Creating Stylized Grass in Unreal Engine 5 (Studio Ghibli Style)

1. Introduction to Class: Hello everyone, and welcome to this new class creating stylized grass in Unreal Engine Five. With the help of this class, you would be able to create your very own fluffy looking stylized grass. We will be going for a look similar to studio gibley grass, but you can very well customize it on your own. We will start the process by setting up the RVTs and creating the landscape material as the color for the grass would be driven from the landscape. After that, we will be modeling the grass clump in blender using very simple modeling techniques. You can use any three D modeling package that you have as the steps done are universal. After we export our grass model from blender to unlined, we will be creating our grass material. We will add various customizations to it through which you can adjust it accordingly. At last, we will also be adding wind to our grass material so that our stylized grass looks even more realistic. We would be learning a lot, and I hope to see you there in the class. Thank you. 2. Setting up RVTs: Hello and welcome everyone to this new course where we will be creating a stylized environment. From start to finish, we will be creating a landscape type environment with a stylized look. We will be covering a bunch of things in this course, like creating nice looking, stylized fluffy grass, stylized foliage. Things like stylized rocks, bushes, clouds, and many more things. Let's start right away. We can start by creating a new hundred project. Just open up this unreal project browser and head over to the game Stab so that we can create a new project. You can select blank from over here, and rest of the setting stay at default, check, check, check, check. Now let's just change the name. I will say it to something like course, underscore stylized environment. Let's just hit Create and wait for it to finish. All right guys, now our new under project has opened up. I will just go over a couple of basics of Fundal. You can move around in the Ca by holding right click, and then using WASD to move around like in a game. It's pretty basic. Another thing, if you want to bring up your content browser, you can just press control plus space to bring it up. I'm pretty sure that you are aware with all these shortcuts because they're pretty basic. Now, in this first lecture, we will start by creating a simple landscape master material. We will set up a landscape and we will also set up our RVD's that is run time virtual textures. If you don't know what that is, it's basically a feature in Unreal Engine that will help our assets to pick up color from the landscape itself and use it so that there is a seamless transition between our landscape and the assets that are kept over it, like the grass, rocks, everything like that. A we will get like a seamless transition between them and not like a hard edge. It will mainly help our grass to take color from the landscape. All right? Yeah. If you don't understand it that well right now, don't worry. We'll go over it completely. In the upcoming lectures, you will understand it completely. We don't really need this level over here. This is like the starting level. We can right click over here in a content browser, so just press control space to bring it up. And you can click over here to dock it in layout, so that it stays over here. Only now you can hit right click. Create New Level. Let's create this new world. Only double click to open it up, say selected. And now when the level will open up, you will be welcomed with this completely black screen. Because currently the level does not have anything, not even light. We need to add them on our own. Let's just quickly set up a basic lighting scene for our level. Now you can go over here in window and enable place actors so that we can view this place actor window. You can just drag and drop anything from over here in this window into the scene. Let's search for something like directional light, which will basically be our sun. Drag and drop it over here. You will notice nothing really happens. But wait. Another thing that we're going to add to the atmosphere, that is sky. Atmosphere. As soon as we have like a nice looking sky, we have this dark area over here. We'll just fix that in a minute. One more thing is select the directional light and make sure to search for atmosphere, sun light over here. It is enabled by default, but if it is disabled, just enable it. You will notice this is the thing that connects this directional light to the atmosphere. That way we can see the sun over here. Next thing to add is I think we can add exponential height. For to add a bit of fog, we don't really need fog in our scene. But let's just add it so that we fix that black color thing over here that was appearing at the bottom. You can adjust the fog directly from over here. By the fog density, we can decrease it to 0.0 001, that it is very less. Let's see, Next we can add is skylight is dragon robber skylight. And make sure to enable real time capture from over here so that we don't have to capture it again and again. It will automatically update whenever we change the lighting. The last thing to add is you can also add a bit of clouds just for now so that your scene looks good. But we won't really be adding them in our final scene as we will be creating our own clouds. We don't really need them, but if you want to add them for now, you can add them. Yeah, that's basically it. Let's see. First we can hit Save. Another thing that I will do is I will just select all of them and click over here to create a new folder. And I will place all of them in the light section. Yes, so we have everything organized. We will try and keep everything very organized in this course so that we have no problem in finding assets and things. Also, when I pass on all these resources to you, you guys also don't have any issues finding out things. Now we can just close this place actors window because we don't really need it. Now we have our basic lighting set up. Next we can add a landscape to our scene. You can go over here in the select mode and select landscape from over here. That will be now in the landscape editing mode. And you can see this huge green color plane appearing basically what this is. This will Help us visualize how big our landscape is and how many like sections does it have. You can see if you change it from over here, it will update if you just create, now the landscape is appearing. You can sculpt on it and do things like it, but let's just undo it for now. We need to change a couple of settings over here. I don't really want the landscape to be too big. I will just go over here and set the selection size to seven by seven, and we can increase the number of components to 32 by 32. Then I will just scale it down. Type in just 25 over here. That way we have a nice bit of detail in our landscape. And it is like really small because you don't want it to be too big. We can detail it properly with it being small if you want. Yeah, definitely. You can go for a larger one if you want to have that. But yeah, I'm just going to keep it this way and create now. All right, so now we have a landscape with us now. You can use the tools over here and the brush to sculpt on the landscape very easily. We can add elevation by painting over it. If you hold shift, then you will be like adding depth to the landscape. You can also change the brushes to add like smoothness. You can select the smooth brush or flat to flatten out the surface. They're pretty self explanatory. We also have brushes like hydro and noise that damage thing to like your landscape to make it look like actual land. Which is pretty cool. Yeah, Basically, I will just quickly undo everything. Now what we want to do is we just want to add like a little bit of variation in the elevation of our landscape. Just so it looks like a real land and does not look like completely flat this way. Let's just just brush size, Let's set the strength to something like 0.2 that it is not that much. Select the scud tool and just paint over it like this. Randomly, you can add a little bit more elevation to some of the area. Just so we have variations all around. Right away, it looks like much better, but we can maybe select things like the erosion brush again, paint over it. Don't want it to be like that obvious, we just want it to be a little bit subtle. As you can see, we have a little bit damage in some variation. We can add some noise as well. That much. Let's just undo it over here. I think I will use a flattened brush to decrease this a little bit. Obviously, you can spend some more time with this until you're satisfied. But yeah, I think this is pretty good. You can also use a smooth brush to like smoothen out some of the surfaces where you think the elevation is too much. But yeah, this much is pretty good. I'm happy with this. If you look at from this perspective, we have like various different elevations. Just let C and add a bit more height over here. Like this. Yeah, I think that's good. Let's come back to the select mode now we're done with the landscape. Now what we want to do is we want to set up the runtime virtual textures. The first thing that you need to do is to edit and project settings over here ser textures, you need to enable virtual texture support. If you are doing this for the very first time, it might take a little while, so just keep that in mind if you enable and then you need to restart your project. I'll just hit Restart. You guys can also do that and grab a cup of coffee because it will take a little bit while. I'll just resume back the video when it is done. Save. All right guys, it is done. Now let's just close this project settings window, open up our level. Let's see. I will right click over here and create a new folder. Let's just rename this to R VTs. We can add our run time virtual textures over here. The first thing that we need to do is go over to Tools to window and enable actors and search for. Time. Yeah, pin time, virtual texture volume, and just drag and drop it onto the scene. Now you can see this volume has like a box like thing. What we want is we want this box like thing to cover our entire landscape. That way the volume would work. We don't need to do it manually. We can do it from over here. But before that, let's just rename this press two to rename it. This one will be our base color one because we will be creating two volumes. One for the base color and another one for height. Duplicate this suppress control C, then control V. Rename this one to height. Press two again and rename this to height. All right, now we have created like two volumes to run time, texture volumes. The next step is to create the corresponding two textures. Come over here in this folder. Let's close this place actors window. For now, in the content browser, hit right click and in the texture section, you can create a run time virtual texture from over here. Create this again. I will first rename the base color, just so we know that it is for the base color. Right click textures, and again create another one, and this one would be for height. Now select the base color from over here in the virtual texture section, come over here, select base color, and in the height also select the height. Now we need to change their size just so it fits everything fits our landscape properly. So it is very easy to do, just select the base color. And you will see this bound Align actor, select the dropdown. And using that dropdown, select the landscape. And then hit Set Bounds. As soon as you do that, you can see the size has increased and it is completely encompassing our landscape. Do the same thing for the height. Click on this, drop down, select this and set downs. All right, perfect. We are, good to go. Let's see. Next step is to just open up your base color, the textures from over here. Double click to open them up. Now when you open this up, we will see the virtual texture content and we can just change it to base color only because we will only be using it for base color. We do not need the rest of the channels. Select base color and make sure to increase the size to its maximum and it's safe. Close this and do the same thing for the height. Double click to open it up. Change it to world height from over here and increase the size to maximum Close this again if you want. You can change the virtual texture content for the base color to contain all of the channels. Just to have them, but we won't be using them at all. We will be using the base color only. But let's just keep it to have it. All right, now we are basically done with a run time virtual texture. The last thing to do is select the landscape and drag down come over here. In the virtual texture section, we also want to add both virtual textures just to know that they need to be connected to this landscape. Click over here and select the base color again. Click on this Plus Cycon and select the height. Now as soon as you do that, you will see that our height has some texture appearing over here, this black and white texture, basically. Now we know that our RVTs are working because basically what this white and black color is, wherever our landscape is like, raised in height, it is appearing in white. And wherever it is flat or like downwards, it is appearing black. Just quickly restarted my unwell project and you can see it is appearing over here also. Now we can also see in action, if we go over to the landscape mode, let's just again start sculpting over here. Send this to something like 0.2 again and just sculpt lightly like this, you will see update over here. As you can see, yeah, the color has updated. If you keep on sculpting, you'll see the map changes over here. Also, the base color is not really changing right now because our landscape does not have any color. But when we will add our landscape material to it to give it color, then we will see it appearing in the base color section. Also, if you hold shift now and create depth, you'll see that black color spot appearing in the center. This is basically for the death. If you keep on like painting, you'll see it starts to appear basically. Now we can confirm that our RTs are working properly and they're connected to the landscape. I will just quickly undo it. Yeah. Now I think it is done and it should revert back to normal in a while. I think it is still left. So let's just quickly undo everything. All right, so everything is back to normal again. And in this lecture we have successfully set up our RVT's. I think this is it for this first lecture. In the next video, we'll be creating a landscape material. Yeah, we will start to paint on the landscape a little bit to give it a bit more detail. Yeah, thank you as watching, I'll see in the next film. 3. Creating the Landscape Master Material: Hello and welcome everyone. In this lecture, let's set up our landscape master material. I'll just come over here in the content right click. And let's create a new folder and we name this new materials. Now in this folder, let's again right click and create a new material. I will name this as the Landscape past the Material. Double click to open up this material. And let's start. We will be creating a pretty basic landscape material. Let's just start. First, to access all the runtime virtual textures, we need to add a virtual texture output. Not just hit right click and search for virtual texture output Enter and place it right over here. All right, next we need to set up the base color of our landscape. What we will be doing is we will be setting up a layer blend. And we'll choose like three or four different colors, one for the ground, dark colored grass. Then we will blend them all. And using that, we will paint on our landscape. Just sit right click and search for landscape layer blend this one. Now what you need to do is select this node and come over here and click on the plus icon four times to create four different layers. Let's open this up from here. The first one would be a ground. The second one would be grass underscore, will be like a lighter version of our grass. This one can be sly grass. The last one would be grass underscored dark. Now what we need to do is we need to plug this into the base color. Basically, this node will drive our base color. We need to add like four different colors for all these layers. Just V on your keyboard hold and then just click like this. You will see a parameter is added. Basically, this is like a vector four parameter and we can rename this to ground just like this. Now this copy paste this four times, just plug all four of them into their respective channels like this and make sure to rename them. This one would be grass underscored light. This one can be grass, the last one is grass underscored. All right. We could have also like created them normally just by pressing three. And if you use like this kind color basically, this is also a color input only. But the reason I created them parameter is you can just right click and convert this to parameter. Now this is a parameter. The basic difference between using it normally and using it like a parameter is, uh, when we create the instance of this material, we can change this on the fly. And we don't have to go into this material and change the color like manually again and again. We can just directly change it from the instance. Let me just quickly show you how. First let's just set the color. Select the ground and let's see that the alpha to one and we can select like a yellowish color for the ground. Obviously, we can change this at any point of time. You can just quickly set this to anything you like. This one would be a ground color for the grass underscored light, we can choose like a greenish yellowish color, something like this. For the grass underscored dark, let's just select a darker color, something like this. For the normal grass, let's choose a basic green color. Yeah, I think this is pretty good now, as I said, we can change these on the fly when you could save on your master material. Wait for it to completely save. Let's close this window and if you come down over here, right click and create material instance. We won't be actually using the master material on our landscape, but we will be using the instance. When you open up this instance, you can see over here we can easily change all the colors on the fly however we like. We don't have to actually go into the master material and make the changes over here, then it safe, because that will be a long and tedious process. Yeah, that's why creating like parameters for the values that you will change often is a good practice. Let's just hit safe. I will delete this instance for now. And open up the master material again. And let's start working. One thing that we forgot is make sure to set the alpha to one. Yeah. All right. Now for the specular and the roughness, we can basically hold one on our keyboard and then click to create these two scalar parameters. And just plug them into specular and roughness. Make sure to right click and convert them to parameter like this and rename this one specular. This one can be our roughness. Now obviously we don't want to set the roughness to zero because landscape is basically like ground. It won't be reflecting that much value for the default value. We can set this to one for the specular, Let's see, You can see how the specular value reacts with the landscape material. For now, I will just set the default value to 0.1 and we can see how it works out. It's safe. Now, basically this is a very basic landscape material, but you will notice that we haven't actually done anything with this runtime virtual texture output. What we need to do is it is pretty. Whatever you plug into the base color, you can just grab it and plug this into the base color. And this way now it is working. Connect all these colors and our base color into the N time virtual texture. Whenever we place things like grass or rocks, whatever, they will pick up the color from the ground and everything would work. Just plug this into the base color if you want. You can also plug these channels into the specular and the roughness like this, but we won't be really using them. I will just not do it. Another thing that we want to do is if you remember we created two different RVT's, one for the base color and another one for the height. We need to plug something into the world height. It is very simple, you'll just hit right flick and search for the node world position. This one absolute world position, this node will basically give us like the coordinates of a single pixel. We cannot directly plug this into the world height because these are like the coordinates. So we'll just keep it like this and search for component mask. Basically this will mask out the coordinates value this has like R, G, and B. Basically this is x, y, and z. For the world height, obviously we will use the z axis only because that is the height. Just enable the channel because we only need the z value, because we only need the world height, we do not have any use for the X and the Y. Rgb is X, Y and Z just enable the blue channel and we only need the z value. And now plug this into the world height. Basically it is working perfect now and we're done with a landscape material. Now let's start painting on the landscape a little bit to give it a bit of color. Close this, now hit right, create material intense, select the landscape and just drag down. And in the material section, landscape material, drag and drop. This material instance like this, you can see our landscape went completely black. All right, let's fix that. We can go over here in the mode, in the landscape mode, select the paint and you can see all four of five layers are appearing over here. But if we start painting, nothing really happens. It will say that this layer has no layer in four assigned yet, so we need to create that. It is pretty simple. Again, click on this plus icon and select Weight Blended Layer Normal. And we can save it over here. But first I will create a folder right click and create a new folder layer info. Now click over here, Weight Blended Layer and the layer in four folder. It's safe. Wait for it to save. Now as soon as you will save that, you will see the ground color is appearing all over our landscape because that was the first layer. That's why it is completely filled like this. You can now select the grass light, click on the plus icon, and just keep on creating all the layer in files for all four of the layers like this. Now all of the layer inflows are created. Now when you select the layers from over here, like let's select the grass and start painting, It might take a little wide to load. At first it will be a little slope. You can see this green color is appearing over here. It is not as dark because currently the tool strength is set to 0.2 If you increase that, now you will see it is a lot darker. We can sleds dark and start painting like this. It is a little bit laggy, but yeah, we can work with it. It is definitely not that bad. You can see this way. We can paint over our landscape easily adding like all these different variations of colors to make it look good. What will happen is when we will add our grass onto the landscape, it will basically pick these colors from the landscape. And using runtime, virtual texture, the grass would automatically appear of that color, whatever. Below it. It could be really cool. We'll do that later on. But right now, this is looking like really bad. Not that good. What we can do is we can use the custom brush. That way we can easily paint onto our landscape. If you select this icon over here, we can also select the alpha brush from over here. Currently it is empty, but if you move over into your resources folder that I've provided to you, open up that folder. In the Textures folder, I've added this Landscape Alpha, this dragon. Drop this into unreal. Obviously, we cannot keep this out over here. Let's just create a new folder and keep everything organized. Drag, drop this into the Textures folder. Now, select the Alpha and Dragon. Drop this Alpha over here. Now you can paint over it this way. It would give a nice feel onto our landscape. It is much better than using the normal brush. As you can see, it is already giving us really nice results. All right, Before I start to actually paint, I want to show you something that I mentioned earlier. If you go back in the material section, open up the material instance. As I said, we can change the colors on the fly. Let's say I did not like the ground color, so I can set this to completely different, like red. Okay? And you can see instantly that color changes to red. This is like the power of using parameters. We don't have to go into the master material actually, and we can just quickly change them from over here only. Let's see specuf I said this to one, give us better results. One is lights zero. I think setting it to zero looks much better. In my opinion, roughness is okay at one only. Because if you said this to zero, everything would be like really reflective. We cannot see it right now. But yeah, we don't want this to be reflective. We'll just set this to one, only specular. Instead of setting it at zero, we can set it 2.1 Now let's just start painting on our ground. We can adjust the colors later on. How we can do that is I will just select the grass dart. Give it complete one tool strength, and paint it all over our landscape like this. Discover it entirely. This now we can use the other layers to like layer onto it. Let's select the brown and make sure to decrease the tool strength to something like maybe 0.4 for now. And quickly dab onto your landscape like this. If you keep on layering, trust me, it would turn out to be really good. Just keep on doing this. You can see we have this nice layering effect, like over these areas, we can use it repeatedly. So maybe set this 2.6 this time. Again, keep on doing this to give it like a painterly look. I need to do it like multiple times to make it look good. Let's select this now. This might take a little while, but it will drive how our actual environment looks later on because all these colors are dependent on to grass. It'll decrease it to 0.2, or three maybe. So now I would just suggest you guys to pause the video and just keep on doing this until you feel like kind of nice effect has been reached. Make sure to keep on like changing the tool strength again and again and just have different variations of these grass. And you can see it is starting to look. All right. Obviously we can change the colors at any point of time. The tools strength because I want the grass dark to be like, mainly predominant in the landscape. Now, just select the, this one is a tool stretch, again, just to the same because earlier it was looking like really light. Now it is much better. I think either side, this might take a little while to achieve the perfect combo right now. I think I'm really happy with it. It is, giving nice painterly look and I'm quite satisfied with it. Let's just keep it this way. And I will hit save. We are done right now with a landscape. We have set up the basic material. We can now change these colors whenever we want. But right now, let's keep them this way. Only when we will actually add our grass onto our landscape. Then we will change the colors and see how they react and how they look. For now, I think that's pretty good. Let's just hit safe. And much is it for this video. Thank you, us watching. I'll see the next one. 4. Modelling the Grass: Hello and welcome guys. So in the last lecture, we created our landscape material and also set up the landscape so that we can paint on it. And in this lecture, let's just finally start to model the assets that we will be mainly using in our environment. So the first thing that we will be creating is the grass, so it is pretty easy to do. Quickly open a blender because we will be using blender to model everything. All the grass foliage, rocks, everything. We will be using blender. Open up a new scene in Blender. And let's just start by pressing A to select everything and just delete all these default objects. I will also press N and quickly enable Screencast keys, just so you can see all of the shortcuts that I'm performing. As you can see, they will appear over here, all of it by clicks and even the keyboard shortcuts that I'm performing. Yeah, that's pretty helpful. All right, to start off, the first thing that I want you guys to do is if you will quickly go over to your resources folder. In the exports folder, you will find this unreal mannequin FBX file. Basically, we will be using this model. This is like a human model that we can use for our reference reference, the size of our grass and foliage. Everything just go over to file import f x. Now quickly head over to your tutorial directory just a second. Now, in the exports folder, select this and you will see this mannequin import it into a blend. Then we can use it to reference all our assets that we create so that we get the perfect size and nothing is like too big or too small. All right, to start off, let's just press Shift and add a plane. This plane would be added, press R, then X, and rotated by 90 degrees. You can type in 90 on your number pad to rotate it exactly by 90 degrees. The first thing that I want to do is I want to move the origin point, right over here at the bottom. Do that, just press Tab to go into the edit mode. Press two for select, select this edge, and then press Shift Plus. And move the cursor over here. Select cursor to select shift plus S, then cursor to select it to bring the cursor right at the center of this bottom edge. Then you can go over here, object set origin and set the origin to three cursor. The reason I'm doing this is I'll just quickly show you. First you can press, then set. Now when you hold control, you can snap it like this and easily place it exactly over this axis like this. That is exactly over here. If you scale it down, you can see it is really simple to scale it down. If you press then to scale it up, you can see it is pretty easy. Conversely, if you add another plane, and let's just say the origin was in the center. And if you place it like this, then if you try to scale it, it can get a little bit tedious this way. When you set the origin right at the bottom, it is very easy to scale everything. All right, let's see, I will first scale it down something. Let's just see how thick we want a grass strand to be, obviously not this much the length, you can see it is around two boxes, two units. You can make the length of the grass strand this much only around two units. You can press then to scale it accordingly. Then you can press then X to scale it down on the x axis like this. Let's just keep it this much for now. And then what I will do is selected press control, apply the scale, then press Tab press control and just add a bunch of edge loops. You can add maybe five. Add edge loop. You can press control and then use your scroll wheel to increase the number of them. Make it five. Then hit right click to place them exactly at the center, like this. Now what I will do is select these two vertices, Press one verticlectelect, these two vertices, then press M and merge them at center. Create something like this. Now to make it a little bit thinner, what I will do is I'll select this and select this thing over here. This is proportional editing. I will just show you what it is. Basically, just enable it for now, Press tab, Just select these three things, these three vertices. Then press the X, and when you scale it down, first enable it, Now press then X. And when you scale it down, you can see even though you are scaling these three things, only all of it is being affected. And you can control it by using your scroll wheel. If you bring the scroll wheel down, whatever is inside this circle, it would be affected. If you increase the size of the circle, you can see all of these vertices still here are being affected. If you increase the size even more, then everything is being affected. But if you decrease the size, the only these three are being affected. This is really cool. What I will do is press N X to scale it like this, and then just increase the size of it. Yeah, this is pretty good and it is giving us like a nice strand, like look, which I think looks pretty cool. We don't have to do too much with this. I think this looks fine. Now what we need to do is we need to create a grass clump out of this. Basically we need to duplicate it again and again, and then we can create a grass clump, but before that, make sure to disable this. One thing that I want to do before actually creating a clump out of this is go over to UV editing. Let's over here, press control, Apply the scale first, then press Tab press to select everything. Then press U and just hit unwrap, that it is UV unwrapped like this. You can select it over here, Then press R and type in 180 to rotate it by 180 degrees, just it is UV unwrapped. Before we do anything disabled proportional editing, let's scale it down and place it just like this over here. The reason I'm UV unwrapping it before is because after we duplicate it, it would be easier for us to wrap all of them at once because they would be already UV unwrapped. Let's just keep it this way and come back to layout. Now we can actually start to duplicate it. I'll just select this mannequin and turn it off. For now, press H to hide it. You can press Alt H to bring it back, or you can just tbl it from here. I'm expecting you guys to know a bit of these shortcuts. I might gloss over them, but I will try to guide you through every step and tell every shortcut that I'm using, but sometimes I might forget. Now, I will just press three for the right side view. Basically, when you press one, it is for front side view, seven is for top, and three is for right side view. I will select this grass strand that we created and press Shift plus D to duplicate it, press Y to lock it on the Y axis. Let's place it somewhere around here. Obviously, it is too straight to look like a grass. We need to rotate it a little bit. Press Tab, let's again enable promotional editing. Select these three, I think, and then press R, then X, and you can rotate it like this. You can maybe select Sphere from over here. Obviously decrease the size. Let's try the first one now, press three again for the right side view. Let's disable it first and press whenever you like. Press three and try to select all these vertices. You will notice that only this side is being selected, so make sure to enable x ray. Now when you press three and select them, you will see everything is being selected. Yeah, just make sure to remember that. Bring it out over here in the front. And just try to create like a nice looking curve out of this. Yeah, I think that looks pretty cool. Now what we need to do is I will select this one. Obviously this is too straight right now. Just select this one, Press R, then X, enable this first, we can just rotate it just a little bit, not too much, so that it does not look like really straight. That's okay. Now we don't need to do anything. Select this, press shift plus D, rotate it around. Shifters these to duplicate things, you can just duplicate it a couple of times and place it around like this. Very simple, obviously. Right now it is looking really repetitive. But what we will do is select this, we can scale this one down, rot, make them all various different sizes. That's why I said the origin at the bottom point. As you can see, it is really easy to scale them down and easily move them around. Press R, then X, and rotate it downwards like this. Now we can, let's select these three. Select them all. Duplicate them. Scale them down like this. Again, duplicate them. Place them over here. Make sure to break up the variation a little bit already. It is starting to look. All right, let's place one over here again, scale it down. Make sure to press R then X. As you can see, it is not rotating properly. But if you press X once again, then you can rotate it like this. Whenever you press any axis two times, let's say if I press then Y, and if I press once again, it would be aligned. Across the rotation, it's pretty helpful. Be sure to make them all a little bit leaning forward. Again, I would suggest you guys to spend some time with it so that everything looks proper. The more time you spend it, it would come out nice. But right now, I think it is looking pretty good. We can duplicate stuff a couple of more times. There's anything many? Yeah, I think the size is pretty good. If you want to make it a little bit larger, you can select them all and scale them up just a little bit. All right, so now I'm pretty happy with it. Let's hit Safe and make sure to save our blender file first. Totally forgot to do that. Now in the blender files folder, let's to grass and hit Save. All right, now what we need to do is select them all like this and then press control J to join them all together so that they are just a single object like this. Right click and shade. Smooth this and go over here in the object data property. Then make sure to enable or to smooth. The next step to do is go back to the UV editing press to select everything and we do not need to UV and wrap it once again, just go over to UV and make sure to select average island scale first. And then just select Pac Islands. We will get something like this. We selected all disabled proportional editing, press R and rotate it by 180 degrees. Now what we need to do is we need to make sure that all, all these bases are parallel to each other. We need to do that because if we don't do that when we set up like wind in unwell engine, it can cause problems for us because we only want the base to stay stable. That's why we need to keep all the bases in the single line. Only what we need to do is it is not that difficult. You can first enable this from over here so that they are visible. Now, just hover over each one of them. Press L, and you can select them easily. You can see, however, over this one, press L and then press then Y to lock it on the Y axis. Then hold control. Okay, first we need to go over here and make sure to select vertex snapping. Select vertex snapping from over here. Now when you press then Y, and now hold control. You can see you can snap them both perfectly again. Press L, then press then Y, and snap it quickly. Keep on doing. Press L and press then Y. Press L over here, then press then Y and hold control L, Y and hold control. So quickly, finish up this thing. All right, Now it is done. We can displace them somewhere around here. Scale them up a little bit. Now all of the bases are completely parallel. That is what we want it. Now we can move back to the layout tab, and let's see. All right, now let's select our object. And first let's rename this to Grass. The last thing that we probably have to do is we just need to fix the normals of our grass. And with that, everything would be done and we can export this to Un engine. To fix the normals. First you need to select your object and go into the edit mode. And Come down over here and enable this thing, this one in the center, middle normals, you can display all the normals. And you can see they are all facing in different directions. What we want them to do is we just want to make them face all upwards like this. Then it would work correctly to do that, It is pretty easy. But first what you need to do is you need to press Tab to come out of the edit mode. Then select your object and press control and apply all transforms. What this will do is it will make sure all your transforms are applied. There is like no rotations or anything and also the origin is exactly at the world origin. One more thing that you need to make sure if your grass is like place somewhere around here and it is not at the origin. Is quickly press seven for the top view. Try to place it just around at the center, only like this, somewhere around here. Then you can press control and apply all transforms and you will see the origin point shifts back to the center. We want it to be at the center only because it can mess up things in under engine. If it is, not, just make sure your grass is exactly at the center and the origin point is also over there at the world origin. Like this. With that, when you've applied all the transforms, you can press Tab to go into the edit mode. Press eight to select everything, and then you can press all plus n. You will see this point to Target Normals. When you select Point to Target, you can click anywhere. It does not matter where they are all pointing. You can see this thing that is popped up in the bottom left corner. Just increase the Z value to a large number. You can maybe set this 21000, that point exactly upwards, just like this. With that, all our normals are correct and fixed. Now, export this thing into Unwell engine. Now to export it, you can just select, make sure to just select this thing only and not anything else. Go over to File Export and select FBX. You can enable selected objects so that only the selected objects get exported. And make sure to select Mesh from over here, so that only mesh type of objects get exported and not anything else like camera, anything else. You can just rename this to Grass and come over to your exports folder. And hit Export that we are basically done. You can open up Unwell. Let's right in the content browser and create a new folder. Will rename Grass. Open it up. Go to Add Import in your folder. You can select this export file that we just exported from Linda Grassfbx and hit open. Make sure to enable import normals from over here you can open up this advanced option. In the normal import method, import normals is selected and not anything else. Re everything can remain at default only just import nor grass has been imported into under engine. You can drag and drop it into the scene. But it would look very weird because it does not really have any kind of material right now. You can see we cannot even view it properly. But don't worry, we'll fix all that. Let's just delete it for now. Next thing to do is right click and create a new material. Let's rename this material Grass Underscore Master Material. Basically, this will be a master material. Yeah, I think this much is pretty good for this video. In the next video, we'll start working on the grass master material. Thank us watching. I'll see the next one. 5. Creating the Grass Material: Hello. I'm welcome guys. So in this lecture, let's start working on a grass master material. If you remember, I mentioned that the grass will be picking up color from a landscape using RVT's. Let's just do that now. Double click to open up your master material and it is really simple to do. Let's just set up that first hit, right click and search for run time virtual texture sample. We will be using this one. Just select, if you remember we only need the base color. Just select the base color. And plug this into the graph, master material, base color. But first what we need to do is we need to actually select the virtual texture over here. Now go over here. Remember now that we have painted our landscape, you will see that it is appearing over here in the RVD like the height. Now, we can just select this node over here and select the virtual texture as this base color automatically, it will pick up the color from the landscape safe. And that is all we had to do. Obviously, this is not the material, It is very, very basic. We will add more things to it, but for now, just to see the colors and everything. If everything is working all right, that is pretty good. Let's just try it out on a grass. Select the grass. Let's right click and create a material instance of this. So we have this grass master material instance. Let's open up the grass and select over here. And search for grass material instance. This one, select it and now disappearing over here. All right, let's close this out. And what we can do is we can go over here, select foliage, and you can dragon drop this grass into foliage. Select this and make sure to set the paint density to one. Let's increase the brush size. If you just start painting over here like this, you can see it is appearing, but it is very small and it is like, Let's just delete this all and what we can do is instead select this and make sure to increase the density from over here. By increasing the density, it will appear a lot more, maybe something like 6,000 that it is a lot higher. Now when you start painting, the grass is appearing a fair bit. It still does not look that good. But if we closely look at the grass, it is picking up the color from what we can say, our landscape. It is picking the color from landscape. Let's just undo it all. And what I will do now is now that we have increased density. Let's just also play with the size a little bit. Right now, they are all of equal size. We don't want our grass to be that way. Increase the scaling from over here for the maximum value to something like three. Now when you paint it, you will see the grass is of different sizes. That's much better. And it is looking right now. If you just quickly paint it all over like that, obviously it looks really, really bad right now. But we will do a couple of things that will fix it a lot more. Now that we have painted quite a lot, clearly see that the grass is picking up color from the landscape and our arbuties are working perfectly. You can see wherever we paint it dark, the dark grass is appearing over there. And wherever we painted, the light grass is appearing, making it look pretty good. It does not look stylized at all. And it does not look like fluffy, But yeah, it is what it is right now. Let's just quickly paint it all over and then I'll show you how we can make it look a little bit better. There is a magic option that we can just select it and it will automatically make things look a lot better. Let's come down over here and let's just find a nice little angle that we can look our grass at. You can to turn on and off game view so that you can view everything properly. I think over here, everything is looking pretty good. Now what you need to do is stylized grass basically does not have any shadows. You can just select over here and scroll down and make sure to disable cast shadow. As soon as you do that, the grass looks much, much better and it looks like much more stylized because there are not really any shadows and it's starting to look a bit fluffy. That is what we were aiming for. It is still not perfect. We will add things like brain, some color variation, but for now it is looking pretty good. All right, Next if you will, just quickly hover around your scene and look over where the part, the light is hitting the grass. You can see that it is looking very weird. And the reason for that is because we haven't really set up the roughness and the specular of our grass. That's why it's looking weird when light hits the grass like this. Just to quickly fix this, let's place our scene like this so that we can see the effect in the grass master material. You can come over here, hold one on a number pad or on your keyboard, and click like this to create two parameters, right click and convert them to parameter. Rename this one to roughness. And this one to specular. We can set the default value of roughness for one, and the speculator can be at zero. Now you can connect this one into roughness, and this one goes into specular As soon as you hit Save, the look of the grass should improve massively. Now you can see that the grass is behaving much better when the light is hitting it, and it looks really good. Now you can also close this out and open up your material instance. And you can easily control both of these parameters from here. If you increase the roughness, nothing really happens when you decrease or increase the roughness. I think it is not that visible, but we don't want our grass to be reflective. So we'll just set this to one for the specula. You will see that if you increase the specula and the grass gets light and it does not look natural at all, let's just keep it to zero. Now you can see the roughness when we increase the specula and then we play in the roughness. You can see now it is very reflective. Obviously, we don't want that. Let's just put this to one and this to all right, much. Our CD is coming along pretty well. The next thing to do is let's save over here and open up a master material once again. Now we want to play around with the colors a little bit more. One thing that I want to share before we proceed is you can also create like a parameter for this run time virtual texture like right, and search for run time sample. And you will find this run time sample parameter. Basically, both of these nodes are basically the same thing. The only difference being that you can change this node in the material instance also because this is the parameter, let's say I just plug this in, it will show a error right now, but I will select the base color as this one save now. The only difference is when you will open up your material instance, you can change the virtual texture from over here. Also, this does not work because we only have one virtual texture and we don't really want to change it from the parameters. But yeah, I just wanted to show you that you can add this node, the parameter one, and you can change it on the fly in your material distance. If you have multiple different virtual textures. Let's select, delete this one and plug this into the base color once again. So we want to be able to change the tip color of the grass and we will create a gradient to control it. Let's just do that. Hold four and click like this. We can just delete this and hold instead. And then click to create this parameter vector four parameter. Let's relate to tip color. We can set something greenish yellowish for now because we can change it later on. Okay, now we want to mix these two. The way we can do that is we can love them to select this and just search for linear interpolate and plug them both in. Now basically both of these are combined are runtime, virtual texture, and the tip color that we have created. We can change it in the material instance. The way we will control this is by setting up a that will decide which parts will get this thing and which parts will get this thing. What we can do is we will be using a gradient. As I mentioned earlier, because grass is basically like a strand, we need to create a gradient in the y. Let's just use a plane for this one. You can change the objects from here. A plane represents a grass beta. Let's just select this and right click and search for linear gradient. Now there are two different gradients, U and V, that basically are x and y. We will choose the gradient in the y axis because we want to create a gradient like this, because our grass strands are standing straight up like this. To select the gradient and plug this into a multiplier. Now press one and create a parameter. Right click and create a parameter over here. Let's rename this Gradient Strength. Basically that will control our gradient and set this to 0.3 Now I will show you just a quick little trick to visualize your nodes better. You'll understand way better this way. Right click select, Start reviewing node, You will see that here is the gradient. If you select this gradient strength, you can control the default value, you can increase the decree default value, and then you can control the gradient. Basically, this will be our gradient strength. That's why we created a parameter so that we can change it. In the material instance, if you said this zero, it is completely black. And if you increase this, it will tighten up over here. But now obviously this gradient is flipped because it is coming out from the top. We want it from the bottom. To do that, you select this gradient and plug this into one minus node. Now plug this into the A, and you will see that it is flipped. Now that is what we want it if you plug this thing into the alpha, just right click over here and stop reviewing this node. The thing about this is if I plug this into the base color, now you can see that we can control this gradient by this gradient. And if I set this to completely zero, it will have the color of this RVT. And if I keep on increasing this gradient, then slowly this tip color will start to come in. As you can see, basically this is what we wanted. You can also change this tip color from over here, and it will show up over here. This is what I meant with the alpha. This alpha is like controlling what parts will show the top node and what parts will show the bottom node. And we are controlling that through this gradient. I hope I was clear with the explanation because it is a little bit confusing. Let's set this to 0.3 And now plug this into the base color. Hit Save and see how it changes our grass. It might not look good, but we can change things in the material instance to make them look better instantly. Our grass is like a lot yellow. And it does not look good right away, because now everything looks pretty much the same. But let's come to the material instance now and try to control the gradient strength. If you increase the gradient strength, it will become all yellow because now the tip color is completely taking over. But if you decrease it and just keep it like a low value, then we can have a nice bit of effect. You can also change this color to make it like a more greenish yellow that is completely according to your taste. I think that would add a nice bit of value this way. I think it looks much better. Now, this hit, okay, let's set this to something like 0.2 Now if you keep on increasing it, the tip color would start to take over. But if you keep it at a low value, you can see if you set this to zero, then it is completely like the LVT. But if you increase it a little bit, then this tip color would start to show up. Let us set this to point to because I think that adds a nice bit of color to our grass. I think it makes it better. I'm happy with it. Let's continue. Let's go back to the master material. We can hit save over here. Let's see. Now the only thing that is left is we need to set up the wind in our grass. Adding wind to the grass is really easy. You can just hit right okay, before adding. Another thing that we also have to do is enable two sided on your grass and hit Save. Everything would look really weird when you just enable two sided and then hit Apply or Save because all the shadows and normals would go weird. Don't worry, we'll quickly fix them later on. Now you can see they look very weird, but let's just quickly fix this. Now the reason this is causing is because we don't have anything plugged into our normal channel. That's why the normals are all weird. Hit right click and search for a multiplier node. For this multiplier in the first node, right click and search for two sided sine. And plug this in because we want our grass to be two sided, that's why we are using this two sided sine. Another one would be hold three on your keyboard. Click like this to create this vector three node, basically a color node, and set the blue value to one. This color is like the base color for the normal maps. That's why we are using this color. Now plug this into the normal channel and it safe. And that should fix our grass back to its original. All right guys, Now our grass normals are completely fixed. I think we can move on to the final part of this lecture. That is to add some wind to our grass, and that will give a lot of life to our scene. Everything is pretty good right now. And if we add the wind, grass would start to look really nice. Let's start, open up the master material and adding wind is pretty easy. It's not that difficult, it's pretty straightforward. Just hit rightly and search for a node called Simple Grass Wind. We have this node over here first. Let's hold one and click over here to add this node. Plug this into intensity. Right click and convert to parameter and let's rename this as Wind Intensity. We can set the default value to as usual 0.3 I will just duplicate this parameter control C and V. Plug this into the wind weight. I will plug this into the wind speed. Again, rename this to wind speed. For the additional, I will just put this to zero, hold one, and click over here and plug this into zero. All right, for the last thing, that is the wind weight. If you want, you can directly plug in like a normal parameter into it and then plug this whole thing into the world position offset. It would work fine I think, but the main problem that would be caused would be that the whole grass strand would start to be affected by the wind. And we do not want that, obviously, we only want the top part of the grass strand to be affected by the wind. We want the bottom part to stay stable into the ground because that is how it is. Also in real life, the bottom part stays inside the ground while only the top part is affected by the wind. Obviously, we need to plug something else into the wind weight. If you remember, we did the same thing over here. When we created this tip color, we created like a mask. Like think for the gradient. We created a gradient on the y axis that masked out the tip from the bottom. If you view this node, start previewing node, you can see we have easily masked out the ground part that is in the black color, that will stay stable and the rest of the part that would keep on moving. We can again, use this setup that we used over here in the wind weight also, let's just stop viewing this node. Copy this whole thing up. Control C, then control this time. Just plug this into the wind weight. Obviously, we need to change the parameter over here this time. This one can be wind for the default value, we can set this to something else because if you just start proving this nod, you will see that this black color is coming up over here. This area also would not be like properly affected by the wind. What we can do is we can increase the gradient strength because we only want the wind to not affect the ground part of our grass. So we can maybe set, this is something like 0.9 maybe for the default value. Obviously we can change this in the parameter, but right now we can set this is 0.9 and hit Save. We are pretty much done with everything. Let's stop viewing this node and plug the result just into the world position offset. You will see that our plane is starting to get wobbly. You can see it is moving around. If you view this in the sphere form, you can see that the sphere is moving now, that means our wind has started to take place. So it's saved. Let's close this out. You can see it is working perfectly. The wind is making our grass move and it is looking really nice. Now, as you can see, the wind is working perfectly. If you go close to the base over here, let's from this side, you will see that the base stays inside the ground. It is not really affected by the wind and only the top part is being affected. If you remember, that's why we did the UVs that way, when all the bases were parallel. For this reason the bases were parallel so that they won't be affected by wind altogether. And we set up like gradient like thing to mask them out. If you open up the instance now, if you decrease the gradient strength, let's set this to zero for now. And also increase the wind intensity and the wind speed now increase the gradient. You will see as you increase the gradient strength, more and more of the strand is being affected by the wind. And if it decrease, less and less parts are being affected. If you keep it at a very low value, only the tip is being affected. If you keep on increasing it, more and more of the strand is being affected. If you make it even greater than one, the whole grass is being affected and it is moving like crazy. Obviously, we can set this to 0.9 Yeah. Right now, the wind speed and the intensity is also very high. That's why it is behaving this way. Let's just set them back to default to 0.3 and 0.3 Let's play around with them to get a nice result. When both of them are set to the default values 0.3 the wind is really not moving that much. We can increase it maybe a little bit. Let's see. We can increase the intensity to somewhere around 0.75 That is making the grass move quite a bit for the speed, we can maybe set this 2.6 These values I found them to be working pretty well. The grass movement is looking very natural. It flows pretty well. You can maybe increase the speed if you want to 0.8 and that is completely according to your taste. You can increase it even more, increasing the intensity also to get some crazy results, but the more you increase the speed, it will look really unnatural. Keeping it at 0.75 and 0.6 I think looks really nice. With that, our grass is good to go. We can hit save on our scenes. I think this is pretty much it for this lecture. Thank you. Are watching? I'll see the next one.