I'd rather not just do it procedurally. I kind of want to check out what looks good through my own eye. Maybe we have one extra large grass carp. We will see, we will see. We might not even need this one in the back. This is not an instant process. Not particularly against this. Check out the side view. I don't think I do want it to kind of radially expand across there. And I'm okay with this. I think we only need one grass card for this course. We can get rid of the duplicate. I will keep this in a group and call it grass group. Let's duplicate the group. Call this. Don't need to name it because we're gonna join it. Let's join it. And I paused for a moment so I could set up the keyboard recordings. You know, at first, it was just like I showed before Shift D to duplicate and then Control G to join. We can't call this grass final just in case we keep this collection. And what I'm going to do is apply the transforms with Control A, all transforms we did rotate it earlier. You know, I'll try not to get too geeky about this for now, but I did hop into Edit mode, and if you check these overlays, you'll see the vertex normals. What I'm going to do is select everything and press Alt L, and that's point to normal. So if I click anywhere, really, what I did was take it from zero, which is at its default to something really, really high on the Z axis and they'll point all the normals completely upwards. I think I want to even out this shape just a little bit, though, add one more. Again, you can always do whatever you need to at this. I want to find something that genuinely happy with. That's good. And maybe the more meshes we have within the actual static mesh, the less we need to dynamically spawn within the foliage editor, and that should be good news for us as well. Oops. I accidentally press I'll bring that down. So we'll call this our statics grass. Why don't we have a final collection? Let's just call it final, and we have our grass. So we'll hide everything, and now we're going to get started on the flowers. Pretty much straightaway. Looks like we need something selected in the scene. So I'll get this. We'll call it grass and blender. I'll just duplicate this and call it flowers. Let's see. With our textures we have, we have two flowers, and we'll get rid of the grass. So for flowers, I want to plug it into the base color and for the under. I'll just duplicate this and call it flowers. Let's see. With our textures we have, we have two flowers, and we'll get rid of the grass. So for flowers, I want to plug it into the base color and for the Oh, yeah, these are masks, and I will plug them into the color of here. That is correct, on the wrong model. So let's go ahead and make a new plane. And let's go to material view. We'll assign the flowers material. In our grass, let's go ahead and assign that back to grass. So we can turn off the vertex normal overlays, and I'm just going to cut these pieces out with Control R and transform attributes or correct face attributes and the knife tool if needed. So I'm putting in some loop cuts and on your keyboard to split a face. However, I have an add on called mesh machine, so I'm actually going to disable that. Disable this one, disable this one. Let's see. Yeah, why should split that face for us just in case we need that. So I'll press why for there. Why and why, why? Why, and why? Select everything and separate by loose parts. So they're all separate meshes now, and with correct face attributes on, I can play with these same vertices to my liking. And, you know, if we zoom in, we're suffering the consequences of Photoshop's fill tool. So off camera, I am going to just take my white paint brush and fix up these little alist edges. I don't think that's appropriate to, you know, waste their time showing you that in the course. But if you have something like that going on, watch out for Photoshop's fill tool. I don't appreciate that specific fill bucket at all, and I'm paying the price for it. So I'll go back to that probably a little after this video, you'll see the difference. But for now, we're just working on our grass and our flowers. Might need two. Do we rotate this around? This one might benefit from another edge loop. I think all of these will benefit from another edge loop. There we go. We're getting something where we're really not wasting too much space at all. See how the orange is doing. And we'll check out the yellow flower. And again, you don't have to do the individual petals and then build them together. Yeah, for some reason, they didn't give the feeling I was actually going for. I think these are a little bit more fun and friendly. You think we should keep it that way? Because our grass is already a little bit. You know, it's grass and our tree leaves or leaves, but we can add a little bit of variety through this. And also, originally, I had built these as clusters, but I think we're going to benefit more from having these as individual flowers. So we'll keep a version of the cards here. We'll just do a quick origin geometry. We'll make a new collection called flowers and another one called flower cards. But now we also want to group to where we're duplicating these and really building the shape out. So let's start with the purple flower. Again, I went with individual petals last time, so who knows how these will look? But I'm thinking we could just sort of raise them up thinking we could just sort of raise them up and then potentially duplicate them around here and there. When we point the normals upwards, this should look fairly interesting. And I'm already getting a silhouette. I enjoyed more than last time. But maybe we can press S and Shift Z so that they're not all overlapping each other or figuring out the style together. Yeah, so how about no overlap? And then we'll see what else is flipping out a little bit here. What we should do for each of these is poke the face. That's not going to work. So we need to get that middle vertex transparent mode will show you, and we need to put a triangle in each of these so that these vertices are bending correctly, are bending correctly. We don't want the engine to interpret the incorrect direction of these triangles. I was just this one left. It does well. Let's shade smooth. Now, if we need to, let's see. Yeah, they're all in a slightly weird spot, but it doesn't really matter. Let's go ahead and grab a cylinder, but we'll make it like you could pick between three sided, four sided, or six sided. I'm going to try out four sided for this one. So I'll delete the top and bottom. Definitely don't need those. And do my standard, like lifted oometer I'm going to press S and shift C. So if that's we're going to scale this object mode. S everything is looking. Where is this on the location? This is definitely a meter high. So yeah, let's keep bringing this down. I do a tenth of a meter as shifts, we want to find a new length. No, I'm just going to add some, let's add one loop cut. And in overlay mode, I'll scale this one down. Scale this a little, and let's bend it on both axises just a little bit. I'll press bevel. And we'll give it some fun loop cuts like that. It doesn't have to be this thick, so it's up to you how you want to approach these flowers. Let's unhide the purple. And now we got to really zoom in here. There we go. I think I am going to be a little bold and try to move these origin points. I'm not sure why it's grabbing this one, too, when I'm not even selecting it, but sure. I'm just gonna move these to their at least correct point. Sorry if that bores you. Okay, so now I'm gonna shave these a little bit on the ZXs. And now for this stem, instead of giving it a scene, I'm going to project from view. Let's check out UV Editing, and we'll check out the flowers texture. I know I wanted to go this way for the wind. So yeah, I'll clean up these little bit of edges off video, you know, fine tune that color. I highly suggest you do, too. I'm ashamed I didn't notice these at first, but yeah, these will not be the version that goes in the engine. Again, you got to re export into substance designer, but that's okay. You will survive that. Okay, but purple's looking pretty good. I'm gonna make sure we assign the material. Let's do flowers for this one. We'll shade everything smooth. And I'm going to duplicate this cylinder stem a couple times we are gonna have our other color flowers. However, I am ready to join these now, or, you know, we could keep it as a group, right? So I'm just going to make a quick collection called purple. And I'll duplicate it. I like to have my backups. Make sure everything's applied, and with Al to L, I'll point the normals upwards. We'll double check that it's working. And it is. So that works for me for the purple one. Move it here, hide that. Let's bring this stem. Now, we'll go ahead and play with this orange one. I don't mind duplicating it, bringing it over. I like last time, let's triangulate this first. And I'm going to hit that middle vertice and click on cursor to selected. I'll go to Object set origin and origin to three D cursor. That way, it is at that middle vertice. So if I select control I, it could lift up everything else. So I'll press Shade Smooth on that. Okay. Then I'll shave this and instead of that more complicated mix we did last time I got an easier idea. We'll duplicate it, bring it down, scale it up and rotate. Then we'll do that again. Scale it down on the Z, scale it up here, and then rotate it. Then we'll just shave it in general on the Z axis. That was a bit less painful at that time. Still going to give it. It's much a little bit of randomness. These are very simple flowers. We could have done an additional leaf. You could always do that, make one green and put some on there. But these are kind of going to be obscured at the same time by the grass. Okay. Maybe we'll scale it up on the Z axis a little bit. Interesting, interesting. So we'll put this in a collection. We'll call it orange. We'll duplicate that. And we'll join all these together based off the stem. Let's make sure these are hidden. Now we can apply all transforms, go to Edit mode, and point those normals upwards. That is flower number two. See, we'll hide the original collections. We'll call this SM flower A one, I guess the orange was our second one, so there are two final flowers ready to go, we can delete these empty collections. Let's just repeat that process. Not as much to commentate over. We'll bring it in if we can and bring it closer. Okay, let's check out yellow. Duplicate it first. Let's point that three D cursor to here. First will poke the face, and I'm combining those vertices with J. Then I'll click on that middle vertice, cursor to selected, and Oge to three D cursor. Shading it smooth, and let's place it. So I'm scaling it. Yeah, I'm scaling it in again with S Shift C. Let's put it in the correct spot. Let's repeat that same process. Scaling it down, out a little bit of rotation. Trying to guard that bottom one again, scale it. Oh. I'm just checking that out. Seems like we need a little more forgiveness on this angle. At least it's not so bad. So again, do collection and duplicate and join. I'm just going to call it fiber three. Oh, but let's not forget to point our normals, I'll tell and upwards. We have one more to do. Let's go ahead and duplicate one of these pink ones. Poke that inwards. Let's get that middle vertice Shift S. Oops, I drag down super fast. Cursor to selected, though. Origin a three dcursor. Not press command I to grab the rest, bring it in. And let's shade it smooth. Oops. Let's find that correct space. In the same process. Okay. A pink collection. We joined it all together. And we point those normals up. As in flour. Oh, four. We'll just call this cards. And we have our final collection still. So, let's see. That means this grass might be 2 meters tall. Yeah, almost, right? So we don't want that. We want something around here. I'm applying all those transforms. I'll hide the cards. I'll just hide that collection 'cause now we have our final flowers, too. I'll move the grass here for now. So that's really cool. We have our grass and flowers models. Next, we are going to hop into my add on tree box to look into how we're going to make fluffy bushes and foliage. I've definitely put a lot of research and time into making sure that we're able to get foliage we're happy with for the value of the product, and it's also really fun to learn at the same time. It's very flexible for pretty much any game engine export as long as we rebuild our shaders. And so I'm really excited to be showing you how to do that, as well. Really hope you enjoy learning how to make trees with me. With this add on, it's still pretty new, but I've updated it a lot recently. It's at least really, really ready for the fight for this course. So good job on these plants. We're going to work on the tree box stuff within the same file. And in the next video, I'll show you the same file. And in the next video, I'll show you what the installation process is like if you've purchased it on ArtStation or Blender Hive, I'll remind you in the next video, too. But remember, the code is Fast Track 25. So, see you in the next video. Good job on these guys. Loving how the shadows came out on these flowers. Painter was the way to go. 23. 21 Modeling With Treebox: So I'm still in blender, and welcome to the tree modeling episode. So the main hero of this would be the Tree Box Bundle. And again, this is an add on I've worked really hard on. I am grateful for all the support and feedback that I've gotten on it, and I've worked on it much, much more since release to bring us better controls, easier use, and the tools we need to take this into Unreal Engine. I'm very proud of its ease of use, too. So again, I'll type it in, like, the video editor, but the code is Fast Track 25, same with paint box two. And after you download it, you should get a folder that looks something like this, like tree Box unzip me. I'm going to go ahead and extract it. And if I open it, we'll check out what's in here. So we have some extras. We don't need to worry too much about that, but if you want to use the same textures I used to make the add on, they are in this extra textures folder, so you can use those in real engine if you want to, but in this case, we've made our own textures, and this would be the add on. So if you check the read me, it will tell you to just find that treebox dot ZIP and so we're going to install that into Blender, and we're going to link it to the library. It's a little weird, but it's pretty easy to do. So let's go ahead and press File or edit preferences. Let's go to add ons. I'm going to install from disk and I'll go to our desktop, and let's find that add on. There we go. Tree Box add on looks ready to go. And it should be on our end panel as well now. This is the basic tree box. The P one comes with an extra pine generator and some IV tools, and I do hope to expand both models, which I have in these updates, and most if not all the love goes into the actual tree and canopy generator. So now you have that add on installed either through the preferences or through here, we're going to link the library. So same in that folder, I'll double click this and just click Accept. Tree Box is pretty ready to go. I'm just going to move these really quick. And we'll press to open and close this panel. Let's hope this works, and I'll click Create Tree. Totally worked. If our export scale is a little too intense for us, we're going to go into the actual tree designer to change its parameters. By going into the modifiers, one of the first options we have is the transform scale, and we can make this smaller depending on our needs. Let's see how tall this is in the item menu. It's around 7.6. So if this were the height of a person, we're going to bring this downwards. We could bring it to 0.05. This is because we're taking game engine measurements into consideration. I'll play with the scale a little bit. So I'm also going to bring up the concept art again. And if you'll notice, we don't really have any regular trees. So this first tree, which I want to be pretty regular, just to introduce you to the tools in this addon, we could put them in the back or sink them lower into the ground because it will have some complex fluffiness that we can use to populate our scene. And so what I'm aiming for is one big ish regular tree, one thin regular tree, which I'm interpreting as these ones back here, and that regular tree could be used back here as well. And I also want two very small trees, and that would be considered the short trees that were populating with these more complex canopies down at the ground. So that's four trees total. And then I also want two bushes. And so those would be populated somewhere around here. And instead of using the actual tree generator, we use just the canopy generator to get these shapes. Because in the newest update, I've also created um, a canopy to mesh button, which is great to create bushes. So we'll take one more look at this. Again, this is provided in your resource file. And again, I'm looking for four trees and two bushes. Hopefully, this won't be too difficult. It would definitely take us a lot longer doing it manually. So let's see the power of this add on. So looking at this first tree, and this includes a preset material that we're also going to we're not going to be translating this into Unreal Engine. We're going to make our own Unreal engine based shader, so don't worry too much about the included material right now. However, I know that we're not going to want too much feature on the trunk itself. So I'm going to look for the trunk radius near the top. I'm going to make that thinner, and I'm also going to take the trunk length, if I can find it or trunk height, whichever one it is called. I've recently added some new features, and we're going to drag this down. Now, as you can see, it's made the branches a little crazy, as of right now, I'm pretty okay with that, but we can play with the start and end range to start to get branches that agree with us a little bit better. Already, not so bad. We can play with the shape of these primary branches by playing with the flare and the radius, as well as the thickness. However, we know as well that we're going to be covering most of this with canopies. But I think with tree box, there's no reason why you shouldn't be able to reach the same fidelity that we're reaching with everything else. I think it's important to include the branches and show how those forms grow. And as well, this is pretty darn optimized for game engines, as you can tell, you can also change the count and the resolution at both the sides for the curves. And the sides themselves. So even so these could be at four, and these could be at six. And because we know that most of this will be covered, it's still going to look pretty good with its smooth shading. Definitely wasn't an easy endeavor creating this. I'm so proud of this. It's my little tree child, and hopefully you guys learn to enjoy it, too. Hopefully, the new update treats you a little bit easier. So we can play with the access rotation. And before we go much farther, I'm sure you want to know how we get leaves on here. So I'm going to click on the button, create Canopy. It's going to load the shader for a moment. And we get this crazy looking bush. If I click it, we get a whole new set of options. If I drag this to the side, it doesn't really matter. It will spawn on this tree. So if I were to give a little introduction to the canopy generator, we can spawn this shape that we're looking at all over this tree, or we could just set it to the much simpler volume scatter and do the complex type scattering on the tree instead. For this particular style, I think it might serve us better to pick the default scatter. And you've taken if you've seen one of the alternative stylized tree shaders before, you'll know that you can also use this style in which it is just a solid UV map to those quads, and these can billboard towards the camera as well. But we want to go a little bit more traditional with the default scatter. There was as much love put into this guy as there was in this, so they worked fantastically together. Know we're we're going to want to start with smaller leaves. And Unreal Engine is pretty powerful. It's not like we're going to be placing 1 million trees. So with that in mind, I do want some pretty dense cards. We can change the scale, and as you can see, they're disappearing a little bit, and that's because the density is low, but we could start boosting that up to get a more detailed small canopy. Recently, the normals have been updated so that they can each have their own very smooth normal, or you can use it from the source itself or the tree, and it gets crazier and crazier. So we'll play with these values a little bit. We can always change the seed. And we can even make this denser with the triple scatter. If we do enjoy that, that's great. Hmm. Yeah, I'm okay keeping that for now. We can get quite a bit of detail into these leaves through that. We'll make sure these are at a more similar scale right here. I think this is where the density is going to serve us best around 15. And we have Aligned rotation to canopy on right now, and I do prefer it that way. In a future update, I want to introduce a type of Z axis offset so that when you click Aligned rotation to canopy, you could start pushing potentially curved leaves outwards, and you're going to get very fortnight style bushes. But that is a future update that I'll still be working on. So for now we're going to work in this more Genchenimpact style, and even so this can be pretty hard to achieve by default terms. So we have this. I'll play with the canopy scale one more time. And I just don't want this to be too dissimilar. Whiter could be okay. But I also don't want that to demand too much attention. Okay. So with this tree, we can scroll all the way down to the leaf section. And by default, it's leaves inactive so that we don't do anything crazy. But with leaves active on, we do have the preferred default scatter mode on, and maybe, you know, future tutorial on my channel, I'll show off the volume scatter mode more. But we have a full tree, which means we can link a collection. That means for this canopy generator, I'm going to want to link a collection to it. So I'll make a new collection and just call it canopy. We'll just throw it in. Let's go back to the tree. And I'm going to select the canopy collection. And we can see it, start to go wild already. So the canopy is pretty dense by default, and we don't know if we want these to be this dense. However, I know if we bring these inwards, if we scroll down back to the leave section, first, we'll change the seed. See if these change places differently, and they don't, and that's because the start and end range are in pretty similar spots. I should probably update this to make sure one of these are at zero. But, luckily, you're seeing the solution to that live. I'll push these out more. And these scale tools are going to help us a lot. So for Mint and Max, I'm just going to boost these up. And we're already getting some very, very cool complexity through this. If we check out the solid view, we'll notice that these don't have smooth normals. However, when we click Treetomsh later, it will automatically do the UV mapping process and the smooth normals process for us. So right now I'm paying more attention to the actual scattering of these tree leaves. And this can have its own distortion in it as well, and the seed will give us a lot. We can even go back to the trunk if we want and increase that height again. It's orbiting a little strangely. I'm not sure if there's some ghost object in my scene. It's probably the export scale not being applied yet, and so I might click one for now, orbit around it correctly. So orbiting around it easier. I'm giving it the kind of visual test. So in the canopy generator, if I move it out. I'm going to decrease the density. First play with that. Then back in the tree generator, I'll play with the start and end ranges all the way down at the leaf section. It looks like we'll have to change the seed for this guy, give it a slightly higher density. I want this to be evenly proportioned. And it's up to the density to make sure that we're not going too far out of our range in this area and then playing with the seed because these are just procedural scatters at the end of the day. Go back to the tree. Let's get that length one more time. I think I do want the optional choice to have some trunk data in here. That way, we can always just sink it into the ground. We can also change the primary branch seed. I already felt like we got some luck at zero, so I'm going to leave it alone. You could change the branch count. And I think this gives us a nice silhouette on all the angles. So I'm going down to the leaf section to see if I want to change anything else. Can even check out the random rotation. Go to the canopy generator, just chest out, test out the double. And then one more time, see what random rotation and base rotation is going to work best. Okay. Sometimes the tertiary can push out shapes a little bit more and same with the secondary length. You always want to check at it from multiple sides. I think I'm happiest with this. This is not the final material we're going to use either. This is just for look development purposes, right? I'll duplicate this tree. And, we'll keep one duplicate for now, and I'm going to click Tritamsh for this one. So I went back before clicking TritaMsh really quick, and I'm going to check out the volume radius. That is what determines the final normal output for us. So I'm checking out what would be the smoothest. And I like that little mix between there and there. So now I'm ready to click Tree to Msh and that's a pretty important secret that I should probably announce in a future video of mine, but this tree is looking a lot better now. So that is one of our final trees. We can make another version. So let's duplicate it and just bring it in. For this one, I just want a different variation of pretty much the same thing. It can be a little tricky to find the correct seed. We can change the length of any of these branches. And I think some of these primary rotation features can help us get a bit of a more lively shape. Changing random rotation on this. Is it different from this one? It is. It is. It even has a nice kind of interesting flat side to it with a bulbict if we need. I'm okay with this one. So these are not our regular trees. We're working on our kind of bushy canopy trees first that I mentioned will be somewhere around this house, and we'll work on, like, a regular tree and a tall tree next. We're almost done with this one. So I'm going to check out that volume radius again. 0.03 looks pretty good with that. You can change the amount. And I can always play with other rotation values, too. Interesting. Okay, I'm gonna keep this one. I'm gonna click Trita Msh. And once again, in one click, we have it ready for game engines. We'll take another duplicate. And for this one, I want to increase the trunk length. I'm just checking out the seed. We could draw the trunk, too, if we want. I can go into Edit Mode after clicking on Draw Trunk and delete these vertices. And if I go to the draw curve mode, we can get our own shape that we enjoy. So change the primary, count. Actually, maybe the seed will serve us better. That one has a lot of different placements, so maybe increasing the count would be interesting. We might need to increase the start range. And if the leaves were off, we could see that we are bending the branches with these ones. The tilt is an alternative rotation. I I want it to tilt upwards, give it some strength. And we'll get the rotation to something we enjoy. It gives a good shape at the front, and it gives an okay shape at the sides. We could keep playing with this a little bit or see if the secondary counts and seeds can do anything for us. I don't like it when they extrude outwards and then taper alone too much. Might be a case where the random rotation is getting a little extreme. Instead of changing the secondary seat, I'm gonna change the primary seed. And I'm pretty happy with this silhouette, I think, you know, I always get picky. I'll stick with this one. I am happy with it. You know, we don't necessarily need this longer trunk ling, but just in case we do, it's always nice to have. So we're not changing too many settings. I'm scrolling down to the leaves, checking the volume radius. 0.02 looks good. I'll get a longer range for the leaves out here. I'm just playing with different values. See what looks nice and fun. This isn't too difficult to use. Let's see if the length the tertiary does anything for us. It does give us control. We could change the seat. I just want to fill out this side a little bit. Do you mean I might need to change the leaf seed. There we go. I'm okay with that. So that's our nice, very, very regular tree, and I'll click tree to mesh. Maybe I'll duplicate this one, too. It's nice and fancy. That's one, two, three. Didn't take us too long. And this add on is definitely more suited to this specific style. However, I do hope to expand upon that more and more in the future. And there's a lot of other tricks you can do. You can assign your own leaf cards. You don't have to use the canopy generator. And in fact, we're still not using the leaf texture we made. Well, we could use these ones if we want, but we're going to try to use the ones we made in engine. Let's try to duplicate this one, and it would be pretty similar. It is tall. I know the trunk is being a little weird, so I'm going to undo draw trunk. And I want to bring these primary branches downwards and then I'll take the rotation and see if we can get them a little more a little more tapered towards the center. Not bad. I'm just gonna play with the rotation until I find something we're happy with. Maybe at primary size at the high, we can bring it in. Same with these. Actually, yeah, they're cool when they're longer at the bottom, but not too much. I'm just trying to find a way we're gonna get the shape we're happiest with. The leaf scale high might do something for us. We can always change the seed. I'm gonna lift up the end range a little bit, change the scale. We'll check out the rotation one more time. It is interesting, for sure, for sure, but maybe another seed can give us something just as cool. I really like that. It gives me exactly what I want kind of from both sides, actually, too. Let's find out what that leaf radius can do for us. Let's not make it too big. We're looking for that smooth transition. Looking good. I'm going to put these procedural trees in a new folder called Procedural. I'll just hide those. And I'm going to click TritaMsh on this one. Move it over here. Now I'm going to duplicate the cantaby generator and, like, move it out of this collection immediately cause if it spawns both of these, we're screwed. We got it out safely. That was some assassins Crete stuff. Very good job. So the reason why I want a new canopy generator is because I want to create two bushes, and we don't necessarily need the entire tree generator for that. We just need the canopy generator. I'm gonna hide these procedural trees just focus a little bit more on this. So I can turn on model canopy mode, and now we get to actually choose the shape of our bush. So as usual, I'm gonna drag it up in meter. I'll scale it down and apply that transform. So you want these trees out of here. And so now we can just do a very simple, low poly shape. What would the world's lowest poly Bush look like? And you can create, you know, entire complex models and then attach that attach the canopy generator to that so you could spawn these nice paint ofly leaves all over it. I'm also planning on including an option so that they don't spawn from the center of the grid. If you use custom leave objects, I want them to spawn from those origins, 'cause right now they can only spawn grids, like little planes, and I want to be able to get custom objects in there. But as of right now, you can't put custom objects on the tree generator itself. So, you know, a lot of work to do, a lot of fun to be had. We'll see if playing with the density helps me out here. Then we can get some more randomness in the minimax. I want a lot more random rotation. I think this was a feature in development. I apologize. Yeah, exactly that Z offset is definitely something I'm working to achieve still. Let me just change the seed. Yeah, we can even change the proportions of these planes so that it adds a little more variety. Part of the foliage shader is changing the perpendicular values of these. And then, although it's not part of this generator, here, I'll leave this one as a backup. What I'm going to do is duplicate this bush. First, I think I want it a little bit wider. And if I apply it with canopy to mesh, I can then go into here with a randomized transform. And alternatively, this is a little bit dangerous. Let me move this into a new collection called Bush. And if I separate this by loose parts and go into objects of origin to geometry, I can then randomize this type of transform, as well, and we're able to now change up these leaf cards even more. That's something I'll have to introduce automatically in the add on. But I do know what type of features I want to automate within Python. So we are on the right track. It didn't destroy our lives, so I'm going to click on Control J for this and Control A for applle transforms. Actually gonna lift it up a little. And that's a bush. That is one of our bushes. So if I'm in a top down view, where do we want to move it? Okay, yeah, that's the right view. This is our original canopy generator that we're using for the trees. So if need be, let's make our trees collection, and we could put canopy in procedural and put that in the trees. So this is our new one. And we don't have to make this much different at all. If anything, maybe you can just make this wide. We could be fancy and do different types of minimax scales. Rotation seed. So once I go apply it as a mesh, let me do that same thing where I'll put it in a new collection, and I'll separate by loose parts and randomized transform. Oh, we'll have to do let's see. Don't flip out on me. You get all these little planes. Gonna go to object mode. Let's do object set origin origin to geometry, and that will let us randomize the transform. Again, you can automate a lot in blender, so I can't wait to include that as part of the canopy generator as well, but at least I'm teaching you how to get down and dirty and how to improve on specific workflows. So I'm already okay with this. You know, you can make them denser. You can make them less dense. I'm just here to show you the tools you need, right? So I'll click I'll Control J for this, and it is not in the center, so I'm going to do Control A. Get all those transforms. I'm going to take both of these. Now I'm actually thinking about the scale, so we don't need them to be 2 meters. We can have them be a little less than a meter, maybe even less. So I just press Control A for combining all transforms. I'm going to press Alt H and get our trees. Check it out their location. I'm going to press Alt G to bring everything back to the center, and I'm going to scale them down. Let's see what our bushes are doing. So we know that, again, 2 meters is the size of a person. So I think I'll have these defaults around three to 4 meters. Whoops. No press control A for getting all the transforms. So let's name these SM. Let's actually see which ones these are. We'll be a bit picky. I'll have the regular tree B tree. And I'll have the tall tree B tree two. I'll have this bigger canopy tree as tree three. And this last one is tree four. Last but not least. So please remember you can be less fussy with this. You can be more fussy with this. I hope you have a little fun trying to see how fast we can create some awesome trees for our scene. So I really appreciate the support. I appreciate learning with me. These are going to look super hot fire and unreal engine, once we get our own custom foliage shader on these, these are meant for, you know, game development. So their wireframes are ready. If we go to the UV Editing, we don't have to worry about that either. We can keep leaving the jungle. Their normals are expanding outwards. You could, if you want to, um, pack these UV maps, and there is, you know, a couple of glitches when Oh, actually, no, these are just the thin tertiary branches. As you can see, they do overlap. That's why I mentioned you could always pack the islands if need be, but it and you could turn off that rotation. It all depends on what UV mapping purposes you need. I'm okay with these being overlapped in this case, and the main featurette is about the canopy leaves. So let's go back to front view. We have a SM Bush 01. And where did our other Bush go? SM Bush 02. Delete those old ones. We can just put these in final, hide the trees. We can apply all the transforms, really. I think all these normal ZV maps. I think they're all good to go. So I'll press A G on these. And this is our entire foliage collection. Like the rocks, we're not going to worry about FBX exporting just yet. We're going to have a big video just, you know, going through the grind and importing everything and setting everything up because then we'll have all of our lego pieces done. But this is what you need. Nothing should broken when you import it. I promise you, we were talking about what scale you should be looking at, how easy it is to install the add on. And 1,000 times over, I'm so, so grateful for the support. I hope you can see how this can benefit your blender foliage journey, and there's a lot more to come with it. Thank you for supporting me as an artist and Gadora. So let us continue on to the village modeling. It is going to be tough, and who knows how long it'll take, but it'll be hopefully a lot of fun. And we've already worked really hard on the substance designer materials, so you've earned the right to model the village. It's going to be kind of, again, low poly to mid Poly. It'll be easy. It'll be fun. So I'll see you in a new blender file in a minute. Great job. See you there. Look Look at all these trees. 24. 22 Village Modeling Introduction: Here I am back in our blockout file from way earlier in the course. And I'm preparing us for another battle of attrition. I think this course comes in difficulty spikes, much like darksls, but we've gotten all the other Lego pieces done, so we don't have to worry about the more abstract pieces of art. We're going to be making all of these assets with the same system, which is just assigning our tiling textures to some basic mid poly assets. And so it's not going to be as difficult as it looks, but it definitely looks daunting. I can give you that. So what I'm going to do is press Control Shift S, and I'm going to save this as our village because we are working with something brand new now. I think it's time for us to close the camera and this view. We are in layout mode. I am sure we kept the original blockout. I'm going to go ahead and delete the landscape. We don't really need that. And I'll go ahead and delete these rocks, too. They could make for good reference. So I guess we can No, no, they're gone. Sorry cubes. We have our scale here. We'll call this a guy. I'll move him out here. And so what we're looking to do is I'm going to take our reference. Whatever reference you have out, I want you to take a really, really strong look at it while we're modeling. We've already come so far by creating the basic shapes. And now, you know, I'll talk us through some of the process, but we're just trying to get a little bit closer to this. We're just replicating it in a low poly style, and then we'll bevel these edges as we continue onwards. And I'll show you a little bit about the UV mapping process as well. So, like I discussed earlier in the course, I do want you to install both UV squares, which is from that GitHub link and then Texel density checker, which is in the extensions folder. And after you have that done, we can go ahead and start with this Beast of a blackout. So what we're going to do is the major elements that I know I want to assign as one asset within Unreal Engine, we can go ahead and join those pieces together and give them an asset name. Or, actually, we don't even have to give them an asset name right now. I'm deciding that I want this piece of the scaffolding to be one piece to reference on, actually, maybe not the rails, maybe just the floor panels for this. See if we can play with these vertical edges. And let's see. Looks like we should go back and maybe we'll I guess we should combine these two together. I'll combine this with the bottom piece. Maybe we don't need to add the rails for now to this one. Join those together. These rails look good, but maybe I want to take out these floor pieces. Make those separate objects. We're just testing all this out. That's okay, looking floor. I'll keep this one with this one. Maybe we don't need to add the rails for now to this one. Join those together. These rails look good, but maybe I want to take out these floor pieces. Make those separate objects. We're just testing all this out. That's okay, looking floor. I'll keep this one. With this one. We have a floor panel. This is one house, two houses. I don't mind combining these objects to this scaffolding with this house. That way we know which one it is. We'll combine our little back house. Well, this is fine for now. The head cannon. These all connect with each other. And in local perhaps we can it looks like we applied the rotation, so's gonna bring that up. I it'll allow me. Okay. I'll have to live with that. We'll make this one object. And we are not gonna join these. We're not gonna join. That's gonna be one of the duplicate objects anyways. We know we took care of this and we have a beam and a wall. So fibrous alt H now. Now we know that these beams could most definitely be part of the bottom scaffolding, and I'll raise them up. I know I want a size like that. So I'll combine it. We know what the ground level is, as well. So far, you know, looking at our original blackout, I'm still okay with this perspective, and I'll start basing things off of this. I do want to decide the final roof, sorry, not roof, the fence width, they're all a little bit different. I'm a fan of grids. So so far, this looks like our shining pupil. We'll be courteous and join the rest of these together because we know we're just going to be duplicating one or two across. So hide that. I think everything is in an appropriate space. Let's just do one more hiding test and find out. Let's hide this floor first. We have an extra little guy from our blockout. We can delete him. I know we didn't make the wheel support in this one. Maybe we should have done that one. Maybe we should have done that before, but I'm sure we could figure it out as we model along. Okay. I guess I'll combine this two and just like we can call those the extra later. Okay, and that is everything. So if I unhide it, we know at least where everything is. If I duplicate it, we could bring everything back to the center so that we have an easier Oh, we might have to do that manually because it would take us moving some of these block points, and it might be easier to do it one at a time. So we might go object by object with that. But what I was going to say before I end this part is that, um, we are tiling textures that we made in designer across our low poly objects. I like to work on a grid system, so that's why we're recreating these so that we can have really nice game assets that you can use for future purposes. For this, that you can use for future purposes. For this scene, you know, I'm following the concepts, so they're not going to be extremely modular, but at least if they're attached to a grid, we'll have an easier time assigning them an engine, and it's a really good habit to have. Speaking of which game studios, I am open to work. I promise I always try to know what I'm doing. So we'll get started on the modeling process. And again, to continue, once we bevel the edges, they're going to blend really nicely with our tiling materials. And instead of fitting them in the zero to one UV space, we're going to be using the textil density checker to make sure that these just tile appropriately across our final models. So we've come far and we're going to go farther. So I'll see you in just a minute. So before we actually get started on the modeling process, there is one more thing we should do. We should go into the shading tab and set up our materials because it's just a good practice when you're working with tiling materials, to see how they'll operate on your mesh. Practice, when you're working with tiling materials, to see how they'll operate on your mesh. So I'm going to go ahead and I've got to get a sphere. Let's shade it smooth and I'll bring it out. Looks like we'll have to create our first material. And so I'm going to go into the textures folder of all these materials we made, and I know I want metal and wood and the two walls and the roof and stone. So that's six materials. So I'll set up the first material live, and then I'll probably speed it up a little bit because we're just doing the same repetitive thing a couple times. Now, I think Blender is going to appreciate the base color more than it is the albedo, but I think unreal will want the albedo. So I'll get base color, normal OpenGL, and I'm going to choose the ORM for this. Now, I'm going to set this to non color and same with the ORM. We'll get a separate XYZ for this one. We'll get a separate XYZ for this one, and a separate color for this one. It's just the way it goes. So again, for that, oh, we actually don't need to invert this at all because we were smart enough to do the OpenGL. That was just silly enough to add a node for it. Let's take the color and just plug it into the normal. For the metal, again, it's AO roughness metal. So if we want to be kind and rewind for a second, let's get the mixed color, mix it in with here. Redwood going here. We'll set it to multiply. Oh, so I took a pause and tried to reason why it was panicking at me, and I'm very, very silly tonight, and want us to get the normal map strength in between there. This should reflect the information better. I want to double check that this blue is Um, pretty white. So I'm checking that out, and it is. It is. So I'm checking that out, and it is. It is. I'm just double checking, considering the lighting conditions. It is a bit of a rougher metal, too, and again, we'll tint that in the shader. So these are little things that you might want to pay attention to per material, but um, I'll call this metal. So we have an SRGB color, two non colors for the ORM, and the normal. The normal does need its normal map, almost flipped out not knowing what was going on. And we know we need to split up our mask for the ORM, and there's nothing wrong with multiplying it by the ambient occlusion a little bit. So that is a standard PBR shader for blender, and I'm going to repeat that five more times because I want to preview five more materials. So forgive my mouse, if it's a little messier, it's going to be the exact same process, sped up a little bit. So I'll see you after all these spheres are set up. Increment snap. Sometimes I already have it in the right spot, so I could just move it and hold control to snap it in the right place. My way of my approach to modeling this is a little bit weird, as in even though these cubes are super basic, I think I still want to rebuild them and just and check double check to make sure that everything is snapping to the grid. I'm a bigger fan of modular pieces, especially for architectural assets. And so I'll just go ahead by starting with a new cube. I'm dragging it up. And with the X ray toggle on, and these days, if you go to Object and back to Edit, it turns off, so I'm just always clicking around here. I'm going to bring these and match the same proportions. Even if these ones were already on the grid, they might have been. I just want to make sure I'm making the assets the way I please, which is pretty modular and pretty snap to the grid, at least in the beginning stage to the grid, at least in the beginning stage. So I'm okay with the pivot point being here for this fence asset. I'm actually going to get my front view, get the top, and I'll start moving these because we have a duplicate blockout with things in the correct place anyways. Okay. I'll even Let's see if we want to make a new collection. I'll call it modeling. We have our guy. We have our spheres. I'll put this in a collection called materials. And what I'll do is when we finish an asset for the blockout, I'll just call it, um, lock out done. So we're just going to start shaving down this asset list with some very simple low poly modeling, beveling, and UV mapping. So I'll definitely go slow the first time, and we'll just be repeating that process a bunch of times. I probably won't time lapse this as in speed this up, but there might be a point where I announce that there's not too much to narrate or commentate on for the rest of the modeling process because these houses would share a very similar workflow. And you'll just see me push and pull polygons around, pressing UV Nwap and beveling that. But we will go through the couple of first ones together. So I'll press TH, make sure that the original blockout is not being hidden, and I'm zooming in. So I'm just going to duplicate this original plan. Or maybe what we should do is give a little attention to how I want each model to look. So the stages would be you get your base low poly shape. And if you weren't going mid poly, you can UV unwrap this starting from here. What that would look like is I want each plan here. What that would look like is I want each plank to be one UV island so we can see the cap lifting off right there and then maybe one seem in the middle. Sort of like a cylindrical UV Nwrap except we're not getting these back edges. If I go into UV Editing mode, I can press to unwrap and we'll see that it is one island. And so for the low poly style, that's perfectly fine. But the issue, is that what I want to do is add a bevel to each one of these because we'll get some nice chamfer topology on that without adding too many edges. But if I apply it, we'll see that it splits up the UV islands. I'm not sure if that works the same way in Maya or Cinema four D, but in blender, we're going to have to bevel and then UV unwrap these. And I'll do this again in a moment. Or actually we'll keep it from here, right? So we've modeled our low poly object. We've added our bevel modifier, and we've modeled our low poly object. We've added our bevel modifier. And once you have the determined thickness that you want, we could even zoom out to determine if we want a thicker bevel. It's always good to test the distance. And you can push it a little farther for stylized objects. I'll keep it at shade flat for just a moment, or maybe we should try Auto smooth because we'll see. We'll see. I'm not sure what shading model is best for the modifier we're going to add next, but we're going to add a weighted normal. Let's do our due diligence and double check what looks best. If we shade it flat, and we shade it smooth, it does pretty much give us the same results. So to be nice and double check, we'll click Shade Smooth, not auto smooth for this weighted normals, which seems to break the output. But the order would be a bevel, we'll even shade it flat, and then a weighted normals. And that way, those tough chamfered and then a weighted normals. And that way, those tough chamfered edges are being blended together by the vertex normals. And this is a very popular method of modeling environments to a faster degree, especially for something that doesn't have as much organic attention to it, such as these nice painterly buildings. So the topology for this wood plank is already okay. I'm going to add a few most likely near the end, I will be adding these extra control loops. That way we know how we want to distribute our vertex paint while we're painting in unreal. But for the sake of managing our topology, I'll save that for a later part in the modeling process. So if I go to material mode, we'll give this a minute to load, and we'll preview the material I want on here. I'll click on Wood. And so we could see, once again, that that bevel is now splitting up the seams in a way that doesn't really benefit our model, at least in blender. So even though we selected our seams, again, that same simple top down and then vertical slice, let me unwrap it again. Creates this model, and we want to kind of reflect that in the bevelled version. So if I apply it now and I'm pressing Control A to apply both of these, I'll turn on my screen recording my keyboard recordings in just a moment. But we can see that these UV islands are split up. And so I'm going to press Control E and clear these seams, and I'll go ahead and turn on my keyboard recording, and we'll go ahead and UV unwrap this the correct way. So with our bevelled version of that cube, I'm going to go ahead and UV unwrap this. It's gonna be the same principles as the previous one. You'd even cut into these. So I only need to grab one vertical edge. And that's why I didn't want to grab that's why I didn't want to add extra control loops earlier because it's easier to Uvnwrap these with a little bit of less topology. So let's try out this Uvnwrap. And that's pretty good. That is pretty good. For Sake's sake, we can also test out the bevel when it reaches around the entire bottom cap and by clearing just those seams. Maybe we'll even try a different vertical position. We could try conformal. Okay, so a vertical edge a little bit of way to split the difference, and then probably leaving these back bevels alone when trying to seam these caps, along with U, and then Uv nap conformal creates just a really, really nice UV map for these planks. So again, I'll go into material mode, and that is mapping a lot better. We still have, the seam at the top and bottom, but we're pretty much looking for our vertical orientation, especially for it to follow along. And so if I click N in the UV mapping editor with Texel density checker, again, that's in preferences like extensions, Texel density checker. We know that our texture size is around two K, and then what we're going to do is test out what size looks best for these wood materials. You just tested out 5.12 pixels per meter. Per meter, per centimeter. We can try ten, and we can try 2048. So it depends what amount of detail you want in your wood planks. I think I'm going to go somewhere around the middle to a 1024, so that's 10.24 pixels per centimeter. And that's a pretty good preset, and it's deciding what size our UV maps take across these tiny textures, use it doesn't have to be in this space. It could be around here. It could be let's duplicate this just for testing sake. Oops. It could be a really large object. And if we were to unwrap this again and then select our textil density, it's totally okay that it reaches outside the zero to one space. It is still the same size resolution as this, and that's how you're getting your different sized assets while still maintaining that same resolution. That had bugged the hell out of me when I was a beginner, so I hope I explained that correctly. So that is one successful wood plank. Let's make sure we unhide everything, go to our front view. And luckily, we can actually duplicate this wood plank. I just duplicated it with Shift, and I'm going to rotate it. I'll place it where I think looks best. We'll go into Edit mode, and if I press on N in the end panel, make a little more room here, I can go to tool options and correct face attributes. And that just means that when I move some vertices around, the UV map will move with it, so I'll show you. If I move it on and I'm very sick of local space here, if I move it on the X axis and Global, you can see that our UV map resolution is still maintained correctly. So for this asset, I know I want it to be 2 meters wide, and I'm not sure if I want the fence to split the difference down the middle of this or if we should push it forward. I'm a pretty big fan of grids, so going to be a little weird and push this all to the side. And we can even keep correct face attributes on because we're just picking a different spot in that UV map. So we'll have this end where this one would begin. So yeah, this reaches down that two meter line, so we'll just end it at 2 meters. For this one, we can scale it down without the X axis. So selecting everything S shift X, and I'm making it thinner. And I don't mind making this one thinner, too. I just like to start off on a grid based system, so I know what proportions I'm working with S shift X. Hmm. Well, for this one, it's still important that I want it to end right here at this two meter mark. So this one might benefit from a bit of manual attention, turning on the X ray overlay. And see with absolute increment Snap on, it kind of busted up the distance that it travels, so I'm turning that off here. We're just seeing if we like those proportions. I'll hide the blockout. So it looks like it's ending at the 1.6, but it'll have it end at 1.5. I'll bring in our plank. I still want it to end at the two meter mark. We might have to it looks like we had absolute increment snap on, so we're going to have to do this a little bit manually, and that is okay. And we can fix it by turning increment snap back on and then just moving these forward. Let's see if it matches that same bevel distance. I'll duplicate this and bring one down, and we'll unhide this. You know, we're not being too picky, but we are going to move this UV map around. I'm going to re unwrap it. See, now sometimes when you move the entire model with correct face attributes, it can sort of mess up the original model. We'll give it a double check. It's very easy to unwrap these simple planks. And so now I'm just going to move the actual UV map itself. I'll get the three of these and set their textil density to 10.24. I'll just move them around. So that is one plank asset, and I'll end the video here because I wanted to take the explanation of, you know, the UVs, the transform attributes, the bevel, the weighted normals, and the modeling and U V on wrapping process in general, a bit slower in this video. So the next couple of videos will just be us trying to take down this Beast of a Village Live, and, you know, I might ramble, and we'll figure that part out later. Good job getting the process started. I'll see you in the next one to take the explanation of, you know, the UVs, the transform attributes, the bevel, the weighted normals, and the modeling and UV on wrapping process, in general, a bit slower in this video. So the next couple of videos will just be us trying to take down this Beast of a village live, and, you know, I might ramble, we'll figure that part out later. Look good job, getting the process started. I'll see in the next one. Process started. I'll see you in the next one. 25. 23 Village Modeling Part 01: Okay, so I'm not going to worry about naming every one of these planks right now. I'm just making sure they're in the right collection. So I'm going to hide that for now. You know what? Change my mind. Let's duplicate this because this makes for a really good example of just what the master wood beam would look like, right? We don't need to do this single process every single time. We could just start duplicating planks around, and we can change their UV maps very easily by moving them around. They're still respecting the same textil density, especially when correct face attributes is still on. So we'll keep this as our example mesh, but we know that this is our finished one, just for fun. I don't know how brave I want to be by moving these around and breaking up how they're grouped together. So what I'm going to do is actually make a new collection called finished. And I know it's going to get a little messy collection wise, but we want to make sure that things we take care of are just in the right spot. So it's like, Oh, we finished these. I don't want to look at the materials. I'm in the process of modeling this. This was our duplicate blockout. I'm going to call it a zoom, 'cause we're going to do whatever we want with this. We can move it around, figure out what we'd like to do with it. And that's what I mean. We want to at least stay organized. So this can be our first win and blackout done, right? And it'll automatically hide because we're in the process of doing that. So I'll take another look at this. For the fence, I think it's time to put this in the Done folder. And so now we can take a look at this. I'll press Alt G to bring it back to the center and see if I can give us a better reference point to how we want to model all this. Luckily, I guess I did rotate it with stamping on in the first place, so it's still safe to look at from here. And this would be a fun reference point so long as our original planks are out of the way. So while we can duplicate this plank and try to move it in and see if we can get a little bit better on both of these positions. In overlay mode, we could start moving these vertices around. And that's probably the most valid option if you don't want to have to repeat that same UV mapping process over and over again. But the problem is is that for some of these wood planks, depending on their width and height, we might want to change the bevel size. And so if you get used to that UV mapping process, it really won't be that difficult. So again, this is valid, but I'm going to go ahead and see how fast I can make a new cube and get a wood plank similar to this with a larger bevel size. But go ahead and make a new one. I'm going to make sure it ends where I want on the grid this time. I could for now move it in this spot. And then raise it up. And I know that everything is still on the grid in that way. We don't need to UV map that yet. Let's try a bevel. I'll hide this. I want something larger this time. I'll check it out in solid view, and I'll add a weighted normals. And I'm a fan of these larger planks that catch the light a little bit differently. So I'm going to accept that. I'll just UVap these again. That's all we need at the top. This is all we need at the bottom. We'll take that one vertical edge there. Mark a seam, Uv unwrap. Check it out and press, set the text of density. U v unwrap it again you should pick conformal for these types of planks. Now, in material mode, I'll just quickly assign the material. And yeah, you can definitely get a lot faster at that. Especially for wood planks, especially for this style, this doesn't demand too much labor per plank. We could be taking these in Zbrush and creating a modular wood plank kit based off a bunch of sculpts and bakes. But I didn't want to take it that far. In the course. We're already covering a lot of different concepts. We still have a lot of concepts to go, and I find that this is a perfect solution to not only this particular village but the type of concept that we're trying to reference here. So I'll unhide that for a moment. Let's just start building this asset out. It depends how picky you want to be with modular grid snapping, which is why I'm not going to be commentating on every single part later because many moments may just be dedicated to me, being a little finicky and making sure that they're on a place on the grid that I can appreciate. I want to make sure that's the same height as this. Now I can get a plank in between. You know, we could make this just one plank. And so, you know, even though these are beveled, I'm not obsessing over where these edge lines are inside, nor am I trying to be too picky with the actual width of everything on a microgrid level. I just want to show you that it's probably preferred to make a new one, depending on the width of the bevel and what you're trying to edit. It actually makes your life a little bit easier. So this one looks okay, but I'm going to try to bring in these a little bit, or a lot of bit. It'd be fun to see something a bit thinner. You know, okay, pushing it out. Let's actually start from the origin point and just move it from there. Something a little more like that. The more you zoom in and blender, the more it lets you snap to the smaller increments of the grid. Just to prove to you, I'm not trying to be that obsessive Worthy snap. This one might have been further back because they all rotate towards a specific plank. With that in mind, artistically or maybe environment art wise, I'd rather just have these be a little bit more similar. And we know they're hitting the planks, and speaking of which, let's try to find where these might best suit us on a grid. I think I most prefer active mode to where I want the last vertice I select to be the one I'm looking at most, but, you know, people have different preferences there. So I'm just holding control, moving stuff back on the grid, and seeing what I think is gonna look best, that seems to be divided in the middle, right. So should we do 3 meters across or 2 meters across? Why don't we give it a stress test by looking at this? I don't know how 'cause I think I'd like our pillars to be evenly distributed. So I'll be a little brave and actually bring this out. We could always scale it in engine. See how the origin points here, so I'm bringing it back instead, 'cause I don't want to mess with its relationship with the origin point. You might prefer scaling it from the center, but I enjoy a corner point for the planks. That way, I could scale it based off a location that I know it's going to be even if I have to rearrange the other side sometimes. Speaking of which, we're going to bring this one back. And for my active grid snapping, I have a vertice selected, and I'll just bring it forward. So it's a lot easier to put together because I decided to create on a grid. That would have taken me much longer, or I could put on Face snapping but I have to do actually, much less thinking so long as I respect the grid system, and I can appreciate that. So let's see if we can find the best final origin point for this particular model. I guess it would be best here. Maybe I'll just rotate the whole thing 90 degrees. So we'll rotate it from the three Dcursor and when I put it in engine, I think that is the location I want it to be at. So I'll just put this in the you know, we can get our backup planks first. This can stay in the modeling section. I kind of want to keep it to a grid, make sure it's duplicated. And I can put this one in the finished area. If it can respect the active element when we move it, that is also fine because that way, if we unchecked finished we're not seeing a whole blob of finished assets together, so we could safely move these. But you have to be kind of careful. You got to be careful and make sure that if they're not joined together, you're not breaking up how these are snapping together and everything. So we have some extra wood beams to play with now, and that's kind of it's kind of the whole point of it. We're building our little wood kit system as we model along. So we know we have this plank, and let's see if we want to scrutinize the origin points. H Let's see how these are working together. Yeah, I might bring this one down? Let's see where these points are. Yeah, no, they all have something similar going on, origin point wise. We'll even check out this beam two. Pretty one metersh but at the same time, pretty awkward looking as to where it snaps on the grid. This might be a situation where if these are still on the grid, I might select these two points and press Shift S, cursor to selected or actually, no. Maybe just this vertice. Shift S, cursor to selected. Objects set origin, origin to three dcursor. If I'm not mistaken, that should snap pretty darn well. Okay we'll check its back. And I'm trying to make our lives as easy as possible so we have easy to use wood planks to use for future areas of this. That was a duplicate one. So we can go ahead and just decide what we want to tackle next. I think we'll go for this stone planter. So I just press Alt G. I am looking at the original blockout mesh first, just using it as an idea as to where I want it to snap on the grid. I'm going to turn on absolute increment snap for the single vertices. That's when it works best when it's just a row of vertices you need to move. Check it out for here, too? I'm kind of using this as the deciding factor for the snapping. In fact, maybe we do move this one to the modeling section. You know, it's sort of a free flow process because this is snapping pretty well. I know I don't want it to be any much thicker than that, but maybe we can bring it out to, like, 1.6 meters wide. So, yeah, I will use this one for the final, so I'm going to move this into modeling, actually. See if we want to put it on a corner point. Yeah, you know, this is a really simple model, so we're not going to need to really mirror this. I just want to test out an inset. Very simple. But if we go to the level, we'll go back to solid. Depending on the thickness of that model, you could add another segment. And for this particular type of modeling, I might prefer the patch or arc for the mit or outer. I'm going to check out these different ones. Yeah, we can see it changing right around here, right? So we have sharp, patch, and arc. We can add a weight to normals before we decide on that final one and see how it interacts with the topology, we're gonna have to clean up the normals anyways. So, you know, for things outside of wood planks that we're not duplicating a ton with really thick bevels, we can test out just how many segments we want. I wouldn't push it past three. And for this, it really might not need. But it doesn't seem to hurt the shading over here either, so I also might keep it. Why don't we keep it for now and see what we have going on? We're going to have to do a little bit of cleanup, but probably not a lot. The reason why we don't have to do a lot is because these are planar surfaces, even though they're engons. So I'm going to delete actually these edges, and I'm going to put a loop cut down the middle here. I'm pressing K, A and C to cut and then on an angle and cut through. I think I will straighten this out on the Z axis, and I'm going to straighten it out with vertex snapping. So if I select an active vertex and then press G and X, we can straighten that out. And the same goes for this side. G, Z, straighten it with that. Looks like this got messed up here, and it's probably probably because we added a knife cut after the weighted normals. So what I'm going to see is if adding it again can help us. It looks like it did. It's because we've baked in that weighted normals before. So you can always, reshade that smooth and go from there. So it's already looking cleaner giving it the ocular pat down. And so long as you know, I know we have some engons as long as it's not too bad, we should be able to unwrap this, but we'll go ahead and see maybe what needs to be changed. Perhaps grabbing the side of this would help, and we can turn off this scene. Let's just unselect these edges. I'm I'm imagining how I would want this to unfold as a paper cut out in the easiest way possible, right? That's what UV mapping is. And I'm thinking, I don't want, like, a vicious seam here, so maybe we have it wrap a little bit. If it can't successfully do that. I'm thinking it might be a little tougher to do that because it's getting so close to the edge there. But this edge a little closer to us, might be a different story. It can actually bend around a little bit easier. So I'm grabbing these edges. Okay, okay. So I think I just have to deselect this edge. You know, I am okay with that one being there because, you know, this is the view that faces the camera. So we're just organizing appropriately here. And I'm looking at the bottom to the top. And what I think I want to do is add a seam right here. Or it might be better to put it back here. Let's press Control E and Mark Seam. And I can see that this would be a top down projection then, right? I'm thinking, do we need to put a seam here? Maybe not, but at the same time, it might help. So I'm looking at this big fat and gone, and I'm wondering how bad blender is going to punish me for this, but I'm going to click Unwrap conform. That looks good, man. Engons be damned. Even though we could fill up these vertices with correct edge loops. In fact, what a good artist does is take his knife tool and he cuts away so that he can eliminate those engons. We might end up doing that. I won't lie, but I don't feel as though it mentally stimulates anyone because it would be the same lesson over and over again. You would look at where a face has more than four vertices in it. In fact, you can go to select Select All by trait, faces by sides. And instead of four, how about you do greater than four? And I'll show you where the endgons are. So I'll tell you what. We'll clean this one up in two different ways, and then I might do a time lapse at the end cleaning them all up. But they all do triangulate engine at the end of the day, and we're being we're not building the cystine chapel when it comes to our vertex placement for the vertex painting. It could be a cruel dark world out there. So I'm pressing knife, A and C. Uh, you do have to click first, K, A and C. And I'm putting in loop cuts. I'll connect them down at the bottom, too. And I'm going to show you two different methods. Method one is with this, the quoted up cut through with the knife tool. We could even do a vertice there. So let's get this top really quick. I don't think I want them to reach all the way across the box over here. Okay, A, C. Take a moment. Get your left arm moving. We'll see which ones need to meet down the middle. And I'm just pressing J to connect those vertices. And we don't have vertical cuts going through here. So what we'll just do is press J on this. And if we need to J on those two corners as well. So besides this face, now, if I go to select select all by trait faces by sides, greater than four, that whole face is definitely cleaned. And then we probably could have put vertical edges here, but I'm just going to rudely clean that up like this. And so for this one, instead of needing to use the knife tool, sort of like a madman, because these are not going to be changed later, you could just select the offending vertice and just find a vertice that joins things together. So we'll give that another shot, select all by trait, and that one was cleaned up. I can see that there's five vertices here, so I'll do the same thing. Now that's cleaned up. Of course, I could repeat that for the other side. But basically, you're just looking to eliminate engons. And 100% of the time, you should totally do that. However, we will examine the topology at the end, see where we especially need to clean this up, and then we'll be able to use the Knife tool, if need be, to add some vertices around and merge things together. We just don't want extremely complex models, but at the same time, if you unwrap it before applying the bevel, you will have terrible looking seams. And so this is the pain that we got to go through in order to alleviate that. So I'm just going to go ahead and continue on with this one. So I'm actually going to go back and I'm not I'm not worried about these loop cuts, yet, right? If I check out the UV map, it's still looking okay, and that's what I'm worried about right now. So go to the stone. Let's check out the material view. So we'll see what faces we want to turn around. If I press L, now we're selecting a seam and I can rotate it 90 degrees. I'll do the same with this one. Check out this bottom, and I think this will benefit from I think it should face this way, actually for now. Maybe same for this one, maybe same for this one, but it'll press everything, go to the end panel, make sure we set our texil density. And now we're able to see how those bricks truly align across this little stone planter. You could, if you want, change the material down here. So I'll press L, add a new material, and I'll choose the roof for now, it's not going to carry these materials over. We could fit in the grass material here. But yeah, it's good for previous purposes, and you especially want to assign your material instances within blender. That way in real at least knows that you have multiple material instances. Then you place that material in the engine. So, honestly, pretty simple model, even if it was a bit of a hassle to explain the cleanup process, which, you know, we might time lapse through later if we need to because again, planar surfaces, right? They'll triangulate perfectly fine in engine, but that is the stone planter. I'd like its position. These are other finished assets, so I'm just going to make sure grid snapping is on. Is increment snapping, actually, they've actually split it between two different functions, and placing it there. So that's another asset done. 26. 24 Village Modeling Part 02: So back in it, I think I want to start with a kind of a difficult asset, and that would be the water wheel. I'm a little nervous about starting this one for you guys, but I think we'll make it through. And I'm thinking that I'll explain how to go through this one. I'll explain going through this house and the scaffolding. But then after that, everything else would be a repetition. It would be the same house, same house, same exact process. Talking through it would be a little exhausting, especially repeating the same information one, two, three, four, five, six times in a row. So we'll take care of the difficult assets together, and hopefully the time lapsed content can help you understand the rest of the process. It might be sped up, might not be. We'll find out. So for this water wheel, I think I want to and I'm going to my pure refile, and I'm once again looking at my concept. This one is going to demand kind of extra attention. So I'm looking at it closely. I'm okay with this starting at the center. But what we need is a new cylinder. I'm going to make it 72 vertices, and that's because I had counted 18 beams in between them, and I was doing some math, thinking, Well, how many edges do I want between theoodplanks? And so I'm going to make a 72 vertice wheel and we'll scale this in. Let's check out which one's the old one. This one is, so we're going to move it to the finished or not the finished. I'd like to move it to blockout Done. So I'm just paying attention to this face, really. I know I want a band of wheels to be wrapping across here, or sorry, a band of wood, apologies. Pretty much. I guess I'll keep this face just so we know what the goal is in terms of the width, but I'll delete these edge loops. Maybe I'll even separate this piece. I'm going to extrude this out. Let me check that out. You know, before we extrude it out, maybe we should get that second ring, as well and really decide what the scale of this should be. For starters, I think I will scale this in. And I'll just duplicate the ring in edit mode. So A, Shift D. Scaling it in. I'll also scale in that inner ring a little bit, too. There is another beam in the middle, but I think I'm going to keep that for what we want to array. So I'm looking at these. The rings look pretty good. I'll extrude them. Now I'll separate this beam. We'll see if we just want to duplicate this one in a moment, but at least we know the width of it. So I'll add the bevel. I'm checking out the width at which I want that. Let's apply the scale. I think that's what has to happen rotation in scale. I'll do rotation in scale for this. Okay, so I'll shade smooth, shade smooth. I'm checking out the bevel width for this one. I'm going to shade flat, actually for now, just to check out the actual width of it, and I'll do weighted normal. Okay. Let's just be a little brave and do the same process for this one. Let's shade of flat, bevel. What's the width of this 0.05, 0.05, and then weighted normal. So that looks good. That looks good. Just go to apply both of these. And I'm just going to put a seam here, a seam here, maybe one at the top. We'll do the same for the inside. I can still see those edges. I'm pressing I'll shift so that I can select the entire edge. That's my middle edge right there. Marken. So let me try unwrap conformal. This looks pretty good. I'll try setting the taxodnsity and we'll check out the material. Et's try Unwrap and formal. Set the textil density. So this is what I want to straighten out, right? So we're going to start by putting a seam at that whole loop instead. We'll hide this original one. So I'll clear that seam. We'll mark this entire one. Let's try Unwrap conformal again. Now, we know that it has a space in between, but we still want to straighten it out. And so that's where the UV squares add on is going to come in. That one I told you guys to download from GitHub, and then you would install it from the disk there, and it should be UV squares. So that's when I'll click on to grid by shape, and I'm pressing L to select the island and just doing to grid by shape. Now is a good time to select everything and then go back to textil density and get our desired density, and we can move these in if we need. So now the wood grain is following across the material correctly. We'll repeat that same process. Let's move this to blockout done. Now, let's check out this one. I'll hide this one for now. Check out the modifiers. Except, except, I want to do this twice just for practice. We're selecting these edge loops and these edge loops. Then we'll select one in the middle. Mark the seam. Unwrap conformal, we'll go to the UV map. We see that space on this circular one. So we'll do grid by shape, grid by shape. No, rotate this 90 degrees, bring it all in, and let's just assign the material. Along with the textil density, let's go ahead and set that. Go to textil density and 1024. And that is our second ring. So now I know I want around 18 beams going around this. I typically use an add on called hard ops for radio arrays. It is possible to duplicate that same function within vanilla blender, and we'll try to do that, but it could be a little bit fussier in vanilla blender. So we'll still give this a shot nonetheless. Let's start with one of our preset beams. I'm going to go ahead and bring it in. Okay. So I'm gonna go ahead and lift it up towards the top kind of where I'm looking at in the concept. And it looks like we can make this thinner. You know, you can duplicate a different sized beam depending on what bevel size you want at this point. That looks good. So right away, I think based off this shape, I'm going to duplicate it. Actually, before I do that, what I'm going to do is go to origin and three Dcursor. That way we are going to be able to more easily array this around the center. Look at that with the rotation tool. So I'm going to duplicate this to get my metal object shaped too. I notice it covers both of these wood beams. So dragging this one down. Just making it wider. And it'll be another unit on the y axis thicker. Thinking what I do like, what I don't like. I think I want it to be a little more flush with these beams. And I'll make it share the same origin point. Origin to three D cursor. Same for these, let's just set them all to three D cursor. Okay, so I'm gonna set this one to metal. I'm just gonna make some really small little bolts, too. I think they only need to be like eight vertices. And I just scaling it up and making, like, a little bolt out of this. I'm gonna poke these faces just by merging them to the center. And I'll give this a small extrusion at the bottom. You save on straights, you spend on curves. Okay, things that are curvy or cylindrical, you just need more polygons for them. Let's see if shade auto smooth looks a little better. I'm okay with the look that gives us. So I'm gonna rotate it. And I'm not being too picky with where these are being placed. So I'll set this to metal as well. Gonna just unwrap this base. To make sure these are all the correct texil density. Looks like I'll have to re unwrap this one, set that texil density. That looks a little better. You move this. Easy, easy. So we have one of these beams, and what might be a little difficult is finding a way to get the horizontal beam moving across all here. But for starters, I'm just going to join these objects together at the base. Forgive me if this first attempt doesn't work, maybe it does, but I'm going to add empty here. And for this object, I want to add an array. And I will set the axis to, I guess, negative one for now. What I'm really looking for is for a way for the empty to control the rotation. So that means I'm going to change the relative offset and maybe I have to apply the rotation in scale. And that seems to do the trick. So if we increase the count to something like 18 and then lift up the space, That looks like a successful attempt at creating 18 of these wood beam arrays across. I am going to duplicate this particular wood beam and make sure that transform attributes is off, rotate it. And I want to connect these And we'll check out which way we want this to rotate. And if you want, you could lift up this edge and bevel it. I'm okay, personally with that rounder shape. But then you do have to kind of adjust the curvature a little bit. We're also going to move this plank back. Checking out the back here. And I want these to blend together well. So I'm also checking out the rotation of these end caps. Cool. Now the inside of that looks a little bit better, too. What I might try to do is duplicate this inner ring, and just scale it down. So I'm just scaling it, trying to fit it in an appropriate way. I'm also going to grab the inner edges. I think if we scale it with S Shift Y, we should be able to get a new desired thickness for this. And I'll just re unwrap this. Set the UV square grid shape, and set the textil density. Okay. Given this a good look, and so far so good, I'm going to unhide this plate back here. And what I'd like to try to do is duplicate this to the other side. Let's see how big of a trouble it gives us if we apply all the transforms. And if we duplicate this, rotate at 180 degrees. Let's see what kind of trouble they wanted to give us. So it's not happy when this is rotated. So what I will do is select all of these except for the empty, duplicate it and convert this visual geometry to a mesh. Now if I rotate it, it should be much more cooperative, and we can check out where we want this to be. I'm just deciding if we want to move it forward or back. But I think with this, we're in a pretty good spot to the point where we could delete this. So now we'll need some wood planks in the middle and maybe a beam in the middle to connect these. So I'm just going to play with these planks and see what I can find. I'm rotating this one. And what I might do is just join it with this. So now we can duplicate array, that wood plank, and I'll just move it around. See if you just want to bring it to the center right there. Check it from atop you. Looks like we're not going to get that perfect grid snap, but we'll align it as best we can cause we're getting the rings are kind of obscuring it a little bit. So that's one plank. Why don't we just duplicate this plank and then I'll raise it up and scale it on this axis. You know what? Instead of that, instead of scaling it is I'll press Shift so I can just grab these vertices. And now I'm able to get these wood planks a little bit wider, and I can unwrap that again and set that correct textil density. Now I'll press alt and for this plank, I'll separate it. And instead of 18, maybe we duplicate that by two, which let's see. 28 36. So the array should be based off this empty I see, Let's duplicate this empty. We'll set it to empty duplicate one. Now I'll make sure I am selecting that one, and that should have worked. And it did work. We'll just see what is fitting best. Not sure why it's operating like that. Let's go ahead and check the number. We'll start with 18. We'll check Empt's rotation, which is 30 degrees. Check this rotation. We'll set it back to 30 for now, and I'm actually going to set it to 15. Now we'll just increase it through here. Maybe maybe we'll try 30. Let's see, one, two. It seems to fit in two in between, and, you know, that actually fits well. So it's 24. Which means I'm going crazy, and I apologize and that still looks completely fine. We do have the option to rotate this plank, if we want. You think that's a little bit more correct. And it looks like we'll also bring out or sorry, bring in these edges. So I'll go to top view. And we'll see if I'll turn on cracked face attributes. Seeing if vertex snapping would do anything. That's okay. And the water wheel itself is looking pretty good. I don't want to celebrate just yet because we have these big woodplank supports to give it. So I'm trying to decide how deep in the ground do I want this to be? I think we'll just reach the bottom of these 10 meters. Now, I'll bring it forward. We're going to try to find the right with that would make for an accurate support, and I'll also lift it up. Um, sure, and I'll start it from here. Looks like a lot to eyeball that grid view. That's okay. It's not a modular asset. So what I'm trying to do is rotate it towards the center, and I'm okay with that, you know, just being how the wood plank was built into there. So I'm just testing that again. I'm rotating that inwards, and I'd like to do the same thing to this side. So I'll see if the mirror modifier can serve us well. I'll have to apply the rotation. And I want the mirror object to be empty one. You can see I was scrambling there for just a little bit. Oh, but it's copying the rotation. So we're going to make one more empty. Let's make a new empty. Find that caractation, and that looks better. You know, I'm okay with them merging together because we're going to be covering it with another object right now. I'd like for it to share the data from this cube, so I'll press Shift D P, selection and I'll just turn off the array. I just need a metal cube. So bringing it out, bringing it in. And I'll just use the grid or the overlay view to bring out the edges. Now I'll lower this, and we can even taper it in a little bit. So even though it's in the correct position, I'm going to bring it back a little bit. Okay, and now I'll get another one of these cubes, actually. You know, I'm okay just duplicating this one. I'll press Shift. Now I'll bring it out. And what I want to do is actually be a little brave and untaper this And I want to bring in one of the edges and try to get a good square. And I'll bring it in. And I'm gonna rotate this. I want this to be a sort of just funky diamond shape. And if we want, we could bring this in. I'll even do see if Live Unwrap does the trick for us. It didn't. So what I'm going to do is instead inset it again. Bring it more, scalt it more. And I'll even chant for these as well. Maybe it's not needed, especially from this view, and especially when I want this to be smaller. Looks pretty good. I'll test the weight in normals on it again. Okay, maybe we will need to chant for these. I'll just do one small chaf There we go. Soft but cartoony. I'm gonna undo these seams. That's looking a lot better. Okay, so that's the front back. We can also connect the middle with probably a similar asset. However, let's get a new type of reusable asset in the mixed. I'll make a cylinder that's about 16 polygons. Let's lift it up. I'll bring it out on the x axis, and I'm going to scale it in Kind of a lot. I'm pressing S Shift X right there. How tall is it 2 meters? I'm okay with it being 2 meters right now. We can always make a different variation of this. But I'll press shade Autosmooth I'm going to do the same process to this with a bevel and a weighted normal. Oh, sorry, my shade flat, regular shade. That's looking pretty good. I'm going to apply both of these. And then I'll poke these faces with face and poke faces. And then I'll just grab the caps of these, put one edge in the back and mark those seams. So if I unwrap it now, that is what I'm looking for, and I'll set the textile density, and I'll give it the metal material. So now we have a pretty reusable metal pipe, including for the chimneys in that back house. So I'm duplicating it. I'm just seeing where it's going to look best. So I'm going to hide these planks because they are in my way. These are in my way. Okay, so on this three D cursor, what I'm going to do is grab these three assets, make sure all the transforms are applied, and from the three D cursor, I'll press Shift D SY negative one. And now from here, I will extend this topology with correct face attributes on. That should be the bar in between. And congratulations. We do have the wheelbarrow done. I'm going to put this in a group because it's one of the more complex ones. Wheelbarrow. Sorry, water wheel. It's been a long day, huh? But it's beautiful. And I'm going to Hm, we could apply it, but I'll duplicate it, hide this one, and I'm going to convert this one to actual geometry. We'll find convert to mesh. See if these three empties can survive being deleted. And then I'll join all these meshes together. So I'm just checking it out, seeing if it survived the process. It did. But there's one more thing that we're going to change. We're going to hide these supports, these interior base supports, and this is going to be one object. And then these are going to be one object. That way, on real engine, we can assign this differently and have it rotate in the blueprint. So this asset is a lot of fun to make. I'm just going to go ahead and move it wherever we choose. So we're starting to build our library. Pretty happy with our progress with that water wheel. Next up, I think we should tackle maybe either one of the scaffoldings, or actually, let's do this house. Let's do the challenging house. Then we'll do a scaffolding, and then the rest will be so we covered pretty much every single concept in this wheelbarrow. I just want to fit in the water wheel. Excuse me. And I just want to repeat some of those processes for these so that we can keep learning together. So I'll see you in the next video. 27. 25 Village Modeling Part 03: I guess we can go ahead and get started on another kind of difficult asset. I'm not going to over explain this one as much. We know the process. We take a basic shape, and we're just trying to figure out how to make it a little more high fidelity with the bevel and weighted normals. So we can go with a more basic proportion. And it's super similar topology, but it's pretty much all we're looking for, and the base shape. I don't want to do too much to it yet, in case we find out that we do need to change the proportions. So I might level this and the roof last. However, I'm going to make a new base shape for this roof. Just to double check that we're on a grid level that we prefer. Checking out where it would look best on the grid. She's okay. I don't know how it went up on axis, but that's fine. Okay, we're gonna get there slowly, but shortly. So if this one goes at 1.5, maybe I do want to be a braver and set it to two or an actual full meter. Gonna hide this one for a sec? Okay. See what width is like on both these sides. They both go a meter out. How about this front? Looks like I might look good at 2 meters out. Okay, let's just bring these sides in. The center correctly. So from this point, I'm going to grab this face, and I'll put the cursor right there. That way, I can grab a circle, and I'm okay keeping it at 16 or let's do 32. We're going to cut it into 16.5 anyways. Let's go to Vertex mode. What I'm doing is trying to create the top of the roof, that cylindrical formation. So object mode, I can rotate it half or dissolve these edges over here. These could make for the distribution of wood planks. So we'll join them together, and I'm going to delete this vase. I'm just going to fill these faces for now. Oh, let's merge these vertices with selecting everything, pressing M, and then merge by distance. I'll press F to fill that face, and I'm filling this phase as well. Just Take a good look at it. And I know Indi Oh, let's merge these vertices with selecting everything, pressing M, and then merge by distance. I'll press F to fill that face. I'm filling this phase as well. Just take a good look at it. And I know in the blackout phase, I had mentioned that I wanted a small extrusion down. We could make that like half a meter, so it'll go back to increment mode. I'll go down like this. Let's start looking so bad. We'll see if we can get away with elongating the cylindrical shape with snapping off and proportional editing on. We'll grab both of these vertices and try that again. I'm gonna check out Auto Smooth, see how it treats us. And I think I do prefer that. Yeah, we have some curve shape, and, you know, I'm just checking out the basic proportions before we do a really big deep dive. I'll check out the original blackout for a second. And I think we will be okay with that thickness. I know I brought it forward. This will be more of a decorative facade type of scaffolding. That way, we still have room for that front house. So I'll hide this block out. And I'm looking at my reference, trying to see what goes where on the grid, looking at everything around me, deciding, how big are these wood planks? Because in the reference, I'm looking at these horizontal beams, and I'm looking at the scaffolding. So we're just going to try to put some wood planks there. So I just duplicated this one. And we're going to go back to solid mode for a while. In a sense, I'm gonna check out that first blockout. Stuff like that is good to know. Like, where do I want the beginning of that scaffolding to occur at the floor level? This could be considered a floor. So I'll continue on here. And I'm taking a look at how wide this building is really quick. Let's hide the blockout. Something one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine and ten. Don't know if I want to change it to nine, considering we do have three equally sized sections, but we'll see if we could figure that out maybe with some extra planks. I'm gonna hide this one, and I'm gonna extend this one out. That original scaffolding can go out, S 2 meters. It might want 3 meters. Checking out the silhouettes, I look at the reference beside me. If now, I'll push it out a little bit. So from here, I'll go to the top. If now, I'll push it out a little bit. So from here, I'll go to the top you. And I think I want to make these wood planks wider. So just in case you want to keep this proportion of wood plank, I'll keep it there. That looks like a pretty good sickness. I'm trying to look for the active vertice here, and I'll see if absolute increment snap will help us or hurt us, and it does not really help us at all. So we're gonna lie ball that. It's just the way it goes. Put another one out. Let's check the Xray. So these seem like pretty good thicknesses. For this bring them back a couple of meters. Turn off absolute. And now I'm just making extra wood planks for this scaffolding, deciding different lengths. Kind of building these like lego blocks. So I'll duplicate these across. We can check out the material as well. This might be a good time to just kind of move these islands around. The islands are a little bit scattered, but it's most likely just because of the transform attributes. I'll also test out with a painterly look can get away with 5.12. Do you like it a little more? We might change it at the end gonna take the not the active element. I'm going to move this. I am going to set it to active element and just rotate this around. I'm just building out that scaffolding. Trying to grid snap it on the correct spot. I'm not sure if these ones actually are. So I'll turn on absolute. Test out it's grid snapping. It can be a game of patience. We actually have to check out just how wide these are, huh? Looks like these are a little bit wide. Now we're doing some live demonstration here. Taking taking one last look at these wood planks and just making sure that they are at the correct, width might have made them a little wide, something like that is going to treat us a lot better. I'll do it for these as well. And for the rote head. That way, we don't have to do it again. We're just lifting these up. By the way, we'll be able to change the normal intensity to something stronger in unreal engine. I just don't want to play with the shaders too much in blender. Okay, so I'm hunting down what I want to use as the base for this rotated side. And let's see. Let's see. We'll grab this plank. And we're just slowly but surely building out this scaffolding. But silly me might be a good idea at this point to actually grab that blockout asset. I'm not gonna do it from this one. I'm gonna do it from our duplicate. Okay, okay. So we made this a little long. We can get rid of this one. We can bring these planks back. That looks a little more accurate. See where we want these to end on the grid. I think where this wood plank is ending is ending could be the best, or it could be where the blackout is ending. I guess we could do this slightly off amount. Yeah, we'll have it end there, too. I'm gonna hide the roof. We're just making sure we get everything correct. Oops, I'm into solid mode. There we go. The issue might be the increment snap again. It could be very unforgiving. Okay. No, I'm just kind of eyeballing it. I think I'll bring this one down meter, duplicate it. And we are definitely getting there. We can go ahead and duplicate all of these planks. Let's see. Which one is in an inappropriate spot? This one is. So let's delete it. Let's just bring this one. We'll duplicate these. So I'll make this one the active object. So I want to rotate it from there. Well, first, I noticed that these are kind of off. I'm gonna do SY zero. Okay, they are aligned correctly. Just double checking. We'll have a end around here. And for fun, we can add a very thin rail, see if we can get away with it. On the side, a little extra for the construction. I think I'm just going to extend these Look, send it out to that meter point. Get some grids back into our life. We'll examine it. It's looking good in the model view. It's looking okay in the material view, and we'll continue on downwards with the scaffolding. We'll work on these assets in tandem. Okay, continuing on. Just grabbing more wood planks. You know, as you can see, I'm not trying to get the exactly what the block I was giving us, but just giving us something that we're happier with in the modeling process. So for these, I'm just gonna make these ones really long and extend them downwards. We'll see where I want these Looks like I'll have to change the dimensions of this one. Looks like I also have to UVnrap this again. We might go through just another UV unwrapping pass. Just checking out how I feel about that same plank being over here. Let's see if we can match where these ones are. I'll hide it for a moment. I like how that looks? Just gonna start moving some islands around. Again, we'll take another UV map, pass at this. All we have to do is reset the unwrap and set the textil density. So I remember I talked about wanting a little bit of space right here, so I might grab It's like we're using these as actual construction plans with transform attributes on. I'm just playing around with that. Okay, now, we'll see if we can get something where these lines can still be parallel with each other. Our best bet might be to grab these and grab that active vertex. And if I press no, that doesn't work anymore. I'm gonna open up the tool bar right here and look for the shear tool. It is going off the active element. So I'm gonna see if I can successfully shear this. I'm gonna lift it up still? And we'll check that out. That actually looks pretty good. Again, I'll grab some of the UV islands. We're still just examining the scaffolding. So we can start by duplicating these planks. I'll duplicate it downwards. See if we can find the right elevation for that. That actually seems to be correct. I'll double check. No, but we were close. Okay. I'll lift these up. I'll just grab two of these rows. And I'm duplicating it across. I'd rather just make these ones thicker rather than adding another plank, go to Edit mode and grab the Xray at the front edges and bring this forward. So we see these crossing into each other. Let's see if we can alleviate that. Let's see if we can alleviate that. We don't want polygons to be crossing over each other, so I'll bring this one back. Then I think I'll just bring these ones forward. Let's see if we can get that correct view. That surprisingly is. Again, I always would prefer to move the origin point. Checking it out. There we go. That fits together well enough for me, but wanted to be kind of OCD about it. I could see what another one of these can do. In fact, I'm not happy that that's in the wrong spot, so I'm bringing it back a meter, putting it in the correct spot. So now I'll duplicate that. I'm just checking out the silhouette. It looks like it's gonna give us more trouble than it's worth, so we'll keep it like that. I want to double check that weighted normals is doing its job. Hmm. Seems like because we changed it up a bit, we could redo those normals. So at the end, we'll put a weighted normals back on everything as well. O Present dH, checking this out, seeing how far this goes. Looks like these ones go too far. And we'll even these ones out. Well, I'll hide this first. Just these ones. I'm just bringing it back to the same spot as the blackout. Okay, still just look, look, look. Okay, still just look, look and look. I'm going to bring these planks forward by duplicating them. Bring back that block out. And the floor scaffolding, I'm okay with. I'm gonna hide the building assets just for a moment. Look down at these select them all. I'll select one of them as the active and get that weight to normals. Middle press Control L and copy the modifiers. So hopefully everything has a refreshed way to normals. Yes, it does. So just for cleanliness purposes, I'll convert it back to a mesh, and everything is also applied. We'll do that probably a few times before we export. So we still have our rails asset, and in our concept, we have a ton of different of pretty much that same structure. So I'll be taking that as the base and duplicating that around a lot. So going into material view, looking at that original rail asset, and I'll duplicate it. And I think I'm going to join them together, just so we have an easier time working with these. And in theory, this should be pretty lego like. We just want to match the same proportions as the blockout. So we might move the rails part over to So, I'm going to see if I can isolate just these two together. See if it's in that correct spot that we originally envisioned, and I think it is. I think that is the correct height. So move this outwards a little bit or hide the roof. Just finding a spot I enjoy for it. And it's flush against the wall, So RZ and 90 are just rotated with control. We could keep this, but it does seem like compared to the fence here that the railings reach all the way to the top for this fence. And then in general, it's just a little bit taller. So I'm going to change this version. Let's see how tall that is. That is 1.8. But it honestly does look a little better at 1.7, so we're going to keep it there. So we'll lift this up. Let's see if we can eyeball this, and I'm taking a look at the structure of it one more time seeing does the railing stay flush with this? I'm thinking we'll want to extend this one out all the way and then we'll lift up this entire. I don't want to put this one below it. I'll try to put this on the grid as best I can. Let's see where it's meeting. Okay. I'm thinking it would look good. It just a little micrometer taller. So I'm okay that it reaches 2 meters across, and it looks like this middle railing is actually doing the correct thing. We can scale it out a little bit without breaking the bevel. Just go to go for the median point. I am going to grab the edges, though for this one. So we're hiding this. I'm checking out the topology of it. We'll put a weight to normal. Wrong one. Wrong one. I think that's okay, but I'm also going to thin this one out a little bit. I think this top pillar should be the kind of striking force within this structure. Double check away to normal on that. Okay, so I'm okay working with this for now. We'll check the material. It's doing its job. I'll start duplicating this across. You always have the option to go back into substance designer and do more base level changes to it to the wood material and so on and so forth. So I'm playing with the width of these fences, and they should be pretty modular. That works out good enough. They reach in just a little bit, but not enough to make me worry. I'll hide the floor for a moment. Don't want to go off of this. So I'm wondering if the answer is to extend it. One, two, three, four. I think we'll just be a little kooky and bring this fence back a little bit. Go for a nice, interesting corner shape. So now we don't have to overthink this. We have a very, very repeatable stair railing asset. I I use my thinking noggin, I think the entrance would start about right here. So I'm just going to put an end cap plank. I don't know if I wanted to start before. Looking at my reference, I know it extends out most of the way here. So instead of reaching all the way around, I do want it to end right around here. So for this first fence, I'm going to delete these two beams, and this one earlier. Let's see how this one ends? Where do we want these to typically repeat? Yeah, because I want to cut off here, I'm just going to join these together. Now we'll see how we feel if we can just finally start duplicating this base acid around on the other side. So I am looking at where this ends, and it's like 0.3 meters out. So I'm thinking, and I'm okay with the entrance of this being 2 meters. So I'm just looking at that for the width of the stair railings. Co, check out that corner piece we originally made. See if it could do something for us. I'm trying to match that rotation. Okay. Might be best if it faces this way and then ends this one. So check out these beams. Bring them in. Looks like we're gonna have to eyeball this just a little bit. Depending on where the duplicate of this rail would probably go on the grid. I want to check that out more. Not sure where these are going to different points. So let's see the real increment snap of these. Okay. I think we have a better reference point. Of this extend out here. G one more before it changes elevation. Actually, it does seem to, we'll get one more. So I'm going to bring this right to where these four wood planks end. And the next railing will be something for something different, something elevated. See what this really ends. Let us see who's under the mask. Okay, there we go. This could be tough. This could be really easy. I think I'll aim to end one of the railings right here. What I'll do is start with a duplicate. And this should help me find the best reference point to end these other wood planks. Okay, correct face attributes. Oh, I'm actually going to turn correct face attributes off because we're bending these really quick. Looks like the answer to relieve this one would be to put a loop cut through it, and I'm going to drag this back. Now I'm going to try to bend this shape upwards after clearing this loop cut Looks like, Okay, I guess we had quads. I just did it the good old knife way. I want to try to meet these two. I'm okay eyeballing it. Same with this one. Just seeing if it would be better to bring this edge down. I think it would. So I'm taking a look at this vertical railing. I'll keep that. Let's see if it can repeat across with any success. I'm okay with how this comes out, as well. Let's see. I know we want it to bend this way. Yeah. Yeah, we'll live with this little square nub. Checking out the original duplicate back here. I want to be a little crazy with this one. Okay, so for these ones, I'm going to UV unwrap them again. Let's get these middle railings. I'll just press unwrap Conformal. I'll check out that textil density again. Now, they're more similar. So we can keep going and just try to wrap these railings around. Let's get one of the bigger pieces. Checking all this out. Seems to start at the correct point. Let's go ahead and hide the building and get a better look at the grid. Okay, let's just extend these planks forward. Make sure X ray toggles on. And I'm gonna end these right here. Actually, let's extend it out. Yeah, here's a good spot. I'm looking for where we should put this sweet little corner railing. And if you want to build this in on real engine, you can. I just like to control over having larger pieces to work with when dealing with replicating concept art. So I'm seeing where the Scott jumbled up in the silhouette, looks like these ones extend outwards too much. Okay. Absolute Grit Snap is on. I see. We just had to get little finicky with it. So I'll just rotate one of the longer pieces. We can duplicate this across a couple of times. An Im pressing Shift R now to repeat that last action. Okay. I'm gonna rotate this right over here. See if we can pull off the square being right here, we can. So we'll just extend m. Maybe we just duplicate this corner piece. That's interesting. Okay, take a fence. As you can see, just the earlier wood beams we built give us all the materials and resources we need to start building much larger structures. Whoops. I'm just going to keep duplicating this across. G sure we hit the correct axis. If you're having trouble seeing it, you can click on the wireframe toggle in the overlays. You'll have access to seeing these in material mode, too. Let's repeat what we have going on right here at this bottom corner. Make sure these snap appropriately to the grid by moving each individual piece instead of both of them together. We'll just keep going. Don't forget to look at the concept art beside you and not just follow what I'm doing. So if you're working off this piece, you know, you should get a good feel for how these modular pieces are snapping together in the frame of your concept art. Let's take a corner piece. And we'll do one last duplication for this scaffolding. And that's really cool. We'll continue on with the building in the next video. Maybe the video I was doing right here is split up into. You know, there's just a lot of modeling to do, but so far so good, I'll see you in just a moment. Just a moment. 28. 26 Village Modeling Part 04: So now we're going to continue on to the house. I'm gonna see which one the blockout model was and go ahead and hide that for now. I'll take another good look at my concept art. So I'm gonna take one of these wood planks and make something new with it, but I might want to take one of the slightly thinner ones. I'll try to work with this plank. Now I'm looking to create the horizontal beams of this house. I'm gonna re rotate that. Let's try RY 90. And yeah, that seems like a good spot for it. So I'm trying to decide how big I want these planks to be, and I think I'll go with about this height, like 0.4. So I'll raise these up a bit. We could make it a little more visually interesting and just put two of those. So I'll grab these just the side ones. That ends at the correct enough location. Let's UV unwrap them and set that taxil density. C, and I'll hide the roof for a moment. Let's duplicate these and put them on the four sides of the house. Gonna join these together. It's not perfect, but, you know, that's okay. Let's see. Let's also bring these ones out a bit. Change that in a moment. But I want to duplicate these two again and just bring them out here. Now we can really see what the real length of this is, and we'll bring it down. Looks like it might not have Looks like it might be rotated awkwardly. And I think I think that's what had happened. Let's go ahead and match these two heights. Okay, that is very, very close. Pretty darn good. Okay, we're in Edit mode. We still have the wireframe on. You know, we can turn it on and off. Checking all four sides. Hoops. Let's go ahead and get that one. Okay, so this one might benefit from bending, I mean, rotating both of these on this axis so we can get the correct origin point. Then we can move them up. That works a lot better. So I'm still looking at the house, seeing what needs to be done. And, you know, we have those three large windows with the nine panels in each of them. And so we have to define the height and distance between those. So I'll test that out by working with these wood planks. Looking at the distance between all of this, I know there's 4 meters across right there. So right here actually might be the best. But let's go ahead and define the distance between each of those panels. And I'm talking about these three panels. I'll just start with one for now. Looking at the total width of this, again, I know this was 10 meters. I could do I knew it. It'd be crazy, right? So could eyeball it. We might not. What we could do is make each of these 3 meters We can make each one 3 meters and then just have another wood plank that's just acting as the structural support. It's a little high. What I'm going to do is try to hide these wood plank assets. We'll get a better look at that. Much better. So with overlay mode on, go to hunt down these vertices and bring them down. I think we'll just make this one wider if we can. Maybe we'll extend that on this side, too. Make sure overlay is on. We'll have to move it back through this through this way, and then we'll extend the forward ones actually. So I'm gonna UV on ap these once again. Get those in line again. You know, put one of the panels over here, so I am counting at least as close as we can get. Maybe we should put them on both sides of these three meter marks. You know, we're kind of making our own style a little bit here. But these are pretty squarish. I want to see if these respect all the measurements correctly. We'll make this one thinner just because match the other one. Okay, so what I'll do is just duplicate one of these. We'll move it. We're gonna build the actual insets instead of insetting the polygons. We'll build the wood planks like this. Notice this one is a little bit thicker. You know, I'll keep face attributes on for this. We'll see if that duplicates correctly, and it does. Now we'll go ahead and check out the vertical beams. I'll duplicate that, and we'll make these separate beams. So we'll bring them all the way down, and we'll start duplicating them. Adding an extra horizontal bar at the top, trying to create a style where we're dealing with squares instead of rectangles. I guess it's okay that this one's cut off a little bit, but we'll see if we can get away with kind of evening goes out. Let's see if just moving it slightly to the left is going to do the trick. It kind of does. Okay. Gonna make one more set and bring these in. So it looks pretty good for the top. I'm also noticing that there's more beams that would go down to the bottom of that floor, we'll bring these tops down. Maybe instead of these doubles, we'll try to replicate the look on this side, as well. The modularity is a little off, but we'll make it work. It's okay that if it goes in a little bit, at least it ends at the correct location right there. And it looks like these are full just straight up wood panels. So they're pretty tall. Let's imagine how many we need. Maybe two tall ones, one short one. Oops. So I'm going to bring these in. And I'll bring these in as well. I'm going to close this toolbar panel, excuse me, for having that up. You know, you can operate off your own window. As you can see, I'm not stressing about the modeling process too much because my window is that small. That's one of the benefits of working with the grid. I'm really not too stressed about how much detail these wood beams can pack because it's more about the sum of its parts. Looks like we'll extend this one out a little bit. I would like to match These side panels. So now I'll bring out these ends. Good enough for me. Okay, let me hide the blockout for just a moment. Okay, let's go back to these beams. Overlay is on. That looks pretty good. I'll just duplicate these across. Again, we'll do one more UV mapping pass at the end. Bringing these ones in. And already, before we even continue, let's just move some of these islands, rewrap the conformal, correct. Texel density, and move them around. Okay, now I'm checking out the side of the house, and it looks like we might duplicate these one more time. But first, let's get the corner pieces in. Close enough, but we're going to move it just a little bit. I guess, in a sense, it is slightly on the grid. You know, it's okay that we're going off. We're building something more complex here. This wall seems to be pretty white, and I'd like one more plank to go in here to split up the side. Now, I will take these two planks, so I'll go to the top view, make sure they're rotated correctly. And now I'll start being finicky with the location. I'll go into solid mode, get the X ray. I want to see how far these are meant to be protruding out. It looks like these are all dug into the wall, huh? Let's go ahead and check out the solid view. So what I'm thinking is, let's hide this water wheel, these assets really quick. Unhide things for a moment to get our bearings go into material mode. These, while they're in the correct location, we're going to scrutinize a bit and to hide that. I want to take the front of these and bring these out more. See if it captured everything? Not exactly. Los I had to hide these railings and these ones and these ones. I want to capture all of this. We can deselect these side panels. Now I want to move them forward if I can. Trying to capture everything around there, too. I'm just going to unhide it, and that is in the correct spot. Which means I'm gonna re hide that really quick with everything selected. We have our front view, and we'll bring these planks inwards. Okay, and it's looking okay so far. Paying attention to that roof again. I'm looking at my proportional editing, and I'm not sure if I was the biggest fan of that huge difference in circlness, if you know what I mean? I sort of turned it into an oval, and we don't need it to be perfect, but something like that just might work better. I'd rather play with the total scale of. Okay, so I'm looking at the walls here. If we want, we could try duplicating these to give this a little bit more life. I'll try moving those out just a little bit. We're just making something new at the bottom really quick. Et's try to get new corner pieces. Bring it in. Looks good on this side, looks good on this side. And we could use this as the basis for our modular window. What I'll do is let's get let's create a cube shape out of this plank. And I'll change this one to the wall material. I'm shining these really quick to see where I want this to go. I'll bring this in the X axis. It could either be wall A or Wall B. We'll stick with Wall B for now. And from here now we'll take individual planks and build a little modular window. Let's see if I can isolate these two. We'll make the wall part pretty thin. I'm bringing up back the object origin. No, I'm just making thin window plank shapes on each axis. I'd rather have them be separate planks. I think it'll make for a pretty cool look. Not being particular about how thick these planks are. Just rotating them in the ways I need. And we can make them all thinner or let's just make these two side ones a little thinner on the X axis. It doesn't look bad, but now it's all a little bit wide. So let's start by making these side ones go up. We'll lift the bottoms down. Now, we'll take it to the correct spot. No, it looks a little better. If we want, we could set a little bit of an intrusion in here. But we can't go far because there's a wall right here. So I'm actually going to keep that as is. So we don't have a window material for this course. So this basic shape doesn't need to be touched too much. And before we continue, I'm actually noticing that we have this bottom scaffolding, as well, and I don't want to ignore that. Let's just start with one of these really long planks. Just creating two quick duplicates. This does. But we didn't capture the overlay. The Xray overlay. That's super important. I'll extend this out here. Just go to duplicate it. Rotating it. I'm just checking out this, this and this, I'll press shift H. And I'll actually just increase the length of this one. Hm. Maybe we're better off decreasing the width of this one. These edges? I'll bring these down. I'll bring these out 2 meters. I'll test out this side, as well. Mm, it looks like we don't need to do that. Let's take these two. Duplicate. Just zooming in. It covers it pretty nicely. And I guess this one does have to extend past the other two. That's why I like doing this in blender because you get your transformed attributes. You get to get your more accurate modeling placement when it comes to your kits. Unless it's a four very large scale pipeline, then you're definitely going to want to prioritize very, very planned out modular pieces. We're just building out our village here. Okay, not bad at all. I grab the bottom ones, change their UV islands. Okay, I'll just grab this one, too. So now I notice these little triangle points, and we'll try to get these really quick. I'm guessing, as usual, this will be best started off from a plank. Start from top you, rotate it this way, then RX let's do RY negative 90. Do we want to bring these out more? No, I'm okay with that. So we're just gonna bring this plank in. Yeah, that's in the correct spot. I'll bring in this side. I think I just need to bring in this side. Double check its way to normals. Yeah, yeah, I'm okay with that. I'm just gonna duplicate it. Let's re try that. I'm going to do shifty X. We're gonna cross a few times and then press Shift R. I'm to check out this other side, too. So RZ let's try negative 90 RZ 90. Okay. And I'll do Shifty X or sorry, let's try that again. Shifty Y and Shift R. That looks pretty good, too. I don't think we need it on these other sides, but we might need it on the back. No need it on the back. I guess I'm being a bit particular. Nothing wrong with putting this on the back if it supports the scaffolding. I'll rotate it on the active element. I'll check out solid mode. That looks pretty good to me. Okay, now let's tackle this really quick. I'm just gonna bevel this. I don't mind two or three segments. Now, I'll add a weight to normals. What's assign a material right quick. I know the backhuse is the base color. So with this box, let's go ahead and UV onwrap it the way I wanted to. But we have to apply our bevel first. I'll press Shift H on this. So I'm checking out the top. Checking out the corners. And then I'll do that same for the bottom. I like where those vertices pinch right there. I'm grabbing those ones. And now it'll just grab one of the back vertical edges. Control click, Control E, mark the Seam. I did live wrap. I never worked with that, but it totally did the trick. I guess it's just automatically resetting that unwrap function every time we place a seam. So check out the textile density. Yeah, this kind of confirmed to me that our textures are a little bit small, especially for the two K. We probably don't need 1024. But we'll fix that a little bit later. At least it's tiling correctly. So I'm checking out the weighted normal. I'm checking out the UV map, and this is pretty good to go for that building shape. Now, for this roof shape, originally, I tried a bevel system, and we could totally do that. Take a look at this and see already why it's being fussy. Let's go ahead and find out why. Could it be the normals. And it was the normals. So originally, I did the weighted normals with this. I'll shade smooth. Let's see. Why clamp them? Will they automatically merge? Maybe I'll try weld. That doesn't look fantastic either. So you may as well not have those bevel edges reach. So we can go with this or you can go with just a simple subdivision surface method. You know, it looks worse right now. But we can add some loop cuts. And I'm going to look at these edges over here. And I'm just adding some support loops. This gives us a different type of smooth effect. And hm, to put dge loop through here wouldn't it be impossible put one down the middle, bevel it. Actually, without breaking this wire frame, we'll check it out. We'll bevel this. Then I would probably, uh, inset these. Then like join these vertices together. Oops. I'm gonna have to do that one split at a time. See how I'm grabbing these back ones? Whoops. I'll merge vertices by distance. Dissolve some edges. And now we can put in a vertical edge loop, as well. So this would be the subdivision surface version of it, and I think I do want this version simply because not only will it give us more room to play with for the vertex painting or actually. In this version, I'm actually not looking for more vertices due to the vertex painting. I'm looking for more vertices due to the particle system that I would like to use later. We're going to use the same grass card to spawn some fur for our roof. And so instead of that simple weight to normal method, I do like some of the more organic shapes that we're getting out of here. I could even lift this up a little bit and be a little less off grid now. We can go ahead and get some softer shapes. Take a look. Yeah, I really enjoy the softness of it, but we're gonna have to apply this. Check out the total density. And we'll see if we could survive with one. And we'll be completely fine with just one subdivision. 'Cause we'll spawn roof cards on this as well, but at least we have a nice even distribution. So that's how you would handle one of the roofs. The reason why I'm talking about it so much is because I'll just be repeating all this for the house, and I've decided these will go uncommuated. You will survive because we've learned a lot through this house alone. This is the only one with the complex scaffolding. So let's check out what we have to do next for this house. Let's just see if we could find a UVN wrap for this guy. I'll isolate it. And I know I want to isolate this bottom face so I'm grabbing the boundary loops. And I'm not entirely sure if we want to cut off the sides from each other or if we want to split it down the middle. But we'll capture the sides first. That might not be the appropriate side, either. We'll try something like this. I'll unwrap it, and we'll try unwrap conform. Not much different on either one. I just want to preview the underlying sorry, the underlying roof material. Okay, I would just rotate all this 90 degrees, really. And, even though this will be covered in fur, it does match the direction I was going for. Yeah, officially 1024 is just too big. This might be a good outlet to find out what official textil density we want. Even if we view it at a distance, not sure if we want 256 or 512. We'll be brave and do 512, but I definitely wouldn't recommend 1024 for the rest of this project. So with that in mind, I'll go to the water wheel. This is Water Wheel one, and it is the one object I wanted. Now I'm looking for the finished collection. I'm gonna move this into finished, get rid of this. And we don't need the procedural version of this waterwheel anymore, so I'm going to delete that, as well. I know we worked hard on it, but we still have a beautiful final version. So I'm checking these out, and I will join these together. I'll join it with this one. Just trying to get a little more organized. I will move these assets over here. So I'm just trying to make sure I have a good view of everything that we finished because I'm going to select all of it. Go to Edit Mode, and I'll set all the texil density to 512. If this crashes blender, I totally regret this. So, luckily, it did work. It didn't crash anything. Yeah, I like that texil density more, and we have roughness controls and tip controls we can play within onRelater. Yeah, I'll keep this beam and rotate it. But we can always use it for something else soon. But I'm looking over here. I'm giving it one last ocular pat down. And the last thing we need to do is add some of the wood planks. So I'm going to be a little bit messy with this. I'm not looking to create the perfect circumference. Just want to get the general orientation correct. I'm gonna turn off grid snapping, as well. I know it feels barbaric to duplicate without a curve, but this is not gonna take long for me, and I just feel like it takes less hassle. Uh, let's see. SY negative one. Did not like that. Shift D. Control A, rotation is scale, SY negative one, and now it's less fussy. Not bad at all. I'll grab a couple of Zs. And I'll just move these around. Oops. Move these around, make sure they're at the correct textil density. They are. And near the end, we will scatter our cards onto this roof, but we're not going to handle that right now. So look at these. And let's take one last examination. We would use the rails from earlier to modularly scatter this. These would just be simple walls that were beveling with those three segments, and then UV mapping. We would copy the exact same process from this roof to this roof to these, including the scaffolding, just a couple modular wood planks. This is just going to be one simple cube and one simple plank that is UV mapped. We'll UV map these cylinders and get those pipes we made earlier to place on top. And we'll do this one last house with all the exact same methods. So the rest of this modeling session will go uncommentated, but probably untime lapsed. I'll just try to dig through these models, and after I'm done modeling, we will discuss final preparations and how we set this up for unreal engine. So don't worry. I'm not hiding anything from you. I just don't think these are an essay's worth of information. We're just going to be watching a nice amount of modeling. So let's go back to material view. So I'm going with the 5.12 Texel density now, and that's what we'll aim for with these assets. You can always pick whatever you like. But enjoy the rest of the modeling session in the next video. These are an essay's worth of information. We're just going to be watching a nice amount of modeling. So let's go back to material view. So I'm going with the 5.12 Texel density now, and that's what we'll aim for with these assets. You can always pick whatever you like. But enjoy the rest of the modeling session in the next video. 29. 27 Village Modeling Part 05: [No Speech] 30. 28 Village Modeling Part 06: Oh 31. 29 Village Modeling Part 07: So my models finished. I've consolidated them in a way that I think I want to snap them together in unreal engine, even though this isn't a modular city. And all I did off camera was share the origin points of these random, like, additions of the houses to the same origin point as the actual house. So I would press something like shift cursor to selected, and I just select everything in object set origin to three D cursor. I just did that a couple of times for these houses, and that was pretty much it. They're still separate objects. I just wish I didn't join the wood planks earlier during the modeling phase. I know that was time lapse, but still super embarrassing. Keep a couple of these so that you can duplicate them across much easier. But luckily, at least we're done with the modeling and everything's looking good. A bit of an impromptu addition to this project is, I'd like to find a way to add a couple of Alpha carts to these roof haystacks. What I'm thinking is we can use our original grass particle system. If I go into shading, I can try to add a plane. I'll rotate it towards us. And I'll apply the rotation in scale. I'm just going to make a new material for this and call it a roof card. And it's going to use the same Alpha as our grass card. So I'm going to go ahead and hunt that down. And here's our grass card. Now, I'll just use the Alpha for this. We can get a similar color to that current brown. Again, we can tint this in engine. But here's a pretty simple grass card. We want to spawn this on the roof meshes, and we're not going to dive into geometry nodes, so we're going to use a pretty simple particle system, and we'll see if it can follow the normal of this roof. So there's the modifier stack, and below it is particles. But go ahead and add one. So there's a couple settings we need to change, and the first one is I'll set it to hair, and I'll also click Advanced so we have rotation. For Render, we're going to render as an object, and I'll select Roof card. Let's name it just in case. And I'll select it as the instance object. It's looking pretty crazy, but it is spawning on there. What I'd like to check out I think I'm okay with having roof cards come out the bottom, but we're going to have to check out the rotation first. Let's go to the rotation. I'll check it on, and I think normal or normal tangent might treat us a little bit better. We can check out the phase at this. So it seems like it's going to rotate it on its Z axis. So what I'm going to do is press Shift S, cursor is selected. I'm going to lift this card up a meter with transform attributes off or correct face attributes. So this at the three D cursor, I think I'll want to rotate the card in a specific way around that cursor. So I'm just looking at these cards. I'm going to press R and Y or R and X. So we see it bending forward or bending back. I'll press RX again. We're seeing that kind of lift now. See if we need to change its Z axis. It doesn't seem like it. How about its Y axis? And so far, it seems like a rotation in this direction is going to do us well. So I'll rotate it this way, as well. We'll take another look at the particle system. So we can definitely increase the hair length. And we'll probably want all these to face the other direction. With some randomized, that's always okay. And, you know, we're working with Unreal Engine five. We're being a little bit cheap with the opaque surfaces and then kind of expensive with the Alpha cart surfaces, and that's okay because we're not going to be making our opaque shaders too wild. So I'm taking a look at how it's distributing across here, and I do like it. I'll see if we could find random scale. I enjoy that, too, and a little bit of randomized phase never hurt anyone. So it could be better, but it could be worse. I'm enjoying how it's looking. We could always see if normal versus normal and tangent work better for us. So maybe I could change the phase once again. I think in this scenario, normal is going to work better for us. I'm going to see if we can maybe copy paste the same particle systems. So let's see what we can do. I see the options copy active to selective objects and copy all copy particle systems from the active object to selective objects. Maybe we'll try this one. So I'm going to select these roof meshes. And that seemed to work out well. I don't think I'm going to cut out reading out which one of these options worked out because you just want to take a look inside the software and get to know it. The conversion to actually turn this into a mesh can be kind of funky as far as I remember, so I might cut, I might not. Okay, so I did cut because there is a little bit of a process. So I'm going to switch to layout mode to make our lives easier, and I'm also going to isolate these roof meshes. I'll press Shift H. For this one, this first roof, I'm going to make some new collections. I want to put these in their own collections because converting them to a mesh can be a little bit messy. The names don't really matter. So what we're going to do first is click Make Instances Real. See how this is all isolated in a collection. We're going to delete the particle system because it's still on this roof, so I'll delete it. And so with that deleted, just hit the other collections really quick. This is our roof mesh, so I'll press Control I to select everything else and select one of these. And I'm just making sure that this is a single user. I'm creating a single user by clicking on that little panel in the data properties. And I think if we press Control J, it should be able to join without duplicating the mesh. And luckily, it did do that successfully. So yeah, that would be the mesh. These would be the particle instances. And if you don't click on that number to make it a single user, it will duplicate that roof a bunch of times. So I had to cut a couple of times to make sure that we did that process error free. I'm going to go ahead and try that out for the other roofs. I'll just hide this collection. Okay. We'll make the instances real. I will delete that from the panel. We'll go to a roof card, and we'll make it a single user, select everything and deselect the roof. Grabbing one card. I'll make the single user and press Control J. Okay, and I'm going to repeat that process four more times and it might be sped up just a little bit. Okay, these should be our completed roof meshes. I'm going to unhide the finished collection, see if everything is in the right place. We're not going to need to export this card. Don't mind putting it in just one of the random sections. And let's go ahead and fix the normals on this. I'm just going to press Select all vertices and press Shift N. I should fix that. And we'll do the same for this object. Shift N. It's just recalculating those normals. Taking a look at how the normals are smoothed on these hay meshes, and I'm pretty okay with how they came out. So now I'm okay joining them. I just didn't want to join them at first to make sure that everything is operating and being joined together in the way I intended, making sure that these roof meshes are clean. So I'm bringing it back down, and I'll just press on both of these as Control J. Control J. Just repeating that. And like before, I do want to make sure that they share the data of the house or the same location. So I'm putting the three D cursor there, set origin of three D cursor. Do the same for this house. Do the same for this one. One's in a good spot. Checking out if I'm okay with the location of this one, I might want to center it out a little more. So with everything selected, I think I could just go to the top down view, go to Edmo You know what might be a little bit safer, actually, is just grabbing this middle vertice. Let's just put the cursor there. Objects at origin origin, a three D cursor, and I'll make sure that they all share that same location. So I'm seeing that if I select everything and I press Alt G, I want them to be joined together. Not sure if that was the case for this window. Let's hide this and find out. We'll get these our little tests. Just double checking that they all share the same location. I'll press Alt G to give that a quick test. And they did all move to the same spot. So this is what I want to move around in unreal. So I'll move the for sure finished assets over here, and we'll keep giving these a quick test. Just go to make sure that they're all in the spot that I want them to be and I'll press Alt G. Make sure we grab that window at the side, too. And that also works correctly. We'll try out this one. Seem to have survived, move it over. This house G, move it over. Let's get this one. We're just making sure that these are going to move the way we want to in real engine. Checking out this I'll price AG. And I know I do want this to rotate around from the center of that wheel, so I'm okay with this at this location. Going to make sure I select everything, literally everything, and apply the rotation in scale. What I'm also going to do is on every single one of these, I believe, except for these roof mesh Okay. I'm going to select all these and add the way to normal again. So let's find our active object. Let's make sure we have an active object, add a way to normal, and I'll press Control L and copy modifiers. That should clean up all the topology, and I'll press convert to mesh really quick. That's the wheel looking good. These were our kind of pieces that we didn't need for the final iteration. I think we'll keep this one, though, because that's the one we could just kind of duplicate around in engine. So I'm just going to move these to a random collection. We can always find those later. This wall, yeah, they're all sharing a location I appreciate. So I'm giving that a good view, and that works out for me. Ps TH make sure all that's working together. Okay. And we'll move this one. Let's see how our main house is doing. Select everything. Um, let's just bring this let's bring all of this to the world origin. I'm just going to press Control A and apply all transforms. That way, for sure, if I move this, our main piece and our scaffolding is in the correct spot. This is just one mesh. This is just one mesh, and this is just one mesh. I'll bring this back. This is our little fence object that we'll have towards the front. Gonna rotate it this way, apply all transforms, and maybe I'll want one that's pretty standard, and maybe one that is slightly tilted. We can even create another duplicate and see if we can kind of even out how we feel about these planks doing what they're doing artistically. We could have two fence meshes. There are definitely no rules. So maybe I'll drag this first one down. Maybe just lift this one. Just giving the quick test. Okay. And yeah, I'll keep it like this. We'll have two fence meshes. Are they any different? Did I really model them the exact same way? And I did. So you know what? Real recognizes Reel. That was a good fence mesh, and we'll just keep this one. That should be it for the actual modeling process of this fantastic job, everyone. I know they're not all joined yet. What I'll do is I've already been a little bit destructive with the modeling in the first place. So first, I'll make sure that everything is just in the finished collection, and I don't want to join a single other object. I have gone much too far with that. So we'll just duplicate this hierarchy. And, you know, not joining things can kind of bloat your modeling process. We already have so many folders here just for the sake of keeping things if we need them. But it's not always necessary and we've totally survived the process while joining things together. I still looks okay. Okay, so with this finished one, I'll just duplicate the collection. And now we can probably join our house meshes together. Just pressing Control J on these. I'm not gonna join this. Taking a look at that. Okay. Okay, these ones, these ones. Now we can start naming things. So I'm going to put the prefix static mesh first. We'll call this pillar support. Static mesh fence, static mesh, stone, duplicate the collection. And now we can probably join our house meshes together. Just pressing Control J on these. I'm not going to join this. Taking a look at that. Okay. Okay, these ones, these ones. Now we can start naming things. So I'm going to put the prefix static mesh first. We'll call this pillar support. Static mesh fence, static mesh, stone. What is this? We'll call it planter. This is the house closest to us house closest to us. We'll call it house one. This is the 1 second closest to us, so it's House 02. Let's make sure we get the prefix on there. I think we should consider the main house House 03. These ones are further back. We'll call this one the fourth one. This is the fifth. Look at this as the sixth. Check out what these others are. Okay. Let's get static Mesh, Water wheel Static Mesh, water wheel support. And I'll just do static Mesh wall. Yeah, we're going to have to live with these two being joined together. You know, if you wanted to extend farther within the engine, you can export these as individual planks and start going really crazy. If anything, you have those extra pieces in the little Zoo file or the Zoo collection, and you can make a couple more planks to if you're working with your own concept, if you want to do modular level design, because we did work within the grid system within Blender, but you can also work with the exact same proportions and units within unreal engine. So I wanted to do the modular building within Blender because we were able to deal with the UV maps a lot easier in this scenario. So I'll name this collection final and we'll hide the other one. Oh, in the Zoom, we actually almost lost our pillar. Don't forget him. Let's bring him back. And I'll move get him. Let's bring him back. And I'll move this guy to Or we'll move him to finished. Finished, we'll duplicate him and put him in final. Like I said, it's always nice to have clean backups when you can. So we'll just call this static mesh pillar. Perfect. So I'm going to grab all these and press Alt G. Everything should be back to the world origin. And these are all in okay areas and what are and with our final meshes, I'm just going to hide the other assets. And what I'm going to speed up is the process of exporting these meshes. So with this fence, I'll give you an example, and then we'll be going through the rest a little bit sped up. So we have our fence asset, and I'll go to game FBX, and I'll make a folder called the village again there again, the preset is selected objects, mesh, face smoothing, and then turn these off. And we'll just add a preset for that. So checking all that out, knowing that all the transforms are applied, I'm going to go ahead and name it to the exact same thing, and then I'll click Export. And that'll be the same process for all 13 of these meshes, and we will meet up to do the exact same process for both the foliage and the rocks. So this is about us getting the meshes into unreal. So turn off my mic and I'll see you guys in a little bit. You can watch me export these. And now I'm in the Rock project file, and I'm pretty much going to repeat the exact same process. We'll set it to the mesh Export we've developed, and we're going to go to Game FBX, and I'll name it appropriately. Do the same for these ones live with you, and then we will hop into the foliage project as well. I'm just going to go File Open and foliage. Here's our final ones. So, again, probably speed this up a little and just export these one at a time in a folder called foliage within that game FBX tection as well. I guess we could do that a little bit after. So like the other names, you copy the Static Mesh name, get your preset and export. I'll see you in a minute once all of these are exported. Stop the export process. Just make sure to remember the fundamentals. Everything should go at the origin point. And you can always use a little two meter cube because that is the same height as a six foot man. And so I'm making these trees just a little taller than a guy. And then we did that same process for scaling for both the village and the rocks. So we got an awesome portfolio ready asset kit ready to go in our three D modeling packages, and now we're going to hop into the adventure of how to convert uh, simple mesh ideas into awesome, lovely final Unreal engine assets. So we have one giant last adventure to go through, and I'm looking forward to it. So thanks for getting this far with me. Next, we will hop into Unreal Engine, see what we can import, see what works, see what doesn't, go from there, and then we'll begin working on shading our Unreal Engine world. So I'll see you in Unreal in a little bit. And then we'll begin working on shading our Unreal Engine world. So I'll see you in Unreal in a little bit. 32. 30 Landscape Shader Part 01: So after many, many moons, we finally have our lego pieces, and we have our blockout. We have our, you know, strong three D reference. We have everything we need to build a level, except color and shading. That is why we have to go on one last giant adventure to shade this level as professionally as we can. And that means we're going to go beyond just the basics. So take one last look at this gray world, and it might get uglier before it gets prettier, but that's the way it goes. So we're going to take this into a specific order. I want to start with the landscape shader because that's going to develop our runtime virtual textures. And then those textures will blend in a little bit nicely with the bottom of the blend shader. And so the blend shader, I just want for the walls. Everything else can use a little bit more of a basic shader, but I really want the option to vertex paint on the wall. So we're going to be blending two materials together for that. Once we have all of these colored appropriately, we'll go back to our landscape and start focusing on the grass and foliage. We're going to make on the grass and foliage. We're going to make a trunk shader, a grass shader, a flower shader, so on and so forth. And after that, you know, the rocks will share the same basic prop shaders the rest of these. So then we'll hop into more, you know, bonus shaders, like the water, and, you know, we'll polish up the scene a little bit and add a cool lighting effect here and there. So this will really come together nicely. But I'm not gonna lie. We do have quite a bit of work to do, even though we've already come so far, so don't give up on me yet. We've come a long way. I'm going to make a new folder in the meshes file called Village and one called foliage. Now, I'm going to go back to the game FBX folder that we had, and I'll start dropping in these assets, and, you know, sometimes it doesn't always work out on the first try. And that's why if we need to go back to blender for a little bit, we can do that. But like I can do that. But like that. And then in static meshes, I'm gonna check Build. And this isn't really a course about nanite type assets. So we're not gonna build Nanite. No importing animations or materials 'cause we've made our own, and that is fine. Let's see if it imports everything appropriately. We'll cross our fingers. So these meshes seemed to have imported correctly. Before we continue, let's move on to the foliage we had developed as well. And I'll just throw all these in with the same settings. And that looks good to me, too. So I'll look at our And that looks good to me, too. So I'll look at our materials. We know that it's empty right now. And so there's a couple of things we could set up for our landscape. Select the landscape, giving it a good bird's eye view. I'm thinking about what we need. And we want our runtime virtual texture. So I'm going to go to the add asset and volume, and I'll add a let's see if we can find it a runtime Virtual texture volume. I'm going to rename it and call it RVT color. And let's go ahead and set the bounds. I'll click on the eyedropper, get the landscape. Let's see. It's not going to let us change yet, and that's probably because we need to assign a texture, so we will go back to that. In the meantime, I'll duplicate it and call this one RVT height. And so in this Maps folder, because we're working with our shared resources, our messy folder, if you will, I'll look for a texture, for a texture, and I'm going to look to add a runtime virtual texture. We'll just use the same name, RVT color, and I'll check out the settings. And I'll bring this up a little bit. We can always increase it or decrease it depending on the needs of the asset. And so for the color, in this scenario, we could inherit the base color, normal roughness and specular, as is often recommended, but we're going for something pretty stylized. I'm only worried about the base color. We could use texture compression. In fact, I think we may want that because we don't want too much detail within these grass maps anyways. I'll save that. I'm going to duplicate this and call it RVT height. Let's see if we do need to change anything. Let's go ahead and change this to world height. For now, that's all I'm going to change. I know we're working with a really large texture, so I'll see if 1024 can pull this off. But back to our volumes, I'll assign the correct texture. So in height, assign it to height and color, assign it to color, and we can't set the bounds now. So select the landscape, select set bounds. RBT color, select the landscape and set bounds. If we change it, we're going to have to reset the bounds, and that's okay. So the textures are set up, our volumes are set up, and now we need our landscape to recognize these two volumes. So we're going to scroll down to virtual texture and add two array elements. I'll go ahead and add color, and I'll add height. So we have the basic setup we need for the runtime virtual texture, and Immaterials, we'll go ahead and add our first official material, which is a basic material, we'll call it master material underscore landscape. Let's open it. We'll it Let's open it. We'll make it full screen, and now we're going to take a bit of a deep dive into creating our landscape material. So I took you in. Now I'm going to take you out. Let's make sure that all these textures we've worked super hard on are actually in the game engine, as well. So I'm going to make a new folder called tiling, and I'm also going to hunt down the textures we've created earlier. I'm going to go in one by one because I don't want to grab every single map. I know I want the Albedo normal and perhaps the ORM, or actually both of these, both the OD and the ORM. Maybe the height just in case, and I think just those five. Put this in a folder called T Bark. So now I'm going to look at my Textures folder, and I'm going to copy the same folder names only because I'm not looking to drag in every single one. And so in each of these folders, again, I'll go into the appropriate folder and grab the Albedo, height, normal or M or D, not the roughness. So those five maps. And it looks like we didn't set this one to linear, so the texture came in a little bit bright. And so we can fix that pretty much live. I'll go. So I'm going to click on reimport file, reimport and fix that up. So go back to the textures folder, and I'm just going to repeat the process for each of these folders. And I am going to make one more folder for the foliage, top back into our landscape material, and we can actually start working on adding our textures. So the first thing we'll do is press T and then click to add a texture, and I'll convert this to a parameter. I'm going to call it grass color because we're looking to create two materials, both our grass and our dirt. So I'll duplicate this and I'll rename it to grass normal. And for the landscape materials, I want to use ORD instead of ORM, just so I have access to their height maps in case we want it. So for this one, I'll call it grass ORD. Let's go ahead and hunt down our textures now. Looks like what I might need to do is go to the main tab. I'll click on settings, and I'm going to uncheck show engine content. That way, we're not searching up too many random things. So I'll look up grass. And here's the ORD, a look of grass normal, a look of grass normal, a look up grass color. Now, what I would like to do for basically most of our color textures in this is be able to control the saturation, brightness and hue, as well. And so instead of kind of muddying up our graph with a bunch of notes just to be able to control that, I'd rather introduce us to material functions. So in our materials folder, we're going to have to make some new folders, one called master. We'll put our landscape in. One called instance because we're going to be making child materials based off of these shaders and one called functions, which are these tiny graphs that we fit into our master graphs. So I'm going to right click and make a material and make a material function. In advanced. And I'll call this MF for material function and function and call this one color controls. Let me go ahead and open it up. And I just want to get the input, the color map we put into it, and I want us to be able to get our colors out of it. So I'm going to right click and create an input. And I do want it to be a vector three. What we'll do first is multiply it by a tent. And to get a tint, I'll hold three and click down and I'll convert it to a parameter. Actually, we don't need to convert it to a parameter in the function unless we really want to, but there's going to be a lot of cases where I want to deal with it in the master graph. So we'll use that as a preview value. Let's get a new input and just call it tint with that in mind. I'm okay with it also being a vector three. So now I want to get a desaturation node, and it does the opposite of changing desaturation slider. So we could invert this, but I think it just makes this, but I think it just makes more sense in this scenario to understand that it's desaturation. So I'll make a new input, and this is a scalar. It's just a number, right? It's a strength. So I'll call it desaturation. And that would be the strength in there. You can actually double check to make sure that is how that is working. Yes. Yes. That's correct. So we're saturating it, we're tinting it, and I also want to add a hue shift. What I'm going to do is just duplicate this and call this one the hue shift. And this should go into the texture. I think if I hold control, I can move the connector. And if I just take a multiply node with a scaler, I'll use the input. This will be the final brightness of it. I'll call it brightness. Just for fun, we can even add cheap for fun. We can even add cheap contrast to this. I'll do the RGB one in this sense. I think we would want to leave some default values in, but we'll take care of that in engine. You know, since it is important to make sure that these default values are at least agreeing with us. So we know we're not looking to change the hue shift by default. Zeros okay. By default, I like to multiply this all by one, and the brightness should be one by default. In the contrast, I think we're actually going to leave it at zero. I believe that's the correct default value. So I'm just going to plug this into the output. And in these functions, if something is plugged into it, I'll use preview value as default. I'm going to do it for this one. And yeah, we'll just check them all for all of these because they seem to be the correct values I want by default anyways. Default anyways. And we'll call this first input the base color. So that's what we want to put into it. Now if I save it, what I'm going to do is press control space to open the content browser, and we can find that function. And I can drag this in here. So it does want the base color. And the rest of the values are at default, which is perfectly fine, but we are going to add some scalar parameters to this. So the value of that goes into the base color, and I want to grab three scalars, the way I'm going to do that is by holding S and then left clicking, and we can name these numbers. I want to get one for the desaturation, so I'm calling it grass desaturation. I'll duplicate it twice. And I know I want controls for the brightness and the contrast and the hue shift. So for this one, let's do the hue shift I think I only need contrast for I think I only need contrast for the landscape materials. But yeah, even though I don't want to overload the amount of scalers we have, contrast is pretty important when it comes to the final output of the landscape. So I'm going to do grass contrast as well. That's why we have these default values, so we don't have to plug them in every single time. Get hue shift, desaturation, you know, put brightness. And we could even put a tint in here. So let's just fill out the entire function. By default, we will be tinting it by white. And so we're actually going to make another function for this grass color because instead of creating a bunch of different grass layers that we would then have to paint with different colors to get some variation, what I'd rather do is just add a function that sort of overlays a couple of different noises on it, and then a couple of different noises on it, and then we can overlay colors on that. And so if you can imagine this to be a big, grassy landscape, we can end up getting some yellows here, some blues here, and it'll look really nice in the overall final picture. But what we'll have to do first is create a new function. So I'm going to do the same thing material advanced material function, and we'll call this one landscape grass color, little long, but we will survive through it. So in this new landscape function, we got to add a bunch of landscape coordinates. So I'm looking at landscape and then layer coordinates. Let's go ahead and get that one. And it's really big by default, so we're actually going to divide it a little bit. I'll make a new scaler. We'll call it color oh one tiling, and for now, we'll just set it to two. Like, we'll just set it to two, like this divide. And so we need a mask that's going to generate these they could be brushstrokes, they could be grunges. What I think I'm going to do is go to the resources folder in our texture and look up the RGBA textures. We could pick any one of these. For example, I think for this one for fun, I'm going to pick number four. We'll choose this texture. And the mode I want to set this to is shared wrap. That way, if we duplicate this texture, we're not adding more samplers, we're just telling unreal to look at this texture once again. So I'm just going to plug a really quick, a cheap contrast into it and actually don't want the RGB. I just want the red channel for this one. I'll add a scalar, and I'll call this mask contrast. I'm going to get a multiply node so we can set the strength of it and set it to color one strength. If you play with the contrast too much, you might break out of the zero to one range. So I'll plug a saturate node in there, and that's just the quick way to clamp numbers 0-1. And this would make for a great mask. And so similar to a blend in designer, we're going to use a larp. It's just a copy blend between two different values. And so our base value, we should get an input. I'll get the function input. And that should be what we're working with in the master material. It could be the base color. But now we can pick a color to blend in between these two. So I'm gonna press three to add a tint, and I'll call it color one. I'm just going to get something generic and green. And we'll plug that into the B channel of the larp. And so we basically want to replicate this type of math just two more times with color one. I mean, color two and color three. So I'm just copying and pasting. And instead of that base color, I'm going to plug the larp into the A value of this larp. So let's call this one color two. Maybe not color 21 and color two. So for this one, I'll just get something a little bit more blue for fun. And we'll keep mask contrast the same, or we can change it. It'll really be up to us and how we're feeling. So we'll duplicate this one more time. We'll plug the AVL and we'll name this color three, so we can get all three channels from our masks. Now we're going to use the green channel and blue channel of these masks. So I'm just going to plug the green channel into this cheap contrast, and I'll plug the blue channel into this cheap contrast. And that's pretty much all we need for the output result. We have the option to mess with this mask more, right? We can duplicate this on top of another noise so we can take some of it out and we can decide if we want to do that later. But for now, we'll keep it like this, and this is our landscape grass color. So back in here, I can grab our material functions and just plug the base color into here. We should have all the scalar parameters we need into this function itself itself. 33. 31 Landscape Shader Part 02: We've come far. We want actual tiling for our base material, as well. So I'm going to get the landscape layer coordinates. And we can divide this once again. And I'm going to make a scalar perimeter and coll it craft tiling instead of looking for a node that might be called one. Sometimes I do that. Base material should have more tiling than our brushstrokes. We'll just plug that into here. So let's grab our other maps. And instead of plugging these into the base landscape, what I'm going to do is get a node called make material attributes. And in this landscape, we're going to set this to use material attributes. That way, we're basically making multiple materials in one landscape. So with that, we know that this is our base color. For our normal, we're going to plug this into the normal. And we have our occlusion roughness displacement. So I'm just going to plug this directly into roughness and for the green oh, sorry, I'm going to get the red and plug it directly into ambient occlusion. If we could find it. My apologies. We'll take the green and plug it into roughness. And this isn't metal, right? This is our displacement. So I'm actually going to get a new node called the named reroute node and call it grass. Height. For now, we can plug that directly into the displacement if we need it, but we may use it and we may not use it because in this specific style, I may want a specific height tile. I may want a specific height texture to blend between these materials. So I'm going to frame this. Oh, and instead of right clicking to frame, like in designer, we're going to click C to comment in Unreal Engine, and I'll call this the grass. And so I'm basically looking to duplicate this for now because we want to create our dirt. So I'll drag this down. And it's time to start renaming a ton of things. I'm renaming this to dirt color dirt norm dirt RD, dirt tiling. Dirt height, and we don't need the landscape grass color for this, so I'm just going to get rid of that. So so far so good. And yeah, we're going to use a new height texture to blend between those two. I'll get a landscape layer coordinates, and I'll divide it so we can get some tiling in here and height tiling. As you can see, I'm getting a little faster because I know I can press S to get some scaly parameters. You can always slow this down or pause it or take a screenshot. You know, we're just looking to build our materials. I'll give this a similar tiling, but we'll give it a larger value with five. And so I'm going to get a new texture sample I don't know if we need to make this a parameter if we find a good noise right off the bat, but I'm typing in noise, and I think I'm going to pick something kind of contrasted like this one. It's a lot more interesting of a mask to use rather than our base height maps. And this is what will be used to create a little bit of an interesting variation in our material blending. So I have a cheap contrast node, and I do want the ability to change the contrast. So I'm making a node called height contrast. I'll leave it at default. And so to blend everything together, we're going to need a node called landscape layer blend. And its settings are in here in the left. We're going to add two layers. The first one will be grass, and the second one will be and we're going to set the mode to height blend. For the preview value, just so we can see something up here, if this still works, I'll set it to one. And our first layer is the grass, so I'm going to take that whole material and plug it in here. Our second material is the dirt. So take that whole material and plug it in here. And remember, all the project files are going to be included. So when the shaders get really messy, you could always reference the final shaders. So now we can use this as the height of both of these layers. I'm going to click on break or I'm going to add a node called break material attributes because now Unreal Engine is considering this to be one material, and I can even add a couple of edits to this material before we In fact, I just realized because we want individual control over these, I'm going to unclick use material attributes because as long as it accepts these, I'm perfectly happy. So for Sardis, we'll grab the normal, and I'm going to get a node called normal flat. Or it might be flat and normal. There we go. And it's sort of like desaturation in which the number is reverse. So by default, I'm going to leave it with the name normal flatness and dragging it to negative one would actually make it stronger. So just keep that in mind. I'll plug that into the normal parameter of our landscape. And for our base color, we know that we want to plug it into here. But we also want to start outputting the runtime virtual texture. So I'm going to get a node called runtime virtual texture output. This is a little formula that you just learn time and time. Again, you take the world position and with its new update, with its new update, you could drag the Z channel and plug it directly into World Height, and we can do that. However, the traditional alternative is to take the XYZ and get a mass component and then Mascots blue channel, which is the same thing. I'm a little bit of a chicken, so I'm going to keep it like this because I did not come up with this method. But basically, as long as our color is plugged into the base color and it can review our height, it can now output the final texture onto the grass shader that we'll be creating later. So there is one more material function I would like to create, and it's because I like to have control over my roughness, specular and metal, as well as my ambient seclusion whenever I'm generating the final output of a material. So there is one more material function to make. So let's go ahead and create it. We're going to go to material advanced material function. We call this material function rough spec. Too hard to create. We just need a couple inputs and a couple outputs. These are just very basic things I do to each input and output regarding these values. We'll call this metallic and we just need roughness. And specular because we are going to do a little something something to it. And I'm going to get one more for ambit collusion, even though it's not so prevalent in the lumen versions of Unreal. So now we need our input version of this. I'm going to get some function inputs, and these only need to be scalar values because the mask is from the ORD Ms or the ORMDs. And so we'll call this one metallic. We'll do that a couple times so that we can get the roughness and ambient occlusion, as well. We could put some preview values in here. I could set these to one. By default, these to one. By default, it's just a full value, so it doesn't go completely black on us. For metallic, I want these to be zero by default. We're not always dealing with metallic values. And what I basically want is just the ability to define how strong metallic is in each material. Not always necessary, definitely, but it's good to set up your little systems. Yeah, by default, it's zero. So now every time we plug the value into it, we can change the strength of it. We'll just put that in there. And for specular, I am just going to get a quick scar parameter and call it specular strength. We don't really need to mess with anything. I just quickly want the ability in our material instance to change its value. And the best default value for that is 0.5. There's no input to put into her. So we'll get a preview value for this and by default, let's set it to one. Lug this directly into the actually, let's get a multiplier similar to this one. I'll copy and paste it. We'll call it the roughness strength. I will clamp the metallic to one. See how I click there and click Slider Max. But roughness, I'm okay. Leaving it at whatever value we need. We just need to saturate it at the end. So it has its preview value. It's checked on, and we're putting in that roughness. Make a little room, one, two, three, four outputs, and that's pretty good to go. I'm going to click Save on that, go back to our landscape, and we'll grab our function. The wires might get cross, but it's okay. You know, roughness can go into here and occlusion can go in here, normal tan it can go here. So I'm just going to plug these into the desired outputs. And that should pretty much be all we need for the actual landscape material. We'll go ahead and save it. Let's do a quick hot fix. I want to make sure that we plug correct the correct UVs into the correct textures. And as well, let's go ahead and actually make sure that we assigned our textures. So let's get the albedo. Let's get the dirt norm I need dirt or D. Go ahead and save that. And I'm going to assign it to our landscape after we create a material instance from this. I'll call it MI landscape. And L, put it into the instance folder. Landscape selected. Let's scroll up to the material in a and we might have switched them around. Let's get our master, put it in here and make sure we assign those correctly. Okay, and now I'm going to assign this material. And in Unreal Engine 5.5, the setup is a little different. So I'll click on the landscape and press Shift two, and you might be a manager sculpt at the bottom, at this bottom right, there's a button called create layers from assigned materials. I'll click on that, and it does detect our materials, but we need to also create the layer info. So I'll click White blended layer, and I'll just put it in the Maps folder. Now, do it once more for the grass. And I'll click on Fill Layer for the grass. And so far so good, nothing seems to be broken, and I'm really enjoying all that hard work we put into the grass in the first place. If I go to the village and then make our landscape window smaller, this is our material instance. We have a couple options that we can go through. A lot of color options, definitely. I might even click on the cinicamera actor and then take a moment to look at my reference beside me and see if I can get the sun direction and landscape lighting I can get the sun direction and landscape lighting to agree with each other. So first with this directional light, I'll try to find a new rotation. Probably something closer to this. And I notice that the landscape is a little bit shiny. So this is why we made that function earlier and I'll set the specular to zero. In this style, I don't think a lot of specular is going to help us. Roughness, by default, I do want to change its preview value to one. So in the rough spec, I'll go to that scalar and set that to one. I'll save it and go back. And if I reset it, it should set to one correctly. Normal flatness looks okay. I'll leave the view for a moment. And we'll check out normal flatness. And it's totally okay to get some extra normal detail in there by going the reverse direction for the flatness. Damon are these grass colors. We'll see what the tiling does first. So that's pretty cool. It doesn't seem like I changed this third color enough, so that's a good enough reason to go back into the landscape grass color. And I'll look for something a little bit more yellow. We'll go back. Play with the strength. So now we get three different hues to play with. They're obviously too strong right now. And so we can fix that by going and changing the tiling of each one. I'll increase them by quite a lot. We're going to find something where these overlay with each other in a pretty organic fashion. And this might also be a good opportunity to go to the landscape grass and perhaps convert this to a parameter. We can call it the paint grass paint texture. I'll save it and go back. And now we have that texture available to us. We could even change these around. I'm detecting that it didn't apply to all the landscape grass colors, which is a good reason to go back and make sure that we're doing things properly. So we want these to all share the same texture. I suppose converting it to a parameter made it think that it was a different one. I'll press Save on this. And we'll try that again. And now we have the whole texture changing. Obviously, you could set this up in different ways. In so far, grass mask number two is doing the most for me. I could check out the mask contrast and lower it or decrease it. Oh, whoops, crab the wrong one. Vector or be really sharp. I don't even mind something in between so long as we change the strength of each of these. So I'm going to go ahead and make all this subtler. And play with the values that it is the happiest. It seems as though in our mass contrast, we might need one final linear interpolation between all of these. So I'm going to take the base color and we'll drag it down. And let's put it into a linear interpolate. We'll put this one into the B channel, and we'll add a scalar called grass paint strength. I'm going to plug this into the Alpha and put this into the output result. Let's save this as well. By default, I'll set it to one because we have other opacities to work with. So it's a good time to go find that now. I'm looking for grass paint strength, and we'll see what that final output is doing. So it tells me that I kind of want to lower the grass brightness in general. And now we have some more fun colors to overlay on top, and we'll just find that balance with the strengths. Little bit more greens, nothing wrong with that, but maybe we could change the tints slightly. Play with different tilings. I'll go pretty low for the blue. And I don't mind some stronger yellows. And now our grass has all these nice, pretty colors that distribute pretty nicely across the entirety of the landscape without needing to add an excessive amount of layers. And now add an excessive amount of layers. And now I'm just going to quickly check out the path. I can click on shift two again and go into paint. I'll lower the brush size. We'll go with 0.3 for now for the strength. And let's see if the blending is working correctly. It does. I'm okay with the strength. Let's lower the brush size, so I can press Shift to start erasing that layer. And I'll start dragging this across the path that we had in our blockout. Just slowly drawing across. Might take one or two passes through to get the fullness of the path that you're looking for. And that painterly height map we plugged in is definitely doing a good amount of work for us. It's a little messy right now cause of the blockout, but it won't stay like that. It's also Whoops. It's a little bit dark. So we can go into the dirt path brightness. Let's see if we can hunt it down. What we might have done is not changed or added color controls. And this is why I keep these windows up so we can navigate this stuff together and finish error free. Very easy fixes, but, you know, there's always nodes flying at you from all directions. So it's good to keep an open eye and test out a material instance before you move on to the next shade. Much better. And let's find maybe the contrast. Don't mind lowering it. Or perhaps the answer is the normal flatness. It is a little intense. I'll make the dirt brighter. I'll make the dirt brighter. Play with the saturation. I'm going to maybe get a wider brush in here, but then lower the strength. Okay. And the dirt path even looks pretty good, along with the grass. We could change the height texture if we want to. You could change it to a different noise. I might change the height tiling and the height contrast. You know, you can get some interesting variations in this. I'll press shift as well. Fun. We're doing little polish passes as we move in before we know it, our unreal engine level will be looking really, really good. I'm going to extend this path a little more out this way. Okay, that came out really great. I think next, we should probably start tackling the village assets that we worked really hard on these architectural assets. What we're going to do is make it both an architecture shader, which means we're going to vertex blend and paint the walls, as well as a simpler prop shader. I say simple, but both of them are going to require some custom functions that we're going to create, and, you know, like I said, 34. 32 Blend Shader Part 01: So going back into this, like I mentioned, we're going to texture the walls and all the wood beams with our two new shaders. So first, I'll make a new master material called MM Architecture. And this time first, I'd like to work on the new material functions that we need. And there are two material functions. Let's go ahead and add one. This one's going to be called World Space paint. Similar to landscape grass paint, but it's going to work a little differently. We're going to copy paste that and make a new material function called RVT blender. This will be responsible for everything that takes in the runtime virtual texture and will help us blend it into the assets. So we can work on world space paint first. What I'd like to do is get a texture object. We can convert it to a parameter. We'll call it the paint texture. Now the reason why I'm picking a texture object is because we're going to plug this into a world aligned texture. That way, it's like the triplanar projection in substance painter. We don't need UV maps to project this at all. So we'll get three different types of tiling. Actually, I want to be able to get a couple more controls over this, so I'll make a new scalar called paint tiling, and we'll put X Y and Z, so I and Z. So let's copy and paste these. I'll get one called Y, get one called Z. And I'm going to go ahead and put this into an append node, actually, not append many. We're trying to build up our vector, right? So I'll get a pen vector. So it knows it's X, I knows it's Y, and now we're getting it to know it's Z. Now I'll plug this into the texture si. So that is its tiling. Now we can add a couple edits to this with the X Y Z texture. I'm going to split the components. And in that paint texture, let's just go ahead and grab the RGBA mask of our choice. I don't mind trying number four this time, or, you know, you can use any RGBA noise that you please. So I'll get a cheap. And I will be duplicating this three times or two times. I want three of them. Let's put this into the contrast. And I will be duplicating this three times or two times. I want three of them. Let's put this into the contrast and I'll take the RGB values for this. So now we're getting all three masks, and this one slider is helping us control the contrast of all three of them. So now I'm going to get a tint or a color. I'll convert it to a parameter and call it color one, similar to before. And I don't know, we can pick different colors this time around. Something that resembles red never hurts. And I'll call this one color two, and we'll get color three as well. I'm just getting a nice version of R, G and B. And so we have two choices. We can either use these sma larp tints. I think because our walls are pretty darn simple, I'm okay trying out larp tints. So I'm just going to get a linear interpolate or a larp. And what I'll do is get a function input. This will be the base color that we actually plug in, so we'll call it base color. Now, I just need a scalar called color a one strength. That could be plugged into the Alpha, and this can be plugged into. Actually, let's get this into the A value and our new color into the B value. And then we'll take it further with these next colors. I'm just connecting them together. So now I'll get a color two strength and a color three strength. I'll set these to one by default, so we know it's working. I'll saturate these nodes as well. Et's try not to break our masks. So I'm totally having a moment. So we're going to make some room for these lbs. And, of course, we should multiply these strengths by our mask. So we're multiplying the mask in the B, we're gonna plug the color strength into there. So I'll grab another multiply. And I can also press M to just add a quick multiply. So now we'll larp it one more time. Larp it just one more time, like we did with the original one. Base color can go into A. This can go into B. And we'll call it paint opacity. Just getting a quick saturate in there. So we may not always want this on every single blend that we create in the future, right? So I am going to get a new node called the static switch parameter, and we can actually just give it a name such as RGB paint with a question mark. And if it's true, we'll plug all of this data in here. And if it's not true, we'll just get that original base color. Let's plug that into the output, and this is the WorldSpace paint. I press Control Shift S to make sure I'm saving everything. That's WorldSpace paint. And now let's go ahead and hop into the runtime virtual and we're going to continue on with this material function, but with another feature. And that feature is called the gradient. Put a question mark on. So if it's false, we could still just pretty much use the base of this. And if it's true, we're going to add some nodes. So we want to create some nodes that'll let us take the total size of the objects and allow us to add a world space shadow to that, and we can use a multiply to tint it into that. It's a little bit weird of a formula, but it always works well. We're going to take it from the object pivot point. So from its location, I'm going to get a fancy node called the Vertex interpolator, and I'm going to add so it's taking its base bounding box, and we're going to convert that data. We're going to add an offset to it, an offset to it. Whoops, we're going to add a scalar. Like I said, sometimes I just type in the scalar note I'm thinking of so I'll call it the offset because it's going to help us move it up and down, and by default, I'll set it to zero. And I want to add a static switch parameter just because I want to see what blend mode works better. Call it gradient pivot mode. I know I want this information, but if we only need the gradient offset, as if it looks good just from one base orientation, then maybe we'll want that off, and so I'm just adding a quick switch. I'm going to get a world position node because that's how we're mapping the gradient and I'll subtract it from that offset. Now, I'll get the divide to control the contrast, and I'll get a new scaler and call it gradient fall off. And I've done some testing on these some testing on these so that it makes our lives a little bit easier. It might be different in scene, but I'm also going to give us the base values that worked great for me, you know, in my original testing. So let's put 150 there, and we're going to mask it's Z channel once again. Okay, it's B channel. We'll just saturate that mask so we're not breaking it. Now, this will be the total strength of that mask, so I'll get a new scalar and call it gradient opacity and plug that into the B. By default, we can also set it to one. And this would be the arp Alpha of the base color. So I'm going to get the base color. And for now, I'm going to just plug this into a multiply. We want to tint it by a color, so I'm going to get a new color, convert it to a parameter and call it gradient color, and also something kind of dark brown. Don't plug this into the B channel. So this would be plugged into the B. This is the Alpha. And I'll see if I could double click this node so we can move it around a little bit. And this is the base color back here. So we could even plug this just into the A channel, and that is the final output of there. So that would be true. And so this would be the finished world space paint. I just want to grab the different scalars and parameters and put them in a group. We could all put them in one group called paint, but sometimes you can't select everything all at once. So I'm getting different scalers first. I'll call it paint. I'll do the same for these static switch parameters. Should be in the right group and same for these colors. And I'll get the paint textures looking good, looking good. I'll save that, and I'm just double checking now. Because as the materials grow more complex, we're not going to want to get confused in the material instance itself. That seems to be in a good place, including these switches, and I'll save this. So this is our finished worldspace paint function, and now we're going to go ahead and work on the runtime virtual texture blender function. So I'm going to open up our other new function, the RVT blender. And what I'm basically just trying to do is create a bunch of masks. We're going to take our runtime virtual texture sample as the color, and I just want different masks that we can use to overlay on top of our assets. So, in theory, these masks could be used to overlay different materials on your assets. It doesn't have to be the runtime virtual texture, runtime virtual texture. But I think this specific function is a good example of showing different blending types anyways. And we're going to work with two different blending types, the height one, which will come from the ground and the slope one, which will act as a sort of moss a little bit. And then we're going to break that up with a third little formula, which is the mask. So it's going to be just follow my lead. I'm not going to try to overexplain everything. It's just a bunch of math that we have to work with. We're going to take world position and mask it at the B channel. Now we're going to take the run time virtual texture sample, which is reading our texture, and we'll get the color. And we're going to subtract this from the world height. We will add it back on top. And then I'm going to get a multiply. By default, this is the height, and I found that this value worked pretty well with it, negative 0.05. And I'm going to subtract this, use control to drag that to the B channel and use the original subtract from that in the A. So now I'll take a divide node, and this will be the fall off, like the contrast. I'll set it to 50 by default. I'll saturate this. And then, lastly, we're going to invert it. So I'll do about one minus. So this is one of the masks. And I'm going to call it the RVT height. So that's one of them. Now we're going to create a new one. We're going to start with a vertex normal. Vertex normal world space. Now let's find the dot product of that and a normal. So I'm just going to go at a tint at a color and go 001 for RG and B. Going to plug this into a normalize and plug this into the dot. Going to get a multiply and get a new scalar called slope sharpness. I'll plug that into there. And I'm also going to subtract this one. Well, from this one from a node called slope bias. We're going to add these two together. This will be the final strength, multiply with a scalar called slope strength. We'll keep it at zero by default because I'm more interested in the height mask. I'll plug this into a saturate node. And before we continue, let's comment this. Call it RVT slope. And we'll create one more section for the RVT mask. Let's create a texture, convert it to a parameter and call it RVT mask. We're going to start with a texture coordinates for its UV. Oops. I'm going to type text coordinate. We're also going to compare or sorry, multiply. And I want to get two different scales for this texture coordinate. I'm actually going to add two scalers, noise tiling X and noise tiling Y. Now, I'll append these two together. Again, it could be a little tough to get the original append append vector. I'll set this one to eight T one to eight as well, and then we can change that later on. So I'm plugging that into the multiply, and these will be the UVs for our RVT mask. All we need to do is to get a strength for it with a scalar called mask strength and also rename these to mask. By default, I'll set it to one. And in between it, we could also get a cheap contrast. Get a new scalar called mask. Contrast there, I'll set this to zero. I'll comment this one out and call it the RVT mask. Now we can start adding these up together. So I'll take an add for these two, and I'll do a subtract for this one. Now we can have the final strength they multiply. RVT strength. And we could just go ahead and saturate this. Now, in case we want all of the features off for this blending on an asset, I'm going to go ahead and add a static switch parameter and call it RVT blend question mark. If it's true, we'll plug it into here. And if it's false, I'm just going to put a constant by holding down one and then clicking, and I'll leave the default at zero. Now, we're just going to add this to the master material, and it should give us all the parameters that we need within the function itself, because every time we would add this to a master material, we would probably just want the same controls again and again. So I'll put this in a group called RVT Same with this texture. And I'll leave this one alone. See that static switch. Let's put it in RVT. So I'm going to save that, as well. And from here, we can hop into our architecture 35. 33 Blend Shader Part 02: So open up our architecture shader, and this one is going to be organized, to the best of my ability, in theory, what we have to do is for every section, we're blending two textures together. So we kind of have to do almost twice the amount of math. And that's why I don't want this to be a three layer vertex blend material. It would be the exact same process. You're just adding more and more to that, in that sense. So first, we're going to need the things we'll be plugging into everything the most. One of those things would be the vertex color. And if you haven't used it before, it seems scary, but in vertex paint mode, we'll use the red channel as a mask. And I'm looking for the named reroute node, and I'm going to call it just red. I'll even color it red. This just lets us know that we're going to be using this node later. So we're also going to add a couple scalar parameters I want to use later, which is heighten up contrast. And I want the tiling as well, so I'll take the texture node, texture coordinate. I'll make a scalar and I'll call it material a one tiling and we'll multiply those together. And I'm going to make a new reroute for all of these. Basically, this one will be material 01 UVs. And this one is just height map contrast. I'll just duplicate this, bring it down here, and I'll call this one material oh two tiling with material two UVs. I will comment this, and I'm going to call it presets for fun. Now, there is another little setup block we have to create, and that would be our height texture. I know I want it to come from the ORD channel of these textures we made. So we'll do a manual, a slider for the metallic, which we have for the metallic, which we have in our function we made. But I'm going to also do the shared wrap method on the ORDs so that I can kind of do a little bit of different stuff with that height map. So first things first, let's get a texture sampler, and I'll convert it to a parameter and call this material. 01, ORD texture. And I'll make a copy and just call it 02 as well. Let's make sure we set these to wrap mode. I'm going to pick Wall A and Wall B for these textures. So I'm looking for the texture, and I'll do Wall A ORD, and Wa BRD. So we have both of them, and I'm going to add a static switch parameter because I might want to pick between which one of these I actually want to use as the height map source. Call it Hip Map switch, or I'll call it switch Hight Map. So like in substance to designer, there is a levels node. It's just called the three point levels, and we'll have to make some scalar parameters to control this. Which is going to be height low, height, mid and height high. And like the levels, the high would be one, and the mid would be 0.5. And we're going to plug these into the new values. So try to keep them close to here or remember that the mid should be in between the low and the high. We're just going to saturate this. And we will give it a named rewrote called the height texture. We'll just comment it and call it the height texture. We will work with our color map first. Oh, but first things first, let's drag this out. And we will take those UV nodes we created earlier. We can get them by typing them in. So material one UVs and material 02 UVs. I'll go ahead and plug those in. So now we can start working with our base colors. I'll start by getting some new textures. Well, actually, we'll bring these down here because I know I want to use the RDs again later. So copy them once again. We'll rename these ones to material oh one color texture and material oh two color texture. Let's go ahead and get the wall A and Wall B for the color. And that should work, okay. We'll also go ahead and grab the nodes. We'll just plug those into the UVs. Like before, what we did with our landscape is we took those color controls. So I'm pressing control space again, and I'm dragging those in. We are going to make a little room for this because I'd rather have separate color controls for both of these. I'm going to go into the landscape material, give you a moment to do that. And I want to copy the same parameters that we had from our landscape into the architecture shader. Except I'm going to rename these appropriately. So instead of grass, it would be material 01. Looks like we'll have to go back and convert this to a parameter and call it grass, grass tint. We could always do that for the same one here to dirt tint. Pressing Control Shift S a couple of times to save everything. Sometimes it just does not listen. So I'll go ahead and continue. I'll plug these into the appropriate maps. And I'll get the base color and plug this in here. And we will blend these together. But first, let's get another color controls and just rename these appropriately once again to material two. Should not take long at all. So I'll plug that color into the base color of here as well. We'll organize it a little bit. And so now we got to ask how are we going to blaze together? And we're going to do it with a new node called the height ert. And so while A would go in A, while B would go in B, the transition phase is just asking what the mask is. And so we're going to get our red for text paint node, so it knows to change it based off that mask. And it's also wondering, well, how do I distort the mask based off what texture? And that would be the height texture we created. And because this has a contrast node, it would be a good time to get that height map contrast. And we put some work into it, so I'm going to press Control space and also get the world space paint that we could just take the results from there into the base color, and that should be good to go for a base color for now. So next step is to just comb at this, make sure we frame it correctly. I'll call it color, then I'll organize this just a little bit. So now we're PBR attributes, and so we have our two textures once again. Let's go ahead and get these two material UV nodes. Then I'll bring them in and assign them correctly. And pretty much we don't need to adjust anything here. So we're just going to take these nodes from the hetert, copy and paste them. And these are our new PBR attributes. However, we are going to then split the components and we know these are our ORD values, and so I'm going to press control space and get the rough spec material function that we created. So we know that green is roughness. This is ambient occlusion, and we don't have a metallic, so we are going to leave that alone, but it will give us the slider we need later on when we need to assign that metallic value to our metal material. So for s specular, I'm just going to plug all of these in for now. If I'm missing something, I'll make sure to address it. But as of right now, this should be good for our PBR attributes. And all we have to tackle last is our normal. So I'll duplicate these two textures, and instead of ORD, we'll call it normal. See if I'm missing a space. Yep. Material 01 normal, material oh two normal, and it's going to be the same deal, copy and paste. Plug into A and B, and like the landscape again, we're going to get a flat and normal and just make a scalar called normal flatness. So I'm going to leave that at zero. Everything seems to be in the correct spot. I'll plug this into the normal. I'm going to make a little bit of room for that base color, and I'm going to go ahead and grab a runtime virtual texture sample. Miss double checking that this is the one picture sample. Miss double checking that this is the one that we are referencing. And in this example, again, we didn't assign other values to these, so we only want to blend the base color in this scenario. So if I go between here and a linear interpolate, I can take this as the base color. This is the base color. And then as the Alpha, we'll press Control space and get our runtime virtual texture blender. Then that should make for a perfectly fine Alpha, plug it into here and we'll just comment this RVT color. And the material is getting kind of crazy, but it is done. It is finished. In my experience, this is the perfect setup to go much, much deeper than this and accidentally make your material way too crazy, but I wanted to limit us here because it should be able to accomplish everything we need unless these are incorrect for the normal texture. And the last thing we need to change is to give it the default of one. Well, breast control S, save that. And that's the architecture shader complete. Next up, before we start texturing our village assets, we have one more quick master material to make, at least a little easier, and it's the simpler prop 36. 34 Village Materials Part 01: So text paint blend material finished. We can move on to the simpler one, and then we can start creating the material instances from there. But I'm going to rename architecture to blend, just to make it easier for us. So I'm just going to go ahead and actually create a new regular material, and call it MN prop, and I'll go ahead and open that up. We're going to build something similar but simpler. So I'll start with a texture sample. I like the other ones, we're going to set up a basic PBR texture setup. So I want to name this one the ORM texture. We'll use an ORM for this one, and this can be the normal texture. Now for the color texture, we can go ahead and copy some of the color controls from one of these other sections. We don't even need to change the names. I'll leave it like that. But I'll press Control Space and get the WorldSpace paint so we can use it on this. And I'll also use a linear interpolate so that we can blend between this and the runtime virtual texture sample. I'll just plug the base color in here, make sure we have the right one selected. And for the Alpha, press control space and get the RVT blender. I am just going to plug this into the base color. Let's go ahead and select a texture. I'm going to go ahead and find our rock prop textures. Or, actually, in this scenario, let's go with the wood, since we're gonna be dealing with that one first. I'll get the wood color. The wood O M and the wood normal. So for the ORM, we'll get our rough spec material function, and it's R for AO, G for roughness, B for metallic. We'll go ahead and put that into the slot that we need to. So the normal's looking okay. And what I'd like to grab is the flat and normal with a normal flatness scalar. And now I want to blend this with a detail normal, and we might do the same thing to the blend shader, as well. I'm looking for the blend angle corrected normals, and I'll go ahead and add a detail normal. I'll start by adding a texture object. Let's convert it to a parameter and call it detail normal. Now I'll just look up normal and see which ones we want to start with. Any of these could be okay. I might start with the metal. We could change the tiling of that. It'll be projected differently. I'll start with a scalar called detail normal tiling. I'll just put texture here. So I'm going to plug this into a world aligned normal. And this will be the texture size. And just in case we could get an append vector and give this X and Y tiling. Snoa has X and Y, and it can detect that XYZ texture. We might actually we'll actually keep it just like this ****, delete that part. And out of the XYZ texture, I'm going to flatten the normal. I'll just put the word detail in front of this, plug it in. We'll put this into the additional normal. And I'll plug this into the final normal slot. And I think I'm okay copying this section of the detail normal and pasting it into the blend. So let's comment everything that we need to. I'll press C and call this the detail normal. This is our regular norm. This is our color. These are our PBR attributes. So I'll copy this. Oh, let's actually fit some tiling in here. Set this to eight. And then let's take care of our UVs before we continue. It's a texture coordinate. Now, I'll just add a multiply to this. Call it material tiling and I'll just set it to one. We'll plug these into each of the textures. I'm going to leave this one alone and have the size of the world line one take care of that. So I'm saving it. A quick fix before I continue is that I was, I think, a little bit careless with the blend and prop in both of these. So make sure that we're putting the brightness and contrast for the color controls in the correct slot. So for prop, it's only one material, and for this one, it's two, but brightness goes in here. We're gonna switch these around. So make sure we have something a little bit closer to this where we can actually see the color apologies. This can tile if we need it or we could put a baked normal in here, and this would be the final prop material instance. So with that done, now we have the basic master material setup to start working on our village instances. So I can also quickly copy that detailed normal function into the blended material if we want. We can just plug this into the base normal and plug this into the input. And that should work properly. The material instance settings might be a little bit messy, but I'm sure it's nothing that we won't be able to handle. So again, for the walls, I'm looking at the blend one, and for the wood and metal, I'm looking at the prop material. And we're going to be taking care of the furry roof a little bit later once we take care of our foliage shaders, and then we'll transfer that over. But in the meantime, I'm focusing on the opaque surfaces. So I guess we should go ahead and look into our meshes. And yeah, it looks like we need wood, metal, and the two walls and the stone. So for the wall itself, we will duplicate this or we will create a material instance out of this. So MI wall, but in instances just a good habit. So for the meshes themselves, I'm going to open up one of the meshes like House. We can go ahead and check out how this would look with these materials we've created. So first, let's try isolating the material and seeing which one we're actually looking for. It should be this one. That should be correct. So we're not dealing with this roof asset right now. Those are wood beams. We can use the prop shader to make the underlying tone of this. So I might already go to the materials. Master. Let's create a material instance for this and call it MI roof. I'll duplicate it. Call it MI wood. And so I'll open up the roof one. Put it here, and I'll look for my textures. I'll head down the roof, and I'll start replacing these. Then I'll preview this. I'll try to place that material on there. So I'm taking a look at how it tiles, and I'll take a look at the material instance. I want to see the detailed normal strength. Okay, so there is some data in there, so I'm going to set this to one by default, including within the master material. That way, it's more of an optional toggle we can bring into each material. And as well, we could check out the brightness. And I know it's pretty dark in the concept art. The roughness looks okay. We could check out the base normal flatness, see if we want to boost it. I prefer to have it pretty weak in this stylized style, and it'll also be covered with the roofy grassy hair cards. So that can make an okay, basic roof opaque material. We're isolating that that'll be the foliage later. Let's go ahead and take a look at the wood beams. If you place these down. We'll see what part of this we need to change. Going to go ahead and look at the normal flatness and I'll look at the desaturation and the brightness. Okay. Well, let me play with the tiling if we need to. I'll play with two for now. That way we get some nice horizontal streaks across even the small beams, but we'll test that again later. And so now looking at the wall material, and it's probably going to be our best bet to find the asset we're working on and place it down. So in my concept art, I'm going to bring it over for a moment. I'm looking at what buildings are white and what buildings are red. So if you have this on the side of your monitor, you'll know where to paint. I'm looking at most of these pillars, the top of this house and the top of this cylindrical house, as well, and the wall, right? So some, but not everywhere. Go and bring that back. The wood is looking okay. And just for a quick test, let's see if the vertex paint is working. I just pressed Shift four, so I'll bring these back here. I just pressed Shift four to enter Vertex paint mode and we have this selected. If I click paint, we know we were only working with our red channel. So who cares thinking about the green and blue. And it's currently black, right, because we imported it it's black. So if it's set to white, now the mask will be white, and we should be able to get something in here. Unless I'm wrong, and we should be going reverse. I guess it's white by default. So let's get the opposite and set it to black. I'm going to increase the size a little bit. You can see now the two materials are blending pretty nicely in there. But if I open the wall material instance, I will bring it into here so we can preview this. We can take a look at the height map contrast and these height levels. So looking at the height values, what I had the most luck with is only barely moving the contrast, and then in the mid value for the height, I'm boosting that outwards. And so I actually also switch switch height map if I turn that off. We can see which height map it's actually using. And so we don't need to go too extreme with it, but we could start playing with the other values based off of these contrast values. And so I think when it is being painted, it would look really interesting like that. You know, we'll keep going with the test. But only this wall material is the one that's actually being painted on, and it looks pretty good like that, as well. I could use the fill tool to fill it with the opposite color. And, yeah, that's my biggest step. Be careful with these values. It looks like the mid value is doing the most work. And then you can boost that contrast once you get the shape you like. If anything, you could even set your material up so that you can use a different black and white mask similarly to how we did with this paint. We might decide to do that later, but we'll see. We'll see. Right now, I want to continue on with building our assets. So I'm not worrying about the roof material right now. But I'm going to assign these materials to the other assets. I'm going to also duplicate this one and I'll create MI metal. Let's bring it in. Check it out, and let's go to our textures and fine metal. So get color, normal O M. So the regular normal flatness, I'll keep this up. Material tiling, I'll keep at two. Desaturation. Let's leave this alone for now. And for this metal, we're gonna have to find an asset that needs it. So I'll go to our water wheel. I'll put it in our other window. Let's check out our instance materials. We have wood, and we do have metal metal. And we're going to need that. Let's try the ORM and not the ORD. So the metal, excuse me, for dropping something out of my pocket. I'm looking at the metal ORM, and I'm also going to look at the brightness, as well as the roughness. You might need to manually bring that metallic strength up to one. There we go. Nice and metal. So it looks pretty cool. It looks like in the concept art, it is a little bit brighter. And then there even seems to be a little bit of a tint. Go ahead and check it out right at the water wheel. Looks good for now. We can always change it later. But that's our metal, that's our wood. We're going to go ahead and keep going through these assets and see what we need. If anything, we could start just by getting our stone material ready as well. MI stone. I'll open it, bring it in. And I'm looking for the stone. Wherever it ran off to, we'll change these textures and reset some of this. Not the detail normal. Excuse me. The regular stone. And I'm looking for the stone OM. That's the normal. There we go, and there we go. So now I'll play with the normal flatness. Could be cool to boost this one up a little bit, and we will check out the meshes. Let's already just check out that planter. And I'll go to the instance. I'll also check out Roof. Interesting. Just go to play with the normal flatness one more time. A little bit of a shade, never hurt anyone. It's a little saturated. I'll bring it down. Actually, it's pretty bright in the concept art, just not so saturated. Yeah, I'll put in some canopies right here. That looks interesting. It's gonna keep going. So with fence, I'm going to close down these materials now because I want this to open in the other window. So we can always open these back up if needed. We're gonna save ourselves a little bit of ram. Am I saving everything? We're making sure that they are applied to the actual world. So maybe that's all for the best for this fence. Go into here. We'll start dragging assets in. We already edited these materials so I can close them for a moment. We'll check, and that's looking okay. Water wheels textured, planters textured. So let's see what we haven't textured. I'll be brave and open up the rest of these. Okay, so we'll make ourselves a little bit of room and find our instances folder. We just need wood for this. Sometimes we can highlight these to find out what we actually need. So I definitely don't want wall here. I'm going to reset that. Let's isolate or highlight what we need. Okay. Wall, for the first. Yeah, that was our roof. And underneath, we'll do the actual MI roof. This is our biggest hero asset. And we have crafted every piece on our own, which is the best part of this. Everything is a hone, which is the best part of this. Everything is 100% yours. So that's underneath for the roof. And these are the actual cards. So we'll leave that alone for now. We'll put it in wall. I'm guessing these will be the metal. And that's the roof opaque mesh. We'll keep going. Those are the cards. We'll skip those, and we're blasting through these, and then we'll paint them in engine. We didn't have to build a ton of materials, right? We're building simple versatile materials that we can populate all over our scene. Surely, it'll just be wall and wood. Then this would be wood and metal. Let's look at it. Looking at how all this came out, go to close everything. And we'll texture and shade these soon we still have to build the shaders for these props. And for these, I'm just going to take a moment to say, great job building the architecture and blend shader, and we'll spend a moment populating the scene with these assets and Vertex painting them for a moment. So good job so far. 37. 35 Village Materials Part 02: Continue building our village. So I'll take it a step at a time, and I'll start placing things where I think they look best on that blockout we've already created. I don't feel the need to go into camera view just yet, not until we place some things around. We're just going ahead. We've put a lot of time into making sure our assets look pretty good. So it shouldn't be too much of a hassle, just placing them in engine. Check out our pillar support. You know, we get to decide that rotation. If we want, we could still lift up some compared to the others. But we keep it at pretty much the same right now. Pretty much the same. I'll look at this wall. I'll rotate it. You know, very simple level design right now. I'm gonna lift that up. Looking good. Let's bring it our wheel. Okay. Bringing in the wheel support now. You know, we'll double check that everything's in a good spot once we hide the blockout. I'm using this as a strong reference guide. I like how these are all snug in together. If we need to, we can bring this back one. We'll find out so that the pillars are in the house one is in, House six just around here. And House five was just around here, it's very fun to just kind of match where the blockout pieces are. Nearly finished assets. So I'm placing the biggest one last that might require the most thinking around. Okay. Now, let's try and do our best with house one. Try to actually match the side angle over here and see if dragging it in will do us any good. And we're going to place our fence act And I'll duplicate this a few times. And I have an idea. Let's go into our meshes, foliage, actually, material instances, and I'm going to duplicate wood and call this one MI rock prop. Let's open it up. We can make it smaller. We can go ahead and reset the scalers. This might have a detailed normal in it, but I'm mostly worried about the rock prop texture, so I'll get the color and the normal, the RM, making sure that metallic is set to zero. Now I'll go to our meshes like I said, I would. I'm going to click on all three rocks and see how these look on here. I'll place them first and then check out how they look. So it's not in a bad spot at all. I actually kind of like how they're a little bit shiny, too. I'm just going to split that window. See if we could scrutinize this a little bit. I'll look at my concept art for just a moment. And I suppose we could give this a small tint. And we could change the roughness a little bit. And I'm looking at the detailed normal flatness now. I'll set it to zero. And now I'm taking a look at the tiling. It might actually need some strength. And yeah, these are rocky micro details. Even though we're using the metal one, these are all pretty abstract, so they give us a good starting point. We even get our nice sea brush details in here. So I'll keep it like that for now. I'll close these windows and go back to the building. So right now, I'm going to get our rock assets, and we'll just place them where these cubes were. This should be a pretty forgiving process. I'm even going to turn off scale snapping and translation snapping with those buttons up And it seems like they didn't export at the location that I wanted them to. So we're actually going to hop in a blender superfast, and I'll show you how to fix that. I'll hop into the Rocks Blender file, and I'm just going to select all of these and press Alt G. Make sure they're all selected. Apply all transforms, and I'll export these one at a time. I remember we made that mesh Export preset. So in game FBX, I'll hunt down Rock one and export these one at a time. Rock two and rock three. I'll save it. And I'll just re import that. And now they are moving to the correct position. Very simple to fix. So here's two small rocks. I'll duplicate this larger one. We can rotate it and scale it differently. Maybe I'll stack two rocks on top of each other for this section. Scale it in. Just finding what I think is going to work best near the end. We still got some work to do anyways. So all the houses are in place. Let's go ahead and hide the blockout. Pretty beautiful, pretty beautiful. I'm going to scale this one down. And so now we get to vertex paints a little bit. First, I'll select these three and press Shift four. Let's go into paint, and we can go ahead and just start tackling these guys. This might work better with a fill and then reversing this paint. And that was pretty easy and pretty fun. It's working well. So now I'm looking at this building. I'll press Shift one again to deselect those. I'll press Shift four again. That way we can set the brush size to something that matches best with this. So now set this too black. And this shouldn't be too tough at all. We even lightly click around here. The breath strength is really high, but, whoops, the breath strength is really high. So if I lightly press, we could start getting some more variation on one side than another. And again, you can always play with the contrast sliders in a little bit, but that's looking pretty good to me. So I know we have three pillars. Now let's select our wall, and I'll paint, and then I will fill. I'll even check out this one again. Whoops. Let's go to paint mode. And I will turn up that strength again. I think that's pretty cool, too, for now. So the top half of this red cylindrical house is also pretty red. Gonna go with everything above here. And we're making good progress. So taking a look at it. I think this is at a pretty good spot, being a little extra picky with this one. And seeing if the reads are all in the correct spot, and I think they are. I'm actually going to see if I can fix up this window a little bit. So I'll select it, paint, decrease the size, set it to white. Maybe we could just grab these window vertices. Yeah, not too hard. We have some color variation there. The windows a little lower in the concept art. You know, you can go into the blender file and just drag that down a little and see if that happens. But so far, it's mostly awesome. It's mostly awesome. So we have our rocks, our village buildings mostly taken care of. I'm thinking before we move on to the next part, though, we can take a look at some of the new shader features as well. Let's go to the rocks first. This might be a little easier to start with. And I want to take a look at the RVT blender. Let's turn it on. Let's see if it actually works after all this setup. And it looks like it's kind of upset. First, let's put it texture here. And let's see if we can fix it right now. So it seems like it's an error within our actual material function. And I'm thinking that this does need a texture asset. So I'll assign one really quick and see if that fixes and I'll go back. And at least it's not gray anymore, so that was a quick fix. We're gonna have to see if the height blend and height fall off can help us fix the fact that I'm not seeing it. Okay, so the only thing we're going to change within the actual material function itself is the mask strength. So I'll set that to zero. And I'd rather change that ourselves manually. So let's go back. And now we'll play with the mask strength. You get some. Let's get the tiling up in there. I'll get the overall strength. And that's something I enjoy a little bit more. So again, because we're working with grass, if you want the material to go on top of it, what you're going to do is set the slope strength up and the bias up. That'll give you a nice slope on top of your material as well. As a quick test, I set all of the slope values above one or around two. Let's see if we could find the correct bias. And that is how you're going to get the RVT textures on top of your model as well. It's a very interesting effect. We could keep it for the rocks, but maybe I want the strength of that to be super, super low. And because it's so low, that's actually the kind of painterly effect I was going for. We may not turn on the paint function for these rocks, but that's looking pretty good. Let's bring in this fence. And so now let's try to repeat that same process for this wall material and even the stone material. But the stone, I'll quickly click on RVT blend. We could boost the strength to one, even two. We'll check out that height blended fall off that we want for this acid. That's good enough for me. Let's check out the wall, as well. Let's check out the RVT. I'm looking at RVT strength. I'm actually going to set it to one for now. That way we get a nice longer green tint. Suppose we should do that for the stone, as well. And that's already okay for the RVT blend on the walls. Now we get to check out the gradient. Did a quick check to see what scalar value we're looking for. And we're looking mostly for the scalar gradient offset. We could change it to pivot mode, so it goes through each individual object as well, and we can find out which look of that we prefer. And for now, I'm just going to keep it at that and have a really high fall off, and it's going to be more impressionistic that dark to light value. And I did a little whoops. And so for this one, it turns out that if we have gradient mode on the walls, then it turns off paint mode. So let's go ahead and just reroute this blending in MF WorldSpace paint. So if this is true, we do want to do all of this blending, and if it's false, we want the original color. If gradient is true, we're going to be doing all of this, as well as the option to add the RGB paint. So maybe it's best to plug this into here. And then the base color should go into the false. So that way, we do need the gradient on, but we could always set its strength to zero. That's my workaround for that right now. And let's see if that worked. Now we do have the option to add RGB paint, and it'll take a second to get used to in terms of what we're looking at, but we'll go ahead and play with some of these values. By default, looks like we'll have to hop into the world space paint and make sure that our tiling is set to maybe something like ten by default. I apologize for leaving it at zero. That's why we build the shaders, like crazy first and then just find out what little things we need to change. So tiling should be at ten, ten, ten, so reset these. And at least we have a starting point. Maybe I find out which one of these scalers are better suited for the task. So I'm getting an okay feeling when the elements are somewhere around 600. So that means for the worldspace paint, I'm going to set the default value to at least something close enough, like 500. Let's go ahead and save that. Very interesting looking. And what I'm going to do now is check out our very interesting looking. And what I'm going to do now is check out our paint, make sure we're in the wall. We'll play with the scaling a little more. And now we can get our individual colors and strengths. This should be on both materials, which it is. And so this default one, we're looking for naturalistic colors if they're going to be on both materials. So I'm looking at some paintolyGuahes, and what I'm going to do is find the contrast for this. And now I'll just go ahead and decrease the opacities. They're going to be pretty low because we want it to be a little bit of a compliment instead of overtaking them. I'm going to lower the yellow one. Maybe the blue will do us a little more good. I do enjoy that blue offset so long as maybe there's a little bit more tiling going around, and I'm going to decrease that contrast now. I'll play with this other hue. Color two strength. It's pretty darn strong. I'll actually leave this one alone. It looks like we will need a little contrast to keep things together. So pink contrast, at least a little. Turn down the yellow again. See what makes us happy. I like the extra hues I'm seeing in the reds over here. I like that the green is going up due to the fronti virtual texture, and we get it dark to light thanks to the gradient. So that looks really awesome. And for the wood, really quick, for this static mesh, in particular, the water wheel, I want to actually duplicate the wood and call it MI water wheel. Cause not only is it a little bit brighter, but we don't want any world space texturing going over something that's going to end up rotating in the final image. But in general, for wood, if I can get that open, I'm just going to go ahead and match the concept art a little better with the hues that I'm looking at. I can still play with the tiling. I still think it looks pretty good at two. The normal's a little strong, but actually like it like that. I don't think this needs a detailed normal, but we'll go ahead and find out. We'll see if another normal does us any good. We can look one up. And maybe if I make it really large, we can add some sort of deformations to this wood, in a sense. That looks pretty interesting. So for this one, I do want RVT blend on. I'm going to look at the height fall off. These strength. Maybe something lower than a full strength on there. And I will see if the slope strength will do us any good for these wood assets. I'm sure a little bit of moss never killed anyone, but I'm looking at the top, and I don't know if that's giving me the features I really want. We'd have to play with the slope strength first. I'm actually going to set it to something like 1.5, bring down the height fall off and height blend if I need to. I don't bring these back down. So we could see the moss overlaying on top, as well as the height blend going up. And I think I want to give the impression that all this is happening, as well, I will add some of the mask strength back into this. However, I think I also want this to just be really weak. Barely give the impression that light and age and dust and moss is doing its thing to these wooden planks. So now we can add our gradient. We'll look for the gradient offset. I think I'll set it to the pivot mode. And I notice it's being very harsh on this asset. So maybe we don't set it to pivot mode, and we pretend that this is the river, like, wetness that is going kind of surrounding the aging wood. So we'll just take the opacity of that and lower it. Now we'll add our paint. We'll just play with these values. We won't need all three at full strength. We can change the RGBA mask anytime. So maybe I'll make this one a similar wood color. Maybe this one a little less saturated or more saturated. And then we could always play with the contrasts and opacity. And that's subtle, but it looks good. So I don't want the gradient or the slope or the RVT on the waterwheel because that's going to be a moving object at the end. So I'm going ahead and taking a final look at these shaders. The metal doesn't need that much extra attention. The gradients are doing their thing. And if I'm not mistaken, I just think it looks really, really good. We could always change the tints of these. So for material two, maybe we do want it slightly more aged and yellow. Want it to be a bit pinker. I'm looking at the stone, and I'll desaturate it a little bit more. Maybe even Hugh shift it. Okay? And I'm really happy with how all of this is coming out. Keep gandering at it. See if you miss something. I'm taking one more look at it before I hop off this video, and I really do think that we're there. You know, we can move this guy out, and now we have individual pieces to move for the perspective. But I'll find that out in the camera view in a little bit later. Next, what we're going to do is we're going to start setting up our landscape grass. This thing is coming together quickly. 38. 36 Foliage Material Functions: Okay, so this next video is going to be kind of boring, so much as I want to make this course exciting, we have a bunch of material functions to make for our grass. I can barely even pretend to sound excited. The final result comes out fantastic, but we have some work to do. So that's six material functions, and the sixth one is actually kind of optional depending on if you want ray tracing on or not. So we're going to chin up and cat through it. We have the first one to get through, which is the foliage subsurface. So we're going to start with a bunch of material functions advanced material function, and it's MF foliage subsurface. There might be a point where I might need to separate these functions or at least have one dedicated one for foliage. Double check on which one that was. I'm going to move it in here. So for foliage subsurface, at least these functions aren't going to be too long. I'm going to full screen this. And the way the subsurface is going to work for the foliage is with a Ferneel. So I need a scalar called sub surface radius. By default, we'll just set it to zero, actually. I want to preview this. It's not going to be okay, yeah. By default, it'll have the full value around, but if we did set it to five, it'll start curving around the curvature of our model. But by default, I want that full value in, so I'm going to keep it at that and stop previewing this node. We'll make sure to saturate this, and I'm going to multiply it by a subsurface color. I'll press three to get a color and convert it to a parameter, and I'll call it subsurface color. I'll plug it into the multiply. By default, we can get a nice strong green. And I'm going to assign this to a static switch parameter called custom subsurface. If it's false, I actually just want to use the original color map we use for the foliage. So in that sense, I want to get our input and just call it base color. We'll plug that into the false. Now, whatever we plug into here, though, I do want to give it a strength. So I'll multiply, and we'll call this subsurface intensity. I'll give it a half value of 0.5 to start with. And we're going to assign this to the output, and we're going to call this output subsurface color. And we're going to make one more output called subsurface opacity. And that's just a really simple one. We're going to get a scalar called subsurface opacity. We're going to invert it with a one minus and get the absolute value of it. That way, we're always working with the positive values. And suppose we could also saturate it. So both of these look okay. By default, I'll set this to 0.9. I'm also going to saturate this one. And that is our subsurface color. So once we put the input in, we have controls for both subsurface opacity and intensity. I'm going to make this window smaller. And the next material function that we need is a new one. Going to go ahead and make a new one. And I'll call this one material function foliage wind. This one is a little more intense because it includes a special billboard shader that is quite popular for stylized leaves, and I want to be able to implement it into here. And I want to be able to implement it into here. And we're going to implement a couple of things. For this foliage, we're going to have simple grass wind, which maybe you have seen before. Lets our grass move. We're going to add a very crazy math function for the tree trunk wind. And that way, we can have a master wind that sort of sways the entirety of the mesh. And as well, we're going to have that special billboard shader. So we'll start with the easier one and we'll add a simple grass wind. Let's promote this to a parameter. Actually, I'm not a huge fan of how the name comes out, so we are going to put the work in and call it wind intensity. I want to put a function input for the wind weight because I know we had made a gradient for it. However, I think I also want to add a static switch parameter and say custom weight. If it's true, we will take an input and we can have the input be a scaler. By default, we'll set it to one. And we'll plug this into the wind way, and if it's false, I think I just want a texture coordinate, actually, a texture coordinate that is massed on its B channel, so a mass component or on its G channel and invert. That way, we're just going from black to white by default. And if we turn on custom weight, which is true, I'd like to get an input of our choosing. So I'll call this wind weight. So if it's checked off, you know, in a sense, we can just have that texture as is. So this would be the simple grass wind along with the wind speed. We'll have it pretty low by default at 0.1 and 0.1 for this. We can always increase it soon. I'll save it. So if this is the wind for the additional WPO, most of the time we plug in nothing, but this is where we're going to plug in our special billboard shader and our special billboard shader. And that, along with the tree trunk wind shader, I'm going to be honest with you. I am not a technical artist. I didn't I did not develop these formulas. I understand how most of this operates together, but it would be a waste of my breath to explain why certain vectors are transforming into each other and doing insane things. At the end of the day, we're going to comment this out so that we know at least what does what at the end. So speaking of which we'll call this one the simple grass wind. Some of these don't need to be commented out, in my opinion, they're just simple like, Okay, we have a couple functions plugging into each other, but these bigger ones will comment them out. So let's start with our billboard shader. I'm going to grab a texture coordinate node, and we will invert it. I'm going to multiply it by a constant, so I'll hold one, and I'll enter two for there. So I'm multiplying that by two. Then I'm going to subtract it by a constant of one. And we will multiply that by a vector two. So I'm actually holding two now. For Y, it could be one, and for X, it's a negative one. We'll plug that into the B channel. We're going to append a vector, and we're going to add a constant at zero. Now we're going to get a new node called the transform vector. Or it might be the vector transform. Now we're going to get a new node called Transform, and the setting we're going to set it to is in the left camera space to local space. We're going to normalize this input, the normalize node, this input, they normalize node. And I'm multiplying this by a constant of one. Just for sakes, we'll plug it in. I'm going to get a transform once again and I'm going to select local space to WorldSpace. Now, I'm going to get an Ad node and we'll move this to the B slot. I will multiply this and we'll get a scaler and we'll call it Billboard scale. By default, we're going to leave this at zero. And for this A channel and add, let's get a multiply. We'll plug it into the A. But then we're going to take a vertex normal world space. I think that means world space. I'll plug it into here. And I'll get one last scalar and call it billboard inflate. The relationship between these two scalers help us define how fluffy we want the final leaves to be. Both will be left at zero for now, and this will be plugged into the additional world position offset. So I'll make some room. And I'll com it this out and call it a special Billboard Chatter. When it comes to things like this, especially if you're more on the artistic side, it's kind of not worth overthinking elements like this. It's like building a library of functions that you need to achieve your art. So with that in mind, you can always go hunting for more functions depending on the concept art you're working with and what you're trying to achieve. So we have a little more to add, and that would be the tree trunk wind I talked about. We take the result of the simple grass wind, and we're going to multiply it by an object scale no XYZ into here. And now I want to add this. What we're going to add is another crazy math function. We'll start with time and object position. We're going to add these together, and I'm going to plug this into a sine node. And this goes into a node called the constant bias scale. That's right. It's getting a little scary. We're going to multiply this by an absolute world position node. To get that, we never type absolute. That's the secret. XYZ can go into a distance, see if we could just find the regular distance, we're going to get the object pivot point. So now with the tree, it is contributing to the strength of a new sway. And once that's assigned to the leaves, it will be added on top of it. So that distance can be multiplied by the actual a scalar strength and we'll call it tree wind. So things you want with the large swing effect, for example, probably most foliage outside of the grass flowers and the roof fir will want some tree wind. I think with that in mind, we could give it a default value, but instead, I'd rather work off something that we'll know will repeat instead of assigning it to everything. I'm thinking 0.5. We'll go with that. So that multiply can go into the ad and this can go into the foliage wind. So that is actually done. We're going to move on to our next function. I'll save. I'm going to add a new material function called material function grass Shine. So we have two things to add for the outputs, which is a specular output, and I'm going to duplicate that and a roughness output. We're going to start this crazy formula with the world position, and I'll mask its G channel. Apologies. I'm going to mask its B channel. Same as taking out the Z. So I want to subtract this by the runtime virtual texture sample. And I'm going to grab the height. So that way it can find the height and then kind of get a distance from that. And I'll add a new node called object bounds. That way, it's kind of looking for the size of the grass with a component mask at the B channel, and I'll add these two together, the size of the grass with a component mask at the B channel, and I'll add these two together. And to change the strength of this, I'm going to multiply Woops. Let's get the multiply. And I'm going to add a new scalar called grass shine height. Plug it into there. By default, we'll put it at one. And that's going to be subtracted by that height. So now I'm going to take a I'm going to create the fall off by getting a divide node. And I'll call this scalar grass shine fall off. And I'll set the grass shine fall off to 45. Let's go ahead and saturate all of these numbers. Now we can add one more little node, which is the frenel node. That way, we have the option to also change the furneel based on the angle, and we're getting all these cool, crazy height based effects on our grass. We'll see how it operates in the material instant. I'll let the default frenel scalar be four. I'll just plug that into the exponent. So now we just got to add a couple controls because this is our mask. I'm actually going to invert this. It's going to be our mask of some larps. So I'll get two larps. It's the Alpha of both. And for the B channel, we're going to get some constants. For the specular, I want it to stay at zero, and for the roughness, I want it to be at one, like our original default values. And then for the new ones, we're gonna get a new specular. We'll just call it shine specular and shine roughness. There we go. Now we have all these cool controls for a Fneel and height based shine effect on our foliage. We're putting some love into the stylization of it. Yes, I am open to work. And so now we're gonna go back. And the next one we're going to work on is the colorful wind that blows across our grass, which means we need a new material function. We'll call this one MF, Color wind. So we're going to start with the world position. And this is going to be basically textures coordinates. For these scalers, I'm gonna call it wind noise tiling tiling. We'll call it the wind noise. By default, it's got to be really huge. So I'm going to pick something. Thousand. And the new node, the Panner node will let us move this texture across the world space. So I'm going to get a new wind noise speed. And I believe it's got to be also really, really low. So 0.003. I'm plugging that into the Panner node, and it's telling a texture to move across, right? So this can go into the UVs of a texture sampler. I'll convert it to a parameter, call it the wind noise texture. And I'm going to look up noise in here. And in the resources folder, I think our best one would either be noise four or noise two. I'm going to go ahead and pick Noise two and just get this for the UVs. Let's get the strength for this. I'll get a new scalar called. And so I'll get a new scalar called wind noise, strength. And then I'm going to get a new one called with a cheap RGB contrast or not an RGB one, just a regular cheap contrast. Let's just duplicate this and call it wind noise contrast. And then we actually want to give it a couple more strength parameters, this wind noise. So this is like the base version of it. You know, it's not getting too complex yet, but I still want to get our input color, so I'm going to get a function input. We'll call it base color. And we will multiply these two together. We'll make this one the B channel. And next I'll grab a multiply again, and this will be the final strop wind noise, opacity. Actually, maybe we should make this one the strength and this one the amount because we're kind of double layering the strength effect just because I want the contrast to be affecting this a little bit differently. So I'll plug this into the multiply. I'll saturate. Now, similarly to the simple grass wind, I think I'm just going to mask this by the inverted texture coordinate. So let me get a texture coordinate. Let's mask its G channel because it's the Y channel, and then I'll invert it. So now it's being masked out a little bit, because this is only going to go on the grass. So with that in mind, all we would need left is to get a larp p and this would be the Alpha, and the color would be right here. And now all they need is a color. So let's convert it to a perimeter and call it wind noise, color, it'll make it light and yellowish and not too harsh. I'll plug this into the B channel. We did use the color channel to affect the mask itself, and that's okay. We're just looking for some varied interest to break up that noise. So I'll save this. And we're making fantastic progress. We just have two more functions to create. We've got a material function, and this next one is going to be the MF foliage shadow. So on the underlying faces of these cards, we're actually going to be able to make them darker and give it a fall off, and it's a really interesting effect. We're overlaying colors just like we are with the opaque material, with the opaque materials. So for this one, speaking of which we're going to get the vertex normals. I'm going to break out float three components, and from the B channel, I'll add. Or we could mask this, actually. Let's try a component mask. Let's try that B channel, we'll get the. So what I'd like to do is get a new scalar called shadow height. This will be basically the offset. And we'll give it some values that I know work kind of well without giving us a base opacity that way. They don't have to be active on all of them. So I'll multiply this by just 0.5. Soften this up because I want to invert this and then play with the strength from there. I'll get a power. And if you've taken, I don't know, middle school math, you know what's going on here or multiplying it by itself. Power. I said it's something pretty weak by default. You don't want it to be too contrasted, I'll saturate this mask. So if I press L to quickly add a larp, this can be the Alpha, and I want to get our function input base color. Base color. We're gonna start adding some more scalers. With a multiply, I'm going to add a new scalar called shadow brightness. And it's basically taking the color and making it darker wherever this is so we don't have to do too much color work. And by chance, we could plug it into a hue shift, change this to the texture, and I'll add a scalar called shadow hue shift. I'll just plug that into the B channel and the original base color into the A channel. And I'm actually going to add one more scalar for a multiply. It's scalar called shadow opacity. And it'll be one by default. But then we can add a static switch parameter. And say fully shadow question mark. If it's true, we use all of this, and if it's false, we're just using the base color we put into it. And that one's done. And there's just one more to go in advanced material function. And I call this one material function cross fade. And if you turn this on when ray tracing is on, it gets rid of your cash out as for the foliage. So don't pay too much mind to this for this portfolio scene. But if you're turning ray tracing off for your game, turning ray tracing off for say your game and you don't want these perpendicular planes really close to your camera, these can fade these out. And it's a nice little function to have under your belt. It's not too tough to make. We'll quickly get a world position. And we're going to get two nodes called DD Y and DD x. Got the X Y Z of both of these and plug them in, and we're going to get the cross product of the two. I'll normalize these vectors. And now we're going to get the dot product of this and the camera vector. So that perpendicular comparison. We'll make sure it's the absolute value of that. So it's always a positive number, and we will multiply this by the opacity map that we plug in from our foliage. So I'm going to right click and get function input, and I'll call it opacity map. Go ahead and saturate it. And now I do want that switch for that reason I mentioned regarding the ray tracing. So I'll call this cross fade. If it's true, we use this, if it's false, we just use the opacity map. And this would be plugged into the opacity near the end. So that is the six foliage material functions that we're going to be using to build our mass materials, and it'll really help us fill out this scene in a wonderful way. By the way, I had entered the my camera actor and I just moved the rocks around, like, like 5%. And I think I moved the house like a little bit. So, you know, whatever you're working on as you're developing your scene, just keep touching things. See what looks right. We'll go over 39. 37 Grass Shader: Okay, we have our foliage functions completed. We can go ahead and make a new master material called Master material Grass. Let's go ahead and create it. And for the shader type, we're going to set it to mask for the blend mode and two sided foliage for the shading model. Double check two sided there. So we'll start with the grass color first, which would be the world position. And we're going to plug this into a runtime virtual texture sample. This time we'll grab our color. So we'll plug the world position into the correct slot. And if I'm not mistaken, we have the option to change the MIP level, and I do want that because I want this to be a little bit more low resolution. So I'm going to grab a constant and press two. That's why we don't have too much texture detail on the base color of our grass. And now I'll just make this smaller. I'm going to hunt into one of our other materials, put it in here. I'll close these extra ones so we're not working with two extra windows. And I just want to grab one of the color controls. So I'm pretty much okay with all of this. Except we don't really need that texture because this RVT is going to be the texture. So what I'm going to do is just get rid of these extra prefixes in these scalers, simplify the name a little bit. There we go. And so now we can use some of our new functions to build out this material. I'll press Control space, and I'll click on our foliage functions. So the first one I'll get is color wind. I'm just going to go ahead and plug that in there, and this can go to the base color. For the roughness and specular, we're going to get the grass shine material function. And from this base color, what I'd like to do is get the foliage subsurface. We can plug the color into there, and we can get the subsurface opacity, which would be opacity here and the subsurface color right here. Next, I'll grab the foliage wind. Which is right here. And I'll plug this into the world position offset. Now, it does want the wind weight. So next we'll get our texture sample, and I'll look for our grass, our grass card. And let's see if it was the green or blue channel. Might have been the blue. I'll click Preview node. I'll click on the plane, and that is the wind weight I was looking for. So I'll plug this into Windwt. And the R channel can go into the opacity mask. And on first check, this should be our grass shader completed unless it gives us a scary error like that. So I'll click a board and check the stats. So we can go ahead and debug this a little bit. It's upset at color wind. Invalid input types, float two with Vector three. Let's go ahead and check it out. So I quickly found the error, and it's that for the world position, we just only want XY for that divide. It was pretty scary looking at first, but we totally made it through. And now we can see that grass texture. It's a little glitched in this preview, but setting it to the sphere mode will show you that it's working correctly. I'm going to save all of this, and I'll make the window smaller and as much as I would like to use automatic landscape grass, I don't think that's going to give us the controls we need. In theory, you can go to the foliage section and add a landscape grass type, plug it into the landscape, and it will spawn grass everywhere. But I don't think it's going to help us in this scenario because we have a really wide landscape, and I think it might just crash our engine. So hand painting some foliage in the view and letting it fade out is never a problem. So I'm going to go to the meshes and check out our grass, and we'll go to the foliage master materials. And for this being grass, I'm going to create a material instance, call it MI grass. We'll make sure we save this grass material. And in instance, put it in the correct spot and I'll assign it to this grass car. I'll go a full screen for a moment just so we can see this. I'm going to go back to the mass materials grass. And what I'd like to do is change up its normals a little bit. I'm looking at this and thinking we have our normals pointed upwards, but I also want them to be evenly distributed on both sides. So all we have to do is grab a tint a vector three and set it to 001 for the blue. And I'm going to multiply it by a node called the two sided sign. I'm just going to plug that into the normal. We can start commenting things. Normal. And we know this is subsurface and specular and roughness. So we'll just put this up here and call it color. There we go. I'll save that. So then that means it's time to grab our mesh asset and click on Shift three to go to foliage mode. I'm going to drag the foliage in here. Should be easy, if not. So I'm going to right click in this menu, and I'll go to foliage and add a static mesh foliage. And I'll call this SMF grass. Let's open it. And now it wants a mesh, we can quickly put our grass in there, and this foliage painting tool will accept this version. If I click on it, we can go ahead and change some settings. I know right away, I think I want to lock the X and Y, but be able to change the Z. So if I make the brush smaller, and give it a quick test run. We could see just how crazy these are getting. So they're pretty small right now. I'll press Control Z. We'll average these out at around three. Maybe that could be its smallest. Maybe by default, we'll make it four. And I want to test out six around here and maybe eight for the Z. Eight's a little tall or this is a little wide, so maybe I'll set this to five, five and seven with three here and three here. And I'm going to turn off cast shadow for all of these. I don't want our grass to be casting any shadows, basically, especially for this style. In more realistic styles, you should do that. And now I can go ahead and start painting. I think I'll increase the density. Since we're painting manually, and I just want to keep it in the camera distance, not too worried about the actual density of it. And we're using lit wireframe because it's going to blend in to the path very, very well, almost too well to the point where we're going to use size variation to get the depth out of this grass. So I'm already going to press Shift one and just make sure that I could find our camera. I'll pin it, put it in here. Make this window pretty darn small. I'll go back to it. We can see how that grass blends in with the rest of our terrain. It's pretty nice. And it is a little tall right now, but we will be using the reapply tool so that we can change the size of it. Make the scale of this bigger. I'm just painting across. I'm going to erase it right here for a moment. And I'm going to change the settings to turn off static mesh. I only want it on the landscape, so I could be a little less careful with the grass now. Okay. I'm just trying to make it more dense if I need to. It's reaching okay spot. I don't even go into the back and start painting in the landscape with a bigger brush size. Checking out where we actually need the grass and where we might not need it. So I'm seeing how far back we need to push it. I think I'll take the grass as far back as the house, trying to fill out this space, bringing it forward now, checking out where that grass ends, and I'll have it go across or around this river as well so we know what's going on. Before I continue, I'll play with the material instance of this grass. So I'll go back into the instance, get the grass, and it'll make this larger. Maybe we'll go into the camera view for this. We will be changing the grass size, too. For starters, I'm enjoying the fact that it's sharing the same values as the terrain successfully, so I'm not going to play with the color too much. We're going to do that through the landscape material, but I do want to find the wind noise and see if we can actually find the noise texture I was looking for. And there it is coming in successfully. Maybe we could speed this up. And we can now see the grass moving across our terrain in a pretty beautiful way too. Just want to make it a little more subtle, and we can always change the tiling of that. Already very soft, really cool. I might slow it down more. And that's looking pretty cool. For tree wind, I definitely want it at zero. I'm enjoying the opacity of the subsurface for this. I'll set the specular to one for the fnel so that we can actually see Now, we'll see what this number does. So now if we go back, we can actually see the grass getting shinier towards the back. Might mean we need to fill out our space a little more so if your computer can handle that, you know, all as well. I could even decrease the roughness if need be, and we get that really big extra shine. I don't think we need that. I'll leave it at one. That might even take the speculator down to 0.7. You can always change the height fall off too. I don't know if you could see that, but we can definitely see that right there. The billboard inflating scale is more useful for the foliage, so we're not going to need it too much for the grass, but even adding a little effect on there, you can actually see how it works. And so you can use a couple less cards to populate your scene really nicely. In fact, we might work a little bit off that. I'll definitely bring it down. So now I want to play with the wind intensity. And we're going to have to find the wind speed, as well. So it looks like the wind weight might be inverted, so I'll go ahead and see what's going on in the grass. I don't think it should be incorrect, but we're going to invert this. Now, I'll go ahead and the wind weight of the grass is actually working now. I couldn't tell you why since it went from black to white, but maybe the white function in real works a little differently. Couldn't tell you the real answer, but turning up the wind weight is a lot of fun, and then I'm going to change the wind speed again. Something maybe a little lower. You know, now I'm just testing out values, seeing what works. So I'm going to go back into foliage mode now. I'll leave this view. I'm going to go ahead and paint a cross. You know, in your material instance, find the values that you think work best for your scene. As you can see, none of these are very official or beautiful numbers. So I'm not being too careful. In fact, I'm going to go here and increase the density, maybe a little bit, increase the brush size. Just go kind of wild around here. And so I have to be careful with this next move that I'm going to do. But I want to find the reapply tool, and I want to make the edges smaller, and I want to make random strips smaller. So I'll get the reapply and we're going to go to the scaling. And we'll be we're just going to have to remember five, five and seven, right? So I'm going to set this to, I don't know, one, three, and three. I'll go down the path. And I don't want to do chicken scratch strokes over the grass it'll just make it way too small. In fact, that's already too small, so I'm gonna go two, two, and two. So if you go over it multiple times, it might really just make the scale way too aggressively upset. So take a look, and it's doing something, but I think I got to make this bigger and be a little kinder to its max scale. That's looking a little better. Seeing what works. So I'm going to go back into foliage mode now. I'll leave this view. I'm going to go ahead and paint a cross. You know, in your material instance, find the values that you think work best for your seene. As you can see, none of these are very official or beautiful numbers. So I'm not being too careful. In fact, I'm going to go here and increase the density, maybe a little bit, increase the brush size. Just go kind of wild around here. And so I have to be careful with this next move that I'm going to do. But I want to find the reapply tool, and I want to make the edges smaller, and I want to make random strips smaller. So I'll get the reapply and we're going to go to the scaling, and we'll be we're just going to have to remember 55 and seven, right? So I'm going to and we'll be we're just going to have to remember 55 and seven, right? So I'm going to set this to, I don't know, one, three, and three. I'll go down the path. And I don't want to do chicken scratch strokes over the grass it'll just make it way too small. In fact, that's already too small, so I'm gonna go two, two, and two. So if you go over it multiple times, it might really just make the scale way too aggressively upset. So take a look, and it's doing something, but I think I got to make this bigger and be a little kinder to its max scale. Nuts looking a little better. Nuts looking a little better. I'm going to erase this, if I can. Let's take paint. I just try to erase some of these. And I'll regular paint some of these. I'll just take the reapply tool and start busting up the height variation of this. Okay, so really quick, before I start working on the foliage shader for fun, I'm just looking at the concept art, and I'm looking at landscape mode with the paint tool, and I noticed that we have a path. Now, you know, unreal engine landscape tools may not be as kind, but we will give it a shot. We're going to go ahead and hide the foliage for now. We'll bring that back later. I'm just looking at the reference down here and I'm seeing if I could replicate this path. Right now, I'm okay zooming in. Seeing if we can get this around. Oh, whoops. I'm in foliage mode for some reason. I want to get out of that. Okay. So I'm painting around that. Checking out the tool strength cause I'm interested in what kind of shape it gives us. Even in the back, I want something pretty natural. So I'm lightly scraping across. Now, I'm looking at the concept art, and I notice yeah. So I'm lightly scraping across. Now, I'm looking at the concept art, and I notice we have a little bit of a taper this way. Seems like we have a little bit of path action going down here. Maybe I can make it a little lighter and thinner to suggest a bit more distance. Play with the gradient from what I see in D. In the concept or sorry, in the camera view. And that's good enough for me. Now, I'm going to take that path forward. And I'm frequently looking between here and here. Oh, and I had also changed the tiling, just a tad. Oh, and I had also changed the tiling, just a tad. So I don't think it's coming in forward enough, so I'm gonna get rid of some of this. Try to bring it forward a little. I'll keep trying to taper it this way. Okay. We're adding a little bit of complexity to that path. I want to go a bit softer towards the camera. I'm even adding little streaks of brown across because up close, that detail kind of makes our grass a little bit harsh, but far away, it should look pretty good as a little extra color detail. So I'm even pretty good as a little extra color detail. So I'm even brushing horizontal strokes across with the dirt layer. It's getting a little bit toasty around here, bringing it back. Make it a little bit weaker back here. I'm playing with those values. So just in case, we'll check out the instance foliage actor again. And while that looks great, now it's time to erase the grass in that area. So I'll take the paint tool, select the brush size that works, and I'm going to go for this. I'm holding shift to take away that grass. That way, we're breaking up the background silhouette even more. We get a little swaler. We even have some of the paths break up over here. We get a little swaler. We even have some of the paths break up over here. Take a big view of the grass and see if we can even some of this out. I definitely know that we have a lot of these. Let's make this 20,000. And while I will fill it perhaps more up here before I place it set that density lower to something like 100. I want to bring it up closer over here and bring it back here. I think everything behind can go. So getting rid of all this grass in the back and hopefully it could save us some polygons. Go all the way back here, make sure it's not going behind our mountain. And thanks to the wind, we can spot the grass a little bit better. And thanks to the wind, we can spot the grass a little bit better. You know, kind of creating a manual camera culling on that grass. We'll go back. And just for fun, let's go ahead and check out the volumetric Clouds again. I think I want to still keep playing with these sliders until we get something new that we're happy with. I could even change up the material a little bit. I think increasing the amount of clouds is a bet, but I'll lower the velocity. It's a little bit fast. And in the sky atmosphere, maybe we could try going to the art direction and in the sky illuminance factor, we could boost up those blues a little bit. Could try going to the art direction and in the sky luminance factor, we could boost up those blues a little bit. And I'm looking at the skylight. We'll see if increasing the sky intensity helps or hurts us. I actually like the lighter skylight. Now I'm looking at the directional light. We can change the source angle. If we change it to 20, it gets a bit softer at those edges, which we might prefer. I'm still looking at the concept beside me. I might increase the intensity to 13.4 that's already looking pretty good, looking at the colors beside me, and that looks pretty awesome. Now I'm ready to move on to the foliage shader. So this was just a quick polished pass to make sure that we're happy with the direction that we're going with this scene. So, you know, we made our grass foliage functions. We made our grass shader. We painted our landscape with the grass. We find tuned and polished up the background of We're going with this scene. So, you know, we made our grass foliage functions. We made our grass shader. We painted our landscape with the grass. We find tuned and polished up the background of our landscape, and then we polished up our lighting a little bit. So we've done a lot. Now we're going to work on our foliage shader. So really, really good job. Work on our foliage shader. So really, really good job. 40. 38 Foliage And Trunk Shader: So getting this far, we've pretty much gotten everything we need to get started on the foliage and trunk shader, and that's so we could build our trees, bushes, flowers, and hay roofs. So I'm going to make a new master material and call this one foliage. It is different than our grass. For now, as well, I'm going to select our grass and hide it. I don't feel the need to render it out right now. I'll make sure we've saved everything. Let me go ahead and open foliage. So for the specular and roughness, I want it to be pretty simple. It's not going to have the same values as grass shine. So I'm just gonna get two scalars. One specular, one roughness. It's set this one to one and this one to, like, 0.1. I want it pretty low. So now we'll get to work on the base color. I'm going to add a texture sample. We'll convert it to a parameter, and I'm going to call this one the color map texture. If I take a static switch parameter, I can pick between a solid color and this color map, right? So I'll type in color map question mark. And if it's false, I just want to use a regular tint. So I'll add a vector three with the three, and I'll call this foliage color. I'll plug the RGB into the false. So now I'll press Control space, and I'm going to add the foliage shadow function we made earlier. Go ahead and plug it right into there. And, you know, this will take the shadow controls for this amount of color information. But we also want to lurp it between one simple color. So I'll use a three to add a new node, convert it to a parameter, and it's going to be our gradient. So I'll call it our gradient color, and in general, just give it an average dark blue. We'll plug this into B, and now we're going to build D gradient mask. So what we start with is a bounding box based 01 UVW. And this will take the Z channel of that object. And so we'll divide it and get a gradient, sorry, we're just going to add a scalar, and we're going to call it gradient balance. You guys know by now that I tend to do that. So let's add a new scalar and call this one gradient contrast. As usual, we want or to be consistent with our previous ones, we can go something closer like gradient offset, and I'll get a cheap contrast, as well. I'll just plug these in. With the offset, we'll keep it at one, gradient contrast. I'll keep this at zero for now. I also want to invert this and I'll multiply it by final strength, and I'll call it gradient opacity. By default, it could be one, and I'll plug it into B, and I'll saturate this, and this can be the Alpha. So we can stay a little more organized now and I'll comment on these elements, and I'll call it gradient. This is our regular color. So what I'll do is I'll take these boxes and stretch this comment out because now we'll go back up and we'll get the color controls. So that typically means that we're going to go into one of our other materials, to a master, like blend, and we'll just start from there by grabbing some of these nodes. We'll go back to foliage and we'll put in our color controls. Move this back if we need to. So I'll keep this, this, this. I don't think we need contrast too much. You know, unless the tint of the flowers are just incorrect and we need that contrast control. So we'll actually keep it as well as the tint. So I'm just deleting that extra material one name. Okay, with all of this, and this will go into the base color. And for our foliage, in order to get a little extra color variation out of it, we're going to add a node called spe tree variation. Color variation. And for the amount, we'll add a scalar, call it tree color variation or just color variation, and we'll set it to something really low like 0.05 in my instance. You can try something higher if you like. I'll press Control space and get our foliage subsurface, and I'll plug the base color into there. And for the shader, we'll make sure this is also set to mass and two sided foliage, just like the grass. So for the subsurface opacity, we'll do regular opacity, subsurface color. And this color variation up here can go straight to the base color. And we're also going to grab the foliage wind and we're going to put it in the world position offset. It's a little mat without its weight again. So we're going to get its opacity. Let's go ahead and convert it to a parameter. I'll call this opacity mat. Plug we'll plug the red channel into the opacity mask for now. Let's go ahead and grab a base texture. I know we're mostly going to be working with these tree leaves that we had drawn. So the blue channel can go into the wind weight, and this should work perfectly fine, but in our experience with the grass, we had to invert it. So maybe we'll add a static switch parameter and call it invert wind weight. If it's true, let's invert the blue channel. And if it's false, we'll just take the blue channel as is. We can see that the gradient offset is a little high. I wonder if I set it to zero. We'll figure that out. So I'll press Save, and we'll go ahead and I'll minimize that for a moment. Duplicate this and create a material instance. And the first one is tree leaf. That's what we'll get for the first one. Let's go ahead and go to our foliage meshes, and I'm just going to grab the bush for now. Now, I'll take the tree leaf and I'll put it on there, and it looks like we'll have to solve some problems. Okay. So, if you'll notice, our bush disappeared. And there is unfortunately one small problem with tree box that I hope to update before the course is officially released. But if it's not officially fixed, I'm going to show you the actual fix for it right now. We're going to go ahead and open up blender and go into our foliage project. And this bug does not apply to the trees. This only applies to the bushes. So I'm going to hide the trees and look at our two bushes. Let's double check the names as well if this is Bush two and this is Bush one. So normally, you'll have your panel look like this, but we're going to go down into the object data and click on attributes, and it does supply us with the UV map. I just have to make sure that it automatically transfers it to the actual UV map section. So let's fix it for both of these. For this attribute called UV Map, I'm going to click on Convert attribute I'm going to click on Face corner for this and a two D integer or two d vector for the data type. If I click Convert, it is now a UV map. We'll go ahead and try that again for this one. Let's find the UV map. Convert that attribute to face corner and two D vector, and it is applied as a UV map. So now we can go ahead, reset their position, and I'm going to export both of these again. File FBX, we have our mesh Export. I'll go ahead and hop into our village with our game FBX and get Bush one. We'll do the same for Bush, too. Again, I hope that doesn't apply to the final course. So at least we know what the issue is for things like bushes. That should automatically be applied for the trees. So now back and unreal, I'm going to go ahead and re import these. Now if I click on the Bush, we could see our material finally come together a little bit. I'm going to go ahead and place one in the scene. We'll go ahead and check out the tree leaf material instance. I did set the default color as well to a green when it was originally black. That is all I changed. So back into the material instance for the tree leaf, let's go ahead and play with this a little bit. Maybe we should take this bush as well, assign the instance to it. First of all, put it in the correct folder. And we're taking a good look at that, going back to the meshes. Now we have two to play with. So we'll use this. Now we have two to play with. So we'll use this really quick as the basis for what the colors are doing in this shader. Looking at the tree leaf, I think the first thing I want to see is the gradient color. And instead of a blue, I'll make it a darker green. And then we can also change the subsurface intensity to something a bit brighter. And I'm not going to add a custom subsurface to this just because this is already acting sorry, interacting fairly well with the light around it. So I'm looking to see if there's anything else we want to change with this, we could hue shift it to a little bit bluer and change the brightness. But before we change the brightness, let's go ahead and see if we have any other options like the foliage shadow. We'll go ahead and click on that, and I've put those scalar nodes in a little group called shadow. Let's see what this mask is doing. So we can see it's raising up into those tree leaf cards. And so maybe instead of a huge brightness change, we just want to get a nice little hue shift. We can always change the opacity and the power of that mask. Cool. We also have the gradient opacity and offset. So I'm going to change the offset and get a make sure it's working correctly. And I do that by changing the color. And now I'm blending, you know, the vertex shadows with these new shadows, and I still know I want to just get a nice darkish green, a very dark green. So I'll check out the wind next. Let's see. And maybe in the master material in my little debugging process. I wanted to find debugging process. I wanted to find out what was wrong. So I unplugged the foliage wind. But it turns out it was that UV map issue with tree box, so I totally apologize, but it's better than needing to make a whole bush and tree from scratch, isn't it? So let's check out our wind. And for materials like this, this one would actually benefit from the billboard inflate and scale. Now we're starting to see these tree leaves expand towards the camera. We could play with the balance of how these tree leaves operate. For example, you might want more inflate but less scale or vice versa. I think I'm satisfied with something around there. And so we need to decide a universal tree wind. So we'll see what this looks like first. It's going to be one big movement. I'll slow it down. I think I'll stick with 0.05 the functions. I'll see if I can find the foliage wind. Maybe we could slow down the trees a little bit. Oh, but nice, it does depend on the object position. So when the trees are larger, this will be a little bit calmer. So I'll go back to the instance, and now we'll play with the wind intensity. Maybe I want a high intensity. For the wind intensity and then more wind speed here. I want to see if this is actually contributing in the way I need. No, it looks like maybe it's because we inverted our wind weight will find out. So I'm just going to plug, let's see. Let's actually invert it and find out. Okay, so now it's working correctly. So yeah, even though we set up our masks correctly, as far as I know, it's still being pretty fussy when it comes to as far as I know, it's still being pretty fussy when it comes to the mask for the wind weight. So now I'm just binding the wind numbers I enjoy, and near the end, we'll go with something pretty windy. So I'm just setting this up for success there. Oh, and I totally apologize. Let's do one more quick fix for our tree leaf material. I'll hop into foliage, and I want to replicate that two sided sign action we had going on with our grass into these tree leaves. So I'm going to grab a vector three with one at blue and multiply it by a two sided sign. So go ahead and plug that into the normal. Again, apologies. I try not to do this stuff too out of order, but we know what's what now? Normal, and we have windpacity and you know the rest of the story. So very cool. And then before I total that one last function we made, which is material function cross fade. Now that the UVs are working, we're okay with that extra action. Now, I will remind you that if we select it, let's go ahead and turn it on. We're looking for the cross fade. It does work and it does shave out those perpendicular polygons. However, it for some reason, just erases the retraced cast shadow. So that is something you want to consider when either developing a portfolio piece or a larger game project. And this episode was a little bit messy. There was some things we had to fix, but this should be a finished bush, and we'll go ahead and discuss, you know, final lighting polish a little bit later, but we're making good progress. So we'll set up the trees next. Okay, so continuing on, we're going to get started with the trunk shader. It's going to share a lot with the prop shader, so I'll just open this one up as well. And I'll make a new master material, not a news material trunk. Let's just delete that. I'm also thinking I want to make a quick lighting edit. I want to make sure that our ray tracing is on. I'll click Enabled, and I want that to be the same case for skylight. I'm gonna turn off real time capture, and I'll go to Ray. And, yeah, I want these to definitely be enabled. And as well, I'll change the source angle. Maybe five is okay for now, or maybe even ten. Let's go in between. Try seven. I'm just going to change the rotation around a little bit. We think that does look pretty good so we can get a little bit of shadows underneath that foliage. So now I get started on the trunk shader, I'll open that up and I'll open up the prop. I'll put the prop with this one so we have an extra window. So really, looking at this, we can actually copy most of it, everything outside of the detail normal. I'll paste it in here. We'll plug in the appropriate slots. We get our specular ambient occlusion and metallic and our normal. We don't need the detail normal in this case, and all they want to add is the foliage wind. So I'm going to go to the functions, make sure I'll find the wind, and I'll plug the result into the world position offset. So I'm also going to change the base texture to bark. Let's find the color map we made and the other maps we made. Try the ORD for this one. Or, I apologize, the OR. We'll try the normal for this guy. So as usual, we'll give it the stress test. We're gonna open up one of our trees. We'll go to our master, and the stress test, we're gonna open up one of our trees. We'll go to our master, and I'll duplicate this, call it MI truck. Let's go ahead and put it in the instance. Oh, I actually didn't mean to duplicate the master material, so embarrassed. I'm meant to create a material instance out of this MI trunk. What a day. So let's go back to the foliage mesh. And then let's go back to the instance. And this should be the correct one. There are times when you may need to restart unreal if the textures start coming in low resolution. I'm going to scroll through these parameters and make sure that nothing is particularly offensive. In the master material, I don't think we have a use for worldspace paint, so I'm just going to get that out of there. Now I'll go back to the mesh, and I'm going to check out the RVT blend, and we will have to bring in the asset to really test that out. So I will go into trunk, make sure we're sampling the correct one, and I'll go into the material instance and see what we can do. We could try RVT strength set to one, bring up that height blend. We can see that going up there, which is pretty cool. I'm going to give the tiling a shot, see if that changes anything or maybe even just clicking on the bark texture. Sometimes, yeah, sometimes that'll reset the resolution of that texture. We'll have to restart unreal soon to calm it down. So I'm continuing to take a look at the trunk material it's assigned to, and I think we want more normal strength. So I'm bringing the normal flatness down a little bit, more normal strength. So I'm bringing the normal flatness down a little bit. I'm going to bring up the tiling. And I want to take a look at the wind 100%. So I'll click on wind and actually don't want any wind intensity, but I do want tree wind. So 0.020 0.01 or 0.05. Sorry, 0.005. Think of looking for something a little closer to that. And for the leaf, I think we're just going to go ahead and try to assign the same leaf material for now. So in instance, we'll get the tree leaf. And we can tell that the billboard has gotten kind of crazy, so we're going to go ahead and look at the wind and play with that. I'm also going to make sure that we have our cross fade off. I go to make sure that this is And that totally did the trick. So I'm going to look at the tree leaf again, and I know that the tree speed was 0.005, and now let should match a little better. We can go ahead and play with the billboard until this looks pretty good. I'm gonna go ahead and look at the gradient height, too, radiopacity gradient offset. That is still looking pretty good in the grand scheme of things. I'm enjoying the colors of that. I will take a look at the subsurface. It's doing an okay job, but maybe we do want to try out custom subsurface. Check out the radius. That's probably the best we're gonna get. It's okay to add a little yellow tint. Just go to turn down the intensity a little bit. And, you know, we' still getting a lot of shadows due to more more natural global illumination. If you want to turn off ray tracing, you turn off the distance field lighting, and then this will have less dark shadows, but this still fits pretty good within our scene. Seeing if there's anything else we need to change, we could always preview how the specular works on these trees. Get a little bit of shine. There's really nothing wrong with that. I think I'll keep it around 0.2 for now. Play with the brightness. And for now, I'm going to leave it around that. And so I always give the shader a stress test before I move on to the next element. So it's matching the trunk speed, and I'm pretty happy with that. Maybe I'll find a way to change the rotation speed of that while retaining the strength, but I'll let you know super soon. So with that, the next thing we'll move on to is the hey roof cards because they share a similar material. So I'm going to go ahead and make sure everything's saved. Let's just close everything. Material, and I'll call it MI H. And for this one, I want to use the grass card. And I know I'm gonna want some brownish colors. We'll see if we want to keep foliage shadow. We know we're not going to have any tree wind. We know we're gonna have much less billboard inflate. I'm going to turn off custom subsurface. And I think for the rest of these, I'll keep them as such. So we will test out this material right now. Let's go to meshes hop into our village. Let's open up a couple of these houses. Now I'll hop into the instances and see what the hay material looks like on here. See what the hay material looks like on here. So I'm going to drag this one out. Let's play with the tone, see if we need to play with the hue shift and maybe the brightness. Kind of almost want to see if I can get it to a similar hue to the roof underneath it, but that's it's a bit of an ask. However, maybe the desaturation can help us. Now we can still play with the billboard inflate and the scale. And we're actually going to save this and see if we can apply this to the rest of our houses, as well. Okay, given it the stress test with my eye. And so now I'll just play with some of these extra features going on. But we'll see if the shadow is on, it is. I'm assuming just that some of these controls are a little bit finicky. There we go. Now we can see some difference. I'll play with the power, see if I can get the height correct. Now we're getting these fake painterly shadows. We can even change the hue shift. I we might need more power. Make sure the opacity is at one and then take the height from there. Yeah, that's going to work a little bit better. And then for perhaps the gradient color, maybe we want to desaturate it. We could still keep it plenty dark. Now I'm looking at the actual foliage color. Maybe we need to desaturate this and make it darker. Now I'm looking at the subsurface archer. Now I'm looking at the subsurface, seeing if any of these values will treat us differently. Not too much on this one. There is a lot of them. Let's see if the specular value treats us well. We're going to need low specular on this. Just quickly testing out the gradient fall off or the offset, but I think I want to change that contrast fall off and just try to find a value so that all these houses benefit from this color scheme. I think this will be our best bet with the hay. Okay, and so let's just finish up our trees then by assigning the correct materials, then we'll quickly make the flowers instance. Go ahead and assign. T subsurface is really, really strong. Let's bring it down just a little. There we go. That looks pretty cool. Tree leaf, tree leaf, and let's not hide it. We'll assign the trunks, too. They're gonna be completely green in this view, sometimes, sometimes. So now with our tree saved, all we got to do is check out the flowers. I'll open all four up. And I'm going to duplicate tree leaf, and I'll make a new one called MI Flowers. So for these materials, you can see our little flowers right here. We'll go ahead and assign flowers to all four of them. They should be UV mapped correctly. We'll go ahead and we'll find out what the appropriate settings for these are. I think we're going to have a better time right now if I have a better time right now, if we place them down in the ground and see how they operate within the world. We'll take a good look at that. Okay, let's open up flowers. And the first thing we want to change is the opacity map, so we'll change it to flowers. And I'm not too upset with how it's being treated by the wind weight, but it is a little strong. I'm gonna take down the intensity. And still have some speed to that. And then I'm going to go into the color map. We need to make sure that we turn it on as a switch, and then that is already a sign. So let's make sure that we're treating the subsurface correctly. I don't want custom subsurface. I'm okay with it being pretty intense, actually, so we don't get harsh shadows underneath. These are a little bit dull looking, and I'm guessing as linear with in substance designer. So I'm actually opening that up quick and seeing if we need to change Go ahead and check on export outputs. And yeah, it's being a little bit rude so we're just going to try out the linear, save it, close it, even be brave and close it again. And I'll go ahead and re import. And these colors seem to be working a lot better. So I'll check out brightness again. Check out desaturation. And that is all working way closer to how I originally intended. I'm going to delete them from the scene really quick. And I just want to take a double check at our assets. So they are all officially textured, which means we're going to take a breath, and in the next video, we're going to place our assets around, and the final effect shaders like water, cloud shadow, and the shadow post process effect. So we are really getting there. I'll see you in the next one. 41. 39 Level Design Demo: Ad Napa and Artisators two's ta. Carce. I just cars I'm already be stings and trees in with the furniture. Ready put in the fries in freezer. AttriTre versus not. Sir, we're come through. I just ditsy and ten cartas. I'll see it doesn't hurt. 42. 40 Water And Polish: Alright, so we're back, believe it or not, even though it looks quite a bit different, I didn't do much. I made a new tree material, and I went into textures and just made one more tree leaf that I thought looked pretty good. I just wanted it a little bit less dense in the middle, and it took me a little time, so I didn't record it, and I'll just include it in the um, both the resources and the actual project file itself. So don't worry about that. You'll be able to go ahead and grab that texture. No problem. And another thing I did was decrease the roughness for this wheel. That way, once we add the water, it'll be nice and shiny. I changed some of the tints around, and I will still do that until I get to the final rendering stage. And I just added, like, one or two trees back here. So, yeah, do what you feel looks best. Like, there are actually no trees at the top of this in the concept. So I'm going a little off here. So I might even delete that one, but these are things I'm just adding to put my own spin on it. Maybe for the base wood, we'll actually increase the roughness. We can increase the brightness and change the normal flatten. That's gonna be good enough for right there, it looks like. Yeah, that lets us know the difference between this very dry wood and this wood that is constantly going to be going up against the water. So why don't we actually learn how to animate this right now? I'm going to go into meshes and make a blueprint class. Just go to add a common actor and we'll call it BP wheel. When I open it up, I'll be in the viewport, and I'm going to go ahead and see if I can drag this static messi in here. I can. If I select it, we'll get the details, and it's good that everything is at zero. This can be a little tricky to get the hierarchy correct, so hopefully this is as easy as I think it is. But we're going to get the rotating movement object and add it to the scene. I'll look for rotation rate, and I'll set the Z to zero and set the Y to something small like 15 degrees. And we'll give that a quick test by clicking on these three dots and clicking on Simulate. And it didn't seem to do much yet, so let's see if we need to rotate it. So with that done, I'm just going to replace the original wheel with the new wheel. It shouldn't be too hard. If I go to the world settings and do gameplay mode, I want to start with none because I want to surprise us. So in the meantime, I'll go to Cine Camera actor on this, and I'll click Simulate And it is correctly moving. So our wheel looks good. And in this same video, I'm going to go ahead and get started on the water material. I'll make a new material called MM Water. And first things first, we only need two new material functions. But go ahead and go to material advanced material function, MF, water opacity, and we'll make one more material. MF water normals. Now, I'm here to remind you that this isn't an effects course. And so these last couple of effect shaders we're going to work on, they're not complex. We're not going to be working with particle systems. I just want to get us a simple water shader since that's such a basic foundation to most environment art. It's just that it leans more towards the Vec side of things. And at the very least, I can get us, you know, sort of a head start in that direction so that we can at least fill out our scene nicely. So I'll go open water opacity first. And this won't be too hard. I want an output called opacity, and I want an output called refraction. All right, we're going to get this is we're going to start with a node called the depth fade node. We'll take a constant for this opacity and set it to one. Now I want a scalar I can change and set it to opacity distance. By default, I'm going to set it to 500. And I'm going to clamp this instead of saturate so we can pick the values that it's clamping at. So I'm making a new one. New scalers, 14 opacity shallow and opacity deep. So when it's fully deep, I'll set the opacity to 0.9, being a little picky. For the shallow, I'll leave it at zero. And that's pretty important because it'll create clipping if we don't. We'll go ahead and go forward, and we can add some cheap contrast and add a scalar called opacity contrast. We'll just get that final strength with a multiply, and I'll make a node called opacity final. Set that final opacity to one or 0.95. We don't need to change the contrast yet. You need that opacity out, and we're just going to saturate this mask. So from this cheap contrast, we're just going to do something a little bit funky. Let's drag some of this back. And we'll plug this into a multiply with a two sided sign. Two sided sign. We'll saturate it. And this will be the mask between two different refractions. So we'll get a larp. We'll move this to the Alpha, we'll get two more scalars. This one should be called refraction and inverse refraction. So this one is just regular refraction. For the water, I'm actually going to go to the monitor to my right and look up water IOR. And it says it is 1.333. For the inverse refraction, I'm going to set it to zero. So this is going to go into the refraction output. Saving it. And that's our water opacity function. So now we'll go ahead and get started on the water normals, as well. We'll start with a texture coordinate. We'll get some tiling going on. Get a quick multiply. We'll call this normal distortion tiling. We're setting up the distortion, we're setting up the normals, and we're going to have these distortion plug into the UVs of those normals. So I'm getting a Panner node, and we'll get a new scalar called normal distortion speed. Oh. By default, I'll set it to something pretty slow, like 0.05. And the default tiling for this can be around five. Plug this into the speed. Now I'm going to get a texture sample, and I want to decide the input myself. So I'm going to get a function input. I'm going to call this the distortion map. And we can have this be plugged into the texture, so long as we set it to a texture two D. Plug these into the UVs, and we're going to do some more stuff with this. So I'm going to plug this into a multiply. I'll get a scalar called normal distortion strength. Hate that that hides the title every time. Okay, we got to multiply. Let's go ahead and grab an Add, plug it into the B. So by default, I'll set the strength pretty low. I like 0.1. So now we're gonna plug in some chaos into this ad node, as well. From the texture coordinate, I'm going to get a new multiply in scalar. And I'm gonna call this the normal map tiling. So I will do the same thing with this with the pannerEcept I might want control over two different speeds. So in that sense, I'm going to duplicate this and append these vectors. And I can name one X and Y. Whoops. As well as putting the word a map instead of distortion. Okay, we'll pin those vectors. We'll keep the same speed for now. We'll see what we need to change in the actual engine. I'm going to add these two together. And then pretty much all of this can be plugged into a new texture sample that we'll call the normal map. So this is super simple, you know, we are just taking a distortion map, and we are using it to wiggle and warp the UVs of this normal map. That is pretty much all that's going on. Flattening the normal, getting normal flatness, and that's pretty important for the water. We want a lot of control over that. By default, I know I don't even want it too strong, and I'll go ahead and plug this into our output. Now, the normal map can pretty much be any one of the more generic ones we had created, they're all pretty noisy in that sense. So I might get some luck with the rock, surprisingly. We'll check out a couple of these and see which one looks best in a moment. But that's the opacity. That's the normals. And now we'll go into the master. And we can start combining everything together. So we'll start with the color. I'm gonna get two tints. I'll call one the shallow color. And let's set a lighter color for this one. And we'll do it again for this one and call it the deep color. We'll get something darker. And we're just going to mix between thee with a larp. And we're going to get that same type of depth fade logic going on. So a depth fade with a constant of one. And we'll call this the color fade distance. By default, I'll also set this to around 500. We can also get some contrast for it, too. Plug in cheap contrast. And I'll name it color contrast. Maybe color fade contrast. So for the results of this, we'll plug it into the Alpha. And just in case the colors here aren't really treating us too well, we are gonna just hop into any of these and grab some color controls. That should work out pretty well by default. I think I'm just going to plug this into the base color. Let's go ahead and get our two functions that we created. See water opacity and water normals. So messed up a little bit. Let's go ahead and open this up still. So we know we have our distortion input, but we also want to be able to change the colors of this. So instead of having it be a scalar, just go to make a new normal map. Or, sorry, a new texture sampler. And I'll call this function input the normal map. It could be a texture two D. We'll get the UVs from there, and we're just replacing that. Make sure this is spelled correctly. Yes, it is. I'll save that, check that out again. And for opacity, what we need to do is change the shader settings first. So the settings are going to be a translucent material. We're okay with default let. I think I'll leave off two sided for now, but it might be easier to click with two sided on. Oh, it's actually important for this translucent material, I suppose. We don't need the screen space reflections because we're dealing with lumen reflections. But I guess if we turn it off, we can have that checked on, and the type I want to set this to is surface translucency volume. Now we're starting to add the correct settings that we need, and the last setting, I believe, is down below in refraction, and I'm going to set it to index of refraction. We're making progress. Now, for the opacity and refraction, I'll plug that into the correct slots. The result of this can go into the normal, and now we just need to give it to textures. Our distortion map and our normal map. Let's see. It wants a texture two D, so I'm going to check this again. So I think the reason why it's getting upset is because we're using an RGB texture here. I'm going to see if we can alleviate that with just the red channel down here. So with that in mind, that should be everything we need to get the water material instance kind of ready to go. And so, you know, sort of last but not least, let's go ahead and add a plane. And we're in perspective. So I'm going to hunt down that plane. Let's drag it down. And I'm not looking to make it too rectangular because then it'll squeeze our UVs. What I would also like to do is add a little pool for this house. So I'll assign the water material to this, as well, and this will be way in the back, but it should still look kind of nice, a little tint of blue. Okay, let's go back to the river. Let's lower it. And we'll go ahead and create a material instance from the water MI water. Drag it in the instance. I just went ahead and placed it, and it definitely seems like it's going to need some attention. So I'm going back to details. I'll open up our water instance, and we will explore this together. Already, I'm thinking mostly about the opacity right now. So for starters, it's the opacity to one. Right now, the shallow is at zero, so I'm going to check on the distance. We're already really getting somewhere, so we'll have a shorter distance for shore. I think I'll have a higher deep opacity. Then we can also check out the opacity contrast if needed. I'm trying to see if I can get away with dragging that down just a little bit. And we also definitely have to play with the colors. So first, I'll actually look at the colors and see if we need to saturate them more. That definitely seemed to be the case, so we're also going to look at the color fade distance. There we go. Now we're getting a much better look at how these colors interact with each other. If contrast, maybe now I can bring that down. So now, bring in the normal map. And we're looking for the correct speed. Maybe a little slower from there. Unless it goes slower when we do this. You know, I'm just going to find that correct speed. So we'll check out the distortion tiling. Distortion strength. We don't want to go too crazy with it, but that is looking cool. We're gonna have to change that speed so they're overlaying in different ways, maybe opposite ways. So I'll check out the actual colors. And I know this water reflects pretty dark in the final image. So I'm okay having a little color with it. We can't play with the saturation. You know, sometimes I can just go so crazy with the water that I don't even realize how saturated it is. So I'm really just trying to see how I can get closer to the concept art. Maybe I'll increase the contrast but increase the fade distance. Seeing how I can get some fun colors out of there. And I think I need to hop into the water material. And I want to add some scalar parameters for the specular and roughness. Should be very easy to add. By default, we'll get our zero and one, because those are stylized defaults, but we'll change it from there. So let's go back to the water material. Playing with the roughness, making sure that if need be, it can reflect very, very well. So even playing with the opacity contrast, it's pretty cool right there. We're getting more colors reflected. Play with the normal map tiling. And the water normal strength. Lastly, it looks like I'll just have to be careful and make sure that our water is slow, but also fast enough for it to move the actual water wheel. So, you know, it's all about give and take. I'll go ahead and simulate that. It looks like I'll have to reverse the direction of this wheel. First I'll lower. And so I'll go into the blueprint of the mesh whereve ranolp too. I'll go into the rotating movement and put it at 15. I can't remember which way I was rotating it earlier. I'll just simulate that. Yeah, that water is pushing the wheel that way. Awesome. Now, pretty much from here, we have our water. In fact, all lifted up. Oh, let's go ahead and assign water to here. Does it show? Let's force it to show. So as I was saying, I wasn't trying to build up anticipation, but believe it or not, the course is pretty much done. We're just going to be adding a pretty cool effect with the cloud shadow material. The other elements from the teaser was just a simple wind particle effect, as well as some leave sprite particle effects. It's just not an element in this course that I feel qualified to make you the masters of since they were researched off of from the asset marketplace. So this is looking fantastic. And the next video we rock with the cloud shadows and get that final little bit of polish in there. So I'll see you then. 43. 41 Fx And Goodbye: Okay, to be completely honest, I could get a little bit emotional. I guess, first things first to keep things on track. I went ahead and made sure that everything that you're going to be provided with in the project files is included, ready to go and very organized. So you get all the original project files we worked on. You get the entire Unreal Engine project file. You get all the textures, all the resources, and a little bit of a read me. And that read me also now includes an exclusive invite to my discour channel where people are sharing their art and helping each other out with tree box and paint box, talking about their art and their dreams and overall help and updates as to what I'm doing because I'm always around town. And I also have a YouTube channel. This is where I had first introduced Tree Box, and I'm really grateful for all the support it's got. I'm trying to get into YouTube more and take it a little easier on the freelance side. So if you enjoy my voice and want to get to know me more, this is my YouTube channel. I'm saying all this because, you know, I feel like as soon as we finish the cloud material, you might leave me, and you're going to say goodbye before I can, and that's going to really hurt my feelings. So when I go into the scene, I've also boosted the wind in all the material parameters just for fun. And so the two particle effects are the wind and the little grass leaves, you know, something I made from an old course, but it took a while, and we're already kind of maxing out on this scene here. So I hope if you want to learn more from me, you can go check out my YouTube channel or my discord or art station, and I'm extremely proud of us for having made it this far. Spent three months just grinding the heck out of this scene so that I pretty much give up all that I know so that everyone can do this. I really don't want anything to be gate kept. So, you know, you took all my secrets. The least you could do is hang out again with me some time. I hope to see you around on my channel because I'll have to catch up to you guys now now that you have all this awesome information under your belt. Let me stop yammering, and we'll go ahead and create that master material. We're gonna make a material for our sunlight. It's gonna be a really cool effect. I'll call it MM Cloud shadow. Let's just go ahead and open that up. It's gonna be a bit of a funky material. Basically, we're looking to assign this as a light function. It's only going to have an emissive color. We might work our way backwards for a second. For the larp at the beginning, I just want a constant set to one at first. And we're going to get a new node called the smooth step. We'll plug this into the B and the Alpha will be cloud shadow opacity. So now we'll make a little room backwards. I'll get another lp and this to 0.1, so we know that they're both active. And for this lip, we're going to need a texture sample. Let's get two of them, and we'll set it to shared wrap. Let's see if we can find that. Shared wrap, there we go. In the sampler source. So now I'm going to get a texture object. We'll convert it to a parameter and call it the shadow texture. So for now, I'm going to plug this into the textures of this. We're going to go ahead and make the UVs for these now. We'll start with the world position, and we're going to mask the RNG channels. Now I'll multiply this by some crazy values over here. Put it to a parameter and call it the shadow texture. So for now, I'm going to plug this into the textures of this. We're going to go ahead and make the UVs for these now. We'll start with a world position, and we're going to mask the R&G channels. Now I'll multiply this by some crazy values over here. G to get a divide, plug this into multiply. First, we'll get a constant at 0.05. Then I'll get a scalar at 1,000 and I'll call it Cloud noise tile one. Or how about cloud noise? A one tiling. It's a little more suited to my liking. I'll plug these into the divide. And I'll duplicate this divide. Go ahead and make a little room. And I'm going to be multiplying this by the same thing. Both of these multiplies, we'll go into a Panner node. And this can go into the UV. Then we'll just assign a quick scaler for the speed. Set it to something really low for now. 0.01. So now let's pick a noise for clouds. And I think I'll pick noise one or two. I might clean those textures up before the final export, totally fine for you guys. And I'll get the RG I'll either get just the RGB or the R channel. I think for now, I'll just grab the R channel and put the R channel and put those into the two lops, and I'm just going to set the Alpha at 0.5, and we'll clamp it out with these ones. So for now, I'll plug it into the emissive color. I'll save. Let's minimize this window. Now I'm going to check out the directional light and scroll all the way down. Oh, also, let's make sure light shaft bloom is on. It's always fun to have a bit of that in the scene, depending on how the volume metrics interact with each other. So I'm still scrolling down, and I'm gonna look for my light function material and get cloud shadow. So this should be the correct material instance. And Whoopsi Daisy, we know we assigned the correct master material. Let's go ahead and make a material instance. It's been quite a long one. Put the inner trusty instance folder, and let's go ahead and reassign that. We've open it. So we've been open it. So I'm going to leave the camera view for a moment, and we're going to be seeing if we can get some cloud shadows in the mix here. So by just setting it to one, we can already see it in action. And by playing with the minimax, as well as the tiling, we'll get some really interesting variations. Now, for this concept, art, it doesn't need a lot. But I do want some, and maybe we won't have it at full opacity. As well, let's change the speed to negative 0.005, and I'll change the tiling more. Then I'm going to play with the opacity. I'll take one last look at our grass, see what the color wind is doing. I'm just going to see if I can find a new contrast I enjoy more or a new pattern. That's pretty cool, as well. Looks like I'm gonna change the direction of it to negative. And I think everything is going in the correct direction. Honestly, I'm going to go crazy because as far as I know, this is the final scene. I know I amered on earlier about where you can learn more about me, but first, I want you to congratulate yourselves. This came out really, really incredible. I'm still being a little picky about it, even still looking at the brightness of this medal just to get something a little bit in the mix between all of this. And, you know, I'll end it by saying this. I spent a lot of years learning, loving, living and breathing, three D art, and I wanted to create a few years ago, I really couldn't, and it took all my might to create something like this still because it took so much practice and learning. And in a sense, when you look at this, everything that I know and everything I put my time in, this is my life's work. And so I'm honestly extremely humbled and grateful that you got to join me on this journey. I am still working to join the games industry in a really official capacity one day, and I think this course brought me one step closer to that, and I think it brought you one step closer to that, too, because I think everyone got to learn a lot from this. So really longest story short, thank you for supporting me as an artist. And in general, in the future, I really could use your support. I really hope you can look out for some of my future releases and maybe I'll make courses on my own one day. But in the meantime, I am so grateful that Emil had me on Fast Track tutorials to be able to teach you guys everything, literally everything that I know about stylized environments. I do not take it for granted. Do not forget me. I'm Shingadora. My name is Justin Wallace. This was an excellent adventure in building a three d environment of your own. From here, you'll be able to take high resolution screenshots or learn a little bit about the movie Render Q to get your own renders out of this scene. And as a final goodbye, we can take a game override and go into third person, and I'll press Play. And we worked our hearts out for this awesome next gen stylized scene. I could see a lot of potential from here. There's a lot of unique tricks that you're not going to get anywhere else, and they come from the lovely Shin gadora. So take a good look at our wonderful environment, be proud of yourself. Uh, you know, remember me well. I hope to stick around. I'm so thankful you stuck around with me. And this was the adventure of a lifetime. This was the adventure of a lifetime. I will see you in another course, another video, hopefully not another lifetime, and make sure to come reach out to me and show me the environment that you made with these tips. I'd love to come check them out. So thank you so much. Have a fantastic 2025. My name is Justin Wallace again, Shangadora and