Easy Foliage for Games using SpeedTree & Unreal Engine

1. Introduction: My name is Mil Sligas. I am a senior Trey environment artist, and I will be your instructor in this course. In this course, I will teach you how to create easy foliage for games. This means that this course is focused on teaching you quick and efficient ways to create foliage for your environment. All of our foliage will be created using Speed and Maya, and we will render everything using Unreal Engine five. Please note that you can also use Blender or tree as Max for this course instead of Maya. So what will you learn? You will learn how to create various types of foliage, everything from trees to swaps to plants to ivy to grass, just like you see here. Next to this, you will also learn how to create custom leaf and branch textures using photogram try. And finally, we will also have some bonus chapters included that will show you how to design levels using your foliage. One thing I should mention is that due to this tutorial being recorded in winter, most textures that we will use come from quick or mega scans. Also, please note that although we will be using the tunnel scene and lake house scene that you see here as an example on how to use your foliage, these scenes are not included in the source files. Your source files will, of course, include all the save files and textures and an Unreal engine five project with all of your foliage. You will also need to import some specific mega scan textures when you first load up your scene. However, we will explain how to do this in the tutorial. This tutorial is completely done in real time, except for the bonus chapters at the end. And with a total of 11 plus hours of video content, I feel confident that at the end of this course, you will have to know on how to create various types of foliage for games. This course will come with out generated subtitles in English, Chinese, Russian, and Spanish. I hope that you will enjoy this course, and I hope that it will have a positive impact on your life. 2. 01 Project Explanation: Hello, for and welcome to the very first chapter on how to create easy foliage for games. So in this chapter, I just wanted to quickly go over a few things before we actually really dive in and start creating this tutorial. Now, first of all, I have this nice little scene over here, and this will be our preview scene. Right now it looks really empty. It does look cool if I say so myself, but I made it, so I might be a bit biased. So yeah, it does look cool, but it is definitely missing something. And what we are going to go and do is we are going to try and get something more in this direction. I want to actually make it even better than the foliage you see here. So in this course, we will focus on ivy on different types of grass, different types of water plants, types of bushes, trees, and we will also create custom leaf textures. Now, there's a few important things that you need to know before starting this course. So here you can see just like how the scene will work. So we will get started with the IV in the next course. One very important thing is that unfortunately, because I made this scene for my company, I'm not actually allowed to give this scene to you guys, or at least in terms of copyright, I am not able to give this scene to you guys. However, we will, of course, have an unreal engine scene that has all of the texts included. Sorry, texts, all of the foliage included into a presentation scene that we will also be creating in this course. Now for the textures, that one is a little bit tricky. We will have a chapter where I will show you how to create custom leaf textures using photogrammetry. That is pretty much the only way that I know how to do it at a high quality. I know that there are some people in more advanced tutorials that use, for example, sculpting of the actual leaf textures. I am planning on making a course like this later on. But for now, this is easy foliage, so I need to keep it easy. The problem with this is that I am recording this during winter. And even if it was not winter, I probably would not be able to find every single leaf I want outside because I live in quite a monotone area in terms of nature. So this means that we will be using mega scans and texts.com to grade or to use for our leaf and bark textures. Now, this is completely free because mega Scans is owned by Epic, so it comes literally built in. You can find it down here. It comes literally built in with Unreal Engine five. And text com is also copyright free. Unfortunately, although I am allowed to use the textures that come texts, any textures I use from mega scans, I am not allowed to supply with you. So in the next chapter, I believe, we will be going over on downloading some of our foliage textures. And when we do that, there will be an explanation on how you can get the textures back in your scene. Because when you first open up this scene, well, not this one, but the previous scene, you will most likely get an error saying that there are some textures missing because I'm not allowed to spl them, but I will show you a way on how to actually add them back in. Now, that was about it for my explanation so that you know where we stand. This tutorial will be focusing completely on how to create the actual foliage nicely optimized and also a little bit of placement, how to place it inside of Unreal engine and how to properly have all the material set up. Although material setup is super easy because mega scans pretty much does it for you. What I'm going to do now is I got a bit of reference over here that I gathered. Once again, copyright. You will get used to it as an artist, but copyright can sometimes be quite annoying because once again, these images, even though they come from Google, I am not allowed to supply them with this tutorial. However, I have a very nice workaround, and that is that if we use a program called PUR Rv, and I'm just opening it up right now, PureRef is a really awesome program that allows you to neatly preview all of your images in one go. It is very common to use for artists, so I definitely recommend getting it. You can just go to Google and just type in Pure Rv. And what I'm going to do is, I'm just going to go ahead and grab all of these images, and I'm going to nicely import all of them like this. And then when you use your scroll wheel, you can zoom out. You can click Go to images and then go to normalize and then set this to scale, what's it size? I think it was size normalize size over here. And then I can once again, right click Image range optimal there we go. So now we have, just a nice preview. So as you can see, I just gather a few images. Now, I have a little list over here of the stuff I want to create. I want to create a few different types of ivy that show different techniques. I want to create ivy roots, which is a decal. I want to create some different types of grass, some different types of water grass. And when I say water grass, I mean this stuff. And this kind of stuff. Yeah, actually, I should show you. The ivy, it will be mostly ivy like this that you can see over here, it is hanging down with gravity. But I got a bunch of different examples. For the roots, it will be roots like over here. Let's see. The grass, normal grass. Ironically, I don't have normal grass in here, but normal grass is so basic that I don't need a reference for it. I guess you can see this one. Water grass. We will have a few ones. So we will have plain water grass, then we will have very tall water grass, which is stuff that you can see over here. And then what I also want to do is I also want to do some water grass with some cat tails or whatever it is called in your country. So I believe in English, they call them cat tails over here. So we want to just create some of these, which once again show you how to combine because we will be using Spettry, of course, if you haven't seen the trailer or the description. But what I want to do is I want to go ahead and I want to combine inside of speech, read the procedural stuff along with actually custom measures. So that's going to be quite nice. Lily pads are quite a classic one over here. I also want to create some flowers to go with it. So that is going to be quite cool because it will just add something. Bushes, as you can see over here, it will not be too special. You can also see it over here, like these bushes over here, and I also want like a few at the top. And a simple tree, which once again, I don't really need a reference for now, because it's just going to be very basic. And we are going to create a custom leaf material, of course. So that is pretty much our planning. Now, if you look at the scene, you can see that it is a collapsed tunnel and it has some water. So that's why I want to also add some water plants because then we get the best of three worlds. We get both, like of course, the scene where nature takes over. So we are combining urban with nature. We get something that has to do with like water foliage. We get something that has to do with hang foliage and like creeping foliage, so ivy and everything. And then what we will also do is later on here at the top, we will add stuff like grass, extra bushes and trees and everything like that. So it is all going to be very cool, and we will end up with a really nice scene. So this is now all ready to go. I will go ahead and I will save this for you guys. So save us. And I will call this reference, and it will be in your reference folder. There you go. Okay, perfect. So in the next chapter, we will go ahead and we will do some actual work, which is going to be starting by creating our IV, so that's going to be a very interesting one. So let's go ahead and continue with this in our next chapter. 3. 02 Collecting All Our Textures: Okay, so now that we know what we are going to be creating, what I want to do next is I want to go ahead and start by actually importing all of our textures. So what I will do is in this folder over here, let's go ahead and let's right click. Actually, yeah, let's do it in the text folder. Right click, and I'm just going to go ahead and create a new text document for you guys and call this mega scans Import OnCore list. And the reason I'm doing this is because as I said in the last chapter, I am not able to give you guys any mega Scan textures with the project files because that would go against their copyright. However, what I am able to do is I am able to literally show you where you can find them, and I am able to still keep the project intact when I send it to you, so that all you need to do is you need to import mega scans, and then as soon as you restart the engine after you've imported everything, it will actually just automatically register that the texts are now there, and then it will apply them to our foliage that we are going to create. Now, I am using Unreal Engine 51 thing you should keep in mind, if you are still using Unreal Engine four, unless you have the plug in, you do not have mega scans built in, but you can always go to quicks.com slash Mega Scans and in here, you can also go and find it. I can go to I believe it is in Atlas's over here, see? And you have so many textures in here. So if you want to find textures, you can find a lot of them in here. And we will probably be using Meg scans for the most part. If you cannot find something, your second backup to Ty is to go to your texts.com or to go totext com, and then go ahead and go down to Tweedy Scans Atlas over here. And in here, you can also find a lot of leaf textures, and as you can see yeah, we can go in here and we can just find a bunch of stuff like here in leaves. So this is another way that you can find a lot of these textures. So that's really good. But the cool thing is that I will also actually show you how to create these textures, but that will come later because we will be creating those for our tree. So right now we will still just focus on doing it here. Now because Quik or mega scans is owned by Unreal, in the new UnreelEngine five, it is actually built in. You can actually go down to Content and go to your Quixaw Bridge. However, Unreal Engine five is currently still in its Beta or Alpha, I think Beta. What that means in this case is that unfortunately, not all of the mega scans are actually included inside of the bridge. And it happens to be that the ones that are not included are the actual atlases that we need. So that is a little bit annoying. So it means that we need to go ahead and we need to basically get them via the website. But that's no problem. That just means that we need to set up. We will create a custom tall for it. It's totally fine. So let's just go ahead and let's get started by actually gathering all of these textures. And to do this, let's go into our texts folder and let's create a folder called mega scans. Over here so that I can keep it organized so that I know which ones to remove. I just need to go ahead and I need to sign into quick so what you can do with your Unreal engine account. And now what we can do is we can just go ahead and go down our list. So we need iv. Let's go ahead and go into Quixmegascans, atlases, and ivy are vines. So if we go ahead and go in here, you can see that you have a lot of different options. Now, the branches we are going to create in a custom way, so we only need the leaves in this case. So we have this one. This one is looking pretty good. I can see that I've already downloaded it before, but I always like to just go ahead and do a quick scroll through just to make sure that I'm happy with my choice. Now, I can see over here that there aren't actually a lot of vines here. So what I like to do when I don't have a lot of options is so we have this one over here. I can just keep that in mind. But then I also like to go ahead and go over here to text.com and just have a look here. So right now, these are, okay, so these are probably the ivy leaves that we want. Yes, so let's see. So we can choose if I have a look at this. It would probably be between this one and this one. Hmm. To be honest, I think I like this one more just because it is a little bit more uniform. So there's less chance that we go in like a long way over here. But yeah, let's do that. Let's grab this one from Texture Come. Texture Come is also, again, it's really nice, so you can just go ahead and create an account, and then you can purchase like ten credits, I believe, per day, ten or 15 credits per day. So over here, you can see that you do need premium for, like, the higher levels, but we only need like a 512 by 512. So I can go ahead and I can just simply press Download. And I want to go ahead and download. Let me first of all, create a folder, textis.com. And in here, I will make a folder called IV underscore 01. So we want to have our base Color over here. I want to download my normal map. I do not need to download my roughness because it is not really that needed. I want to download my Alpha map. And now for our translucency, that one is a little bit tricky. The reason it is tricky is because right now, UnreelEngine five with its new shadow mode does not accept translucency. So I just need to quickly look over here into my project settings. So if you are using virtual shadows in Unreal engine five, subsurface scattering, which is basically what translucency is for, it is not able to do that. So yes. So shadow mode. Okay, so this is good. I have to shadow map so that's fine. So we can use translucency. If you are using virtual shadow maps, although they look nicer, for foliage, it's quite bad because you are not able to use translucency and that just does not look as nice. So if you will be using this one, I would recommend just switching it back to shadow maps for now if you are making a very foliage heavy C. So this just means that I just need to go ahead and I need to go in here, and I will also get this one. Here we go. Okay, so that's totally fine. Now, Ivy also needs roots. Although we are going to make the roots ourselves, what we can do is we can go at it. We can have a look at some bark. Although I just want to quickly have a look at branches over here. Oh, those are not the type of branches I was hoping for. I was hoping to get just like wood or anything like that. Let's see, T D scans. These are three scans material. I want to have like three D scan atlas. Wood ends, no. I was hoping to get some wood, and else we will just need to go ahead and do it by hand, which I guess it's not that bad to do it by hand. It's just a little bit more time consuming. Tabris, maybe it's in here. Yeah, basically, just like the kind of stuff that I was looking for, like a stick, that would work pretty decently, but I don't think it's going to. Okay, so don't worry about that. We will just do it by hand. That is no problem. So Ivy is sorted out, except for that we need some bark so I can just go ahead and go in here. And let's go into our mega scans and I want to go surface. And then boot. And then there should be park here or is it somewhere else? You can also go ahead and if you want, you can also type in park, and then you should be able to find, there you go. So we just want to have very simple one. Like this tree bark over here, it's totally fine. Now, you can choose your resolution. I'm not going to go for eight K. I'm going to go for, like, two K resolution, and I'm just going to download this. And then it will just have a zip file, and when you open it up, it will showcase over here, your albedo, which I want, and I want to have my normal and want to have my roughness. Those are the only three I need. So I can just go ahead in the mega scans. Bark. And this is just for those branches that are in between of our ivy. Okay, so that one is solid. The next stop is grass. So that is quite an important one. So let's just go ahead. And for the grass, we have some normal grass which I will get, but we also have some taller grass that you can see over here. So I want to see if I can find, multiple different types of grass. I can remember that megakans is really good with grass. So let's just go ahead and have a look here. Grass Ah, see, here. This one actually looks a lot like what we have over here, so that's pretty good. So I will call you here's a download, and I will call you a tall, water, grass underscore 01, just in case we want to have more. So that's what this one will be. Oh, and I almost forgot that I'm forgetting to add this to my text document. So sorry about that. Let me just quickly, very quickly drill it. The IV, I will actually leave in because I'm allowed to use it. So all I need to do is I'm just going to go ahead. And the way that you will see this is I will do this, bark, and then I will do tall water grass underscore 01. And behind that, you will basically see this. If I right click on this, what I can do, or do I have my ID? No, I can right click, and I should be able to copy the Link address. Let me just quickly check. Yes. Okay, so that works. So I can just go ahead and I can just basically add a link behind this, just like that. And I can do the same for the bark. However, I will first of all, apply this grass to my folder. So let's open it up. And I'm going to for this kind of stuff, I'm going to have the albino, normal opacity and the translucency. And the roughness we will build inside of our shado. So, although, yeah, you know what? Let's add the roughness just in case. So that is our ta Water grass. Let me just very, very quickly. Go to, like, bark and then right click and then copy Link address. And then over here. This does mean that the only thing is that you need to make sure that once you download these, place them in the exact folder that we are going to place them inside of Unreal. So just keep that in mind. So we got that one. Now the next one is going to be let's see. Let's see if we can maybe find another type of grass. So Atlas's grass over here. Ooh, these things, actually, these are pretty good because we can use those along with what we can see. So this is quite nice. So we have some grass with some dead ends. But I also often see this kind of weed stuff. So I do want to get that. I don't know why the preview is not working. There we go. I'm not sure if I like that one. Maybe this one. Miriam. Yeah, you know what? Let's do this. And I will call this just Mame underscore. Grass. Yeah, let's do that. And I'm going to go ahead and I'm going to download this. And then in my documents. So yeah, this might be a little bit boring for some people. If you want, you can just quickly copy this over. But, um, as many people who have watched other tutorials of mine know, I do not like to cut out anything unless it is really necessary. So let's have these ones because there's also a lot of talking going on on, like, what I'm actually doing here. So right click Copy Link address. Here we go. Okay, so we got those ends. Now, here we go here. I can see like swamp grass. That's perfect. Here you see? Cannot be better. That's literally what I'm looking for. So I'm just going to go ahead and I'm going to call this swamp underscore grass. Download it, and I'm now just on my other screen. I'm just adding this to my document, and I will create a folder, swamp, underscore grass in my magazines folder. Let's open this up. Albedo, normal paste agnos translucen There we go. Okay, so those are codone. Let's see. So we got this grass over here, so that's already fine. We are going to combine this with this, so that's also fine. So that's what cover those things. These actual cattails, we will need to do those camely because I don't think we will be able to find them anywhere else. I just want to go ahead and go through the grass a little bit more. We also definitely need normal grass, but I just want to go ahead and just see what other stuff is in here just in case. Okay, I don't see too much. Barley grass. No, that is probably too thick for what I'm looking for. We can just scull the other one. So now what I want to do is I just want to go ahead and I want to find some basic normal grass bits but they cannot be too thin. If they are too thin, then we would need to use too many meshes, and it would be too unoptimized. Now, you can use stuff like this that you can see over here. However, that might not always look very nice also. I personally like to have individual strains of grass, but you are able to use, this kind of stuff to maybe give it like a little bit of variation. So a grass, shall we do that? Let's grab this one, this one, and this one. And then this is sweet grass. Over here, I'm just it is important that we get this white because if we need to change this later on, it is quite annoying. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to have basically two different types of grass. I'm going to have some ray grass which are these clumped bits, and those are going to be a little bit more optimized. And then I also want to have one that is like individual bits that is going to be a little bit more unoptimized. So this is called ray grass. So let's do Ray, let's call grass. And let's see, one, two, three. I do not like the big ones. The big ones do not give enough flexibility. So in here, I'm just going to do zero, one, 02, 03. And in here, I will just call this ray grass on the score 01. Two and three. This will be number one or 01. This will be 02, and this will be 03. So let's go ahead and let's start by downloading it. And the grass is going to be a little bit more simplistic, but I think it is best if we still just go ahead and just download all four of the maps. But of course, because we are using three different textures, they will be more expensive in the texture department, but less expensive in the geometry department. So it kind of balances out, I guess. But we'll see how it goes. I just want to make something that looks really cool. And it is still within the reason in terms of, like, optimization. And another cool thing that you can also do is inside of speed tree, if you want, you can actually convert these multiple different atlases back into one single atlas before you export. And that is really cool to do that. Now I'm going to go, so albino normal Passy I'm not yet in the right folder. Okay, so that covers that grass. Now I want to do one more, and I quite like this one, but I just want to Ooh, that actually also looks. That looks pretty good, actually. Sort grass, but it might be a little bit too big. Here, you can see, like, all of these really large clumps of grass. Um, this stuff I also quite like, to be honest, but I want to go for something a little bit thicker. Let's do this one, I think, or this. This is too thin. So, wow, we are going back to will like the old versions. And there are so many versions of grass here. Okay, let's do this one, and I'm just going to call this Grass. So this one is going to be the simplest name. Grass. And let me just quickly copy the link, download it. And give the second to download. Here we go. And now we can just go ahead and begin. Ah, the grass over here. Okay, perfect. So Ivy done, grass done, water grass done, the cattles, we will do ourselves. The next thing is some lily pads. And I'm just going to go to text.com, and let's see. Are there any no and maybe here? Lily Those are the long versions. I quite like it if I could get the rounder versions, but I don't on no way, actually, they should be fine. So here, the water lily is quite good. I don't know if there's any other version. No. Just in case because I can't remember the text that come also had one. Let's see water here you see. So we have this one. This one does have a lot more variations. Let's go ahead and grab this one. And I will just add this so water underscore Lily. And we want to go here or see, I even already got it. So base color. I need my normal. For this one, I'm actually going to go ahead and use my roughness because it is on water, so it might be more important to have a cool looking roughness, at least as a base. But let's go ahead and get these. Now, another thing for the water lily is that it would be nice to get the actual flower that comes with it. However, I'm not sure. Oh, God, I don't even know the name of it. You can go over here. So it does not need to be exactly the same type. If I just find something that looks the same, then I'm fine. So I can go ahead and go to Atlas's and go to plant and then flower over here. And then I can hopefully find something that looks very similar. So just keep in mind that we just need, something like this, and if possible, also something in the center that is just a little bit yellowish. So I'm going to go ahead and just have a look around. No, that's pinkish. And else what I will need to do is I will need to make it by hand. Now doing that is not too difficult, but oh, the shapes are actually really good. I almost feel like just making these purple. So if I need to do by hand, that is what I would probably do use those and then turn them into purple. But over here, I just want to see if there's maybe something. That one is no, that's not exactly what I'm looking for. It looks a little bit too different. But yeah, what are the chances that you find exactly the one that you need? So in this case, Sunflower no. In this case, what I'm going to do is I'm going to go ahead and use this one because I got a good feeling about it. So let's go ahead and download this. And we will call this one Water flour. Like that. So in your mega scans folder, there will be folder called water underscore flour, which will contain these plants. Okay, so we got that one sorted. So that is the water lilies done. For our bushes, what I'm going to do is we just need something very simple. We just need to go ahead and we need to go into our um Let's see, moss. Oh, that's a bit annoying that I cannot find. Let's go to over here to text.com, and let's see three scans. No, that's not the one. Three atlas scans is the one I need. And for our bushes, we want to go ahead and go for, like, some branches. We don't really want to go ahead and have individual leaves, if possible. So let's see if there's something in here. That we can find. It doesn't really feel like, this one would be pretty good, actually. Let's have a look at that one. But let's just quickly Ooh, that one is also pretty good, but it's only one cherry branch. So that's a little bit of a shame. I wish that there were, like, a few more variations. Okay, so we have the choice between this one or let's also go over here, let's have a look. And over here, it's surprisingly difficult to just find. So those are plants. So I don't think they will be in here, no. Tree. Maybe they are in here. So three Aya, here we go. Okay, so what else do we got? So those are a little bit too thin. I like to have something a little bit thicker in this case. Let's see. Those actually look quite interesting. Let's keep those in mind. Those look too much like that they are willy meant for a tree. So I wanted to have something that looks pretty generic so that it is not too obvious that we pick tree leaves for a simple bush or scrub or whatever you want to call it. Um, those actually look also quite good. Let's go ahead and let's middle click on this one so that I can save it while I continue. So it would be nice if we just have two variations. That's no problem. Like, we can have two variations of leaves. So we got that one. Ooh, and this one. I think this or this one. I think this is probably the one that I want to choose. Yeah, let's do that. Okay. So let's go ahead and let's have another one, and you guys call this scrub white. I think you do or shrub or whatever it is called. Swap nscoeT unscoe 01. I just want to make sure because else it will be confusing. Yeah, because it's like flour. Yeah. Yeah, I think that's fine. So let's just do this. Swap. Sorry, that's a difficult word for me to say. Let's do 01 and 02. 01 is going to be this one. 02 is going to be this one over here. So let's just download 01 first, and I don't need four k resolution. I just need two k. Here we go. And then also number 02. Once again, I just need two K. And after that, I think we are pretty much done because, as I said, for our tree, we are going to create custom branches and leaves and everything. So that's going to be pretty cool. And that will actually also involve some real live recording and not just me narrating this. So that is pretty much it for our textures. Okay, perfect. Now, this took a little bit longer than expected. So what I'm going to do is in the next chapter, we will go ahead and we will go inside of Unreal Engine. And oh, no, wait, actually, in the next chapter, we will just start with our IV. And once we have our IV done, we will go ahead and import everything inside of Unreal Engine and set up a new material. Yeah, that's the plan. So let's go ahead and continue with creating our IV in the next chapter. 4. 03 Creating Our Ivy Part1: Okay, so now that we have prepared project, what we're going to do is we are going to get started and actually make some foliage. And we are going to get started with some ivy. Now, the ivy will come in two different parts. One part will be very generic ivy, which is basically ivy that you can use multiple times on multiple different places. And then we will also go over how to create very unique ivy, for example, over here, like the ivy that would be very specifically placed on top of these rocks or rocks on top of these concrete rubble pieces. So those are the two parts that we are going to work with. Now, let's go ahead and dived in in speed R over here. Now, one thing I should tell you is I am using speed nine. Speed nine at the time of recording this has only come out two days ago. So the UI is a little bit different. I'm still learning it myself also. But Frez, it is very straightforward compared to, like, the older versions. So to create a IV, this is a workflow that I developed myself. So I hope that it is a good workflow, but it definitely works. Let's go ahead and go to File and New. And we are just going to go ahead and create a new blank scene over here. And then over here we have a scene. Now, you can just use your right mouse button to, of course, rotate around. I do expect that you know the basics of speedy, but just in case Middle Mouse button is panning, right mouse button is rotating, and you can use the Z button to zoom in and out. Okay, so the first thing I need because IV is hanging, I need something to hang the IV from. Now, this can be very easy. Let's go ahead and go to Maya, although you can use whatever program you want for the tree mulling. And I'm just going to go in here and I'm going to right click and I'm going to create a cube here. Let's create a simple cube. And we just want something to hang the IV from and in speed tree, this something is called a force. So we want to go ahead and create a wall almost to hang the ivy from. So I'm just going to create something that's quite high. It doesn't need to be specific. As I said before, this is going to be generic IV. So being with it being generic, I just want to have it nicely hanging from here and just going down. So this is totally fine. Once I have my model over here, let's go ahead and export and let's just go ahead and create a folder called SpeedreUnerscore forces in our exports, there we go. And let's just go file, and I'm just going to Export Selection. I want to expo it as an FBX and just call this cube underscore collision over here and just export. There we go. Very simple, just a simple cube. Now inside of speed speed three, sorry, what you want to do is you want to go ahead and you want to go to File and then you want to import a mesh asset over here. And personally, I don't really like this view. So what I like to do is, I like to open up the native dialogue, and then I like to simply paste in my location over here and I can grab my cube collision. So let's open this one up. And now we have a cube collision over here that has been imported. So what we're going to do now is we are just going to go ahead and we need to activate it by going into forces, art, geometry, and then grab your cube collision over here. Well, it's a little bit high. That's interesting. I'm not sure why it is high, but so high up, but that is no problem. I'm going to probably scale it up a little bit. I think that's the first thing I want to do. Oh, wait, it's because here, I sell it probably like the wrong direction. No problem. So what you can do is you can press W, and then you have your normal movement tools over here. Now, next this, so I'm just going to place this nicely down here. That's fine. And maybe I'm going to go ahead and press my R tool and I'm going to scale this stuff up. You can scale it up individually, but if you go to this corner over here, you can scale it up all in one go. So let's do something like this. We basically just want to set this nicely into place. If you want to make sure that this is not C true so that you can nicely see it, which I like to do, then go to materials down here. Let's go ahead and press the plus minus and press art Nu and just call this material gray, which I like to do because then if I just click and drag, I can actually apply this gray material on here. And now you can see that we just have a simple gray box in here. So that's perfect. Let's wide away, go file and let's do saves. And I will save this as Ive generic underscore 01. Okay, perfect. So the way that we're going to do this is we are basically going to use a combination of branches along with some collision modifiers and some forces to give it gravity to make it grow down. So, as I said, this is something I came up with myself. So let's just have a look. What I like to do is we have over here a base tree, and I like to go ahead and create a trunk because we need something to start having branches grow out of. So we go to art geometry to select it and add a simple trunk. Now, that one is often very large, but that's no problem. Inside of Speed tree, you have an overwhelming amount of settings. You will get used to this. I'm actually more used to using this window. However, if you want to minimize things, you can also have all of these windows separately. I personally like to scroll, but let me just see if I can use this one the most because it is easier for tutorials. Now, the first thing I need to do is I just need to go ahead and I want to basically, let's go down to our size scalar over here and maybe, like, move it down a little bit. Actually, know what, no. Let's do this a better way. Let's go to our what was it shape? No skin over here in our skin. And let's get started by first of all, setting the length, which you can find Here, see, this is why I like the scrolling. So there is a length. I think this is a spine over here. And then you have over here your absolute length. So in spine, we can set this down. As I said, there are so many settings. Normally, if you do this way, the reason why I find this easier is because everything is always in the same location. So I know, where the length is over here and I can move it down. But, okay, I will try to use these windows just to make it easier. So I'm going to set my length a little bit lower. Then I'm going to go to my skin, and first of all, in my radius, I'm going to click on this little button here. The reason for this is because the radius, it always goes from very thick to thinner. Here, see, you can see that this controls it. However, in this specific case, I do not want that. I want to have the same thickness, and then I want to set the general radius down like this. Now comes the workaround. So it's kind of funky. So what we want to do is we want to press W, and we actually want to go ahead and want to grab this trunk, and we want to now press E, and we want to rotate it sideways like this. And I want to move this just above over here. So that's why it is quite a funny way of doing this because we are going to basically grow the branches out of this area. So you can go in here. And here, let's rote it is a little bit like this. And what you can also decide is the length of your ivy. So let's just keep it probably like this, so we will have the ivy growing a little bit like this. That should be fine. I'm going to go ahead and right now you are a note, so let's go back to generator over here so that we can set the radius a little bit lower. Okay, perfect. Now that we've done this, what we need to do is we need to add some actual branches on top. We can do this by right clicking Add Jumtree to select it, and then if you go to branches over here, and you want to go ahead and so we want to have two types of branches. We want to have big and small. Let's get started with the big. And what the big branches will do is they will basically control where the main shapes of our IV are. You will know it soon enough, so we have this one if we now go to Gen, which is generator over here. We can set a frequency, and we just want to go ahead and play with the first and the last over here. Oh, it's really maybe it can be because it is too thick. Let me just have a look interval. Let's do maybe like a classic. Over here, you have different types of generations. So if we do a classic, we are often able to more easily add like more branches. And now the first, I want to have at the very bottom so that set this at zero and the last one I set at one, so that it is evenly spread out like this. Okay, so that's fine. Now what I'm going to do is I'm going to go into my lengths. Yeah, maybe set the length a little bit higher, but I want to mostly go into my skin and I want to set my radius a little bit thinner like this so that they become quite a bit thinner, not too thin, but we will hide these branches later on. Right now, they are just like a guidance. Let's go into my trunk, move my trunk down a little bit like this. And now what we need to do is we basically need to have these branches, push down so that they are actually attached to this and growing on here. We are going to do this in two ways. One of the ways is that if you go, let's go back to generator. In our BIG, if we go to our forces, over here, you have your cube collision force. What you can do is as soon as you activate it, it will basically try to stay attached to your cube collision, as you can see here. So you can see the more I increase my force, the more it will try to stick to it. So that's one way of doing it. Another way is that we have gravity. So our gravity, let me just quickly see where this one is always located because it's a little bit tricky to find orientation, shape, it is in here in our spine, I believe. But it seems to be quite so there's two ways that we can do this. So we can do this via force, but I was hoping that we can use the gravity over here. But I don't think I can find it. It would be nice. So, here, you can twit it like type it. Gravity here, see? So you are able to type it in, and then you can push the gravity down basically like this. Now, as you can see what is happening over here is with our gravity, we can basically keep it pushed down, so that's good. So we want to have it at maybe like a 0.05 area. And now for these branches, these branches are basically hanging over here. However, we also have some branches on this side. Basically, the way that I fix this is I simply go in and I then click on my individual branches. And as soon as you click on your individual branches and you press W, you are able to over here have a few settings. So you can control the length over here, see? But you can also control the start angle and the rotation. So I want to have, where are you Rotation, drag, move, rotate. There we go. So what we can do with this one is we can go ahead and we basically have full control over where we want to have our branches. It's sometimes a little bit tricky to properly here, move it. But as you can imagine, if I now grab for example, these top ones, I can just go ahead and I can rotate them. Carefully like this, and I can move them around. And you can also delete them. If you just press delete, you can also delete branches. But what I want to do is I first of all I want to nicely rotate these around. So it does involve a little bit of custom work. It's not completely generated. Here we go. So I basically just go ahead and let's see, this is probably enough. So all of the other ones over here, I can just press delete to get rid of them like this. And now it is pretty much just like a matter of, like, playing around with things. Maybe I was playing around with the length to get an interesting ivy, because right now, all of them are pretty much the same length. But what this will do is in your ivy, it will basically give your ivy like a very straight cut, and we don't want that. So you can see over here that I'm especially on the outer side, I'm scaling them in. And basically the reason I'm doing that is because I like to have the ivy kind of like fade out. Oh, this one is being a bit of a pain to annoy. Come on, or to move. I don't know why it's being so difficult. Maybe if I move my start angle. Well, I'm not able to move this one at all. Let's get back to that one. Let's first of all, just play around a little bit more with my start angles. And we are also going to add some noise to this to make it look more interesting. But right now, I just want to have them mostly focused on having different lengths. So let's have this one like the classic Ivy that kind of fades out. Let's make this one, a little bit less. Maybe have this a little bit more or a little bit longer over here, and then it fades out. Although you know what? I'm going to delete this. I don't know what it is. Sometimes it is a little bit buggy if you are doing manual movements like this. But there we go. So that should be fine. Now, cool thing what you can do now is if you just click on the Big again, you go back into your generator mode, and we can go in here and we can go basically to, I believe it is in our skin that you can find these pieces. Or is it in displacement? I think it is in displacement. No, here, I'm just going to do it this way because else I cannot really find it. So in here, there are a bunch of segments, and here we have our gravity, but here we also have segments to give it noise. And I'm not sure where are you. Noise, noise, noise. There's so much stuff in here, so it's often like, so we have our shape over here, so that's fine, but I found it. I don't know why I didn't see it, but it was in the spine. So I don't know why I didn't see it. But basically in here, you are able to add noise, so you have your noise amounts, earlier amounts and late amounts. So the earlier amounts they will abide by the forces. The late amounts, they will basically add noise after the forces have already been added. The late does not seem to work in this case, which can sometimes happen. The earlier amount over here. That one is a little bit you'll a playound with our graph. So what you can do in our graph is we can move this down, but or up to basically control the amount of noise and the amount of turbulence. However, in this case, it's not doing exactly what I was hoping for Yeah, it is quite straight. That is no problem if it is like that. So I'm not too worried about it. You can also play around with your orientation over here, which is like your start angle, but I'm not going to touch it because I've done this manually. Let's just leave it at this, and if needed, I can add some more pieces later on. So what I want to do now is I want to add my final bit of branches, which are going to be our smaller branches. And these are going to be the branches that will actually contain all of our leaves. So if we right click art geometry to select it, we want to go in branches and little or twigs. I think we just want to go for little over here. And now, if we go back to generate, so right now we have them at interval. I think proportional is quite nice. Proportional, it does like steps, basically. It just has a bunch of steps that allows us to add more branches. Now, for these branches, I think it is easier if we first go to forces and immediately turn on our cube collision over here. And we want to set this quite high. And then there is another force that I sometimes tend to use, and it is a force if we go up here to force out force, so we have a few of them. The planear is pretty cool, although I'm not sure if it will do much now because we already have our cube, so we can try. But you can also go ahead and you can also do a directional force. With the direction force, as you can see, it is already activated automatically. Over here, I am able to basically move around the direction. So I was hoping that I can push it out, but it seems not to be the case. So let's have a try. It's always good to just try a few different things. So here we have the plaanar noise. And what you can do with that one is if you place your planar here, this is also why I want to try them out so that I can showcase all the forces to you pretty much. So the planar is pretty good. So you basically have the plane here. And then if you click on your branches and go to forces and you turn it on, it will basically do almost the same as your cube that it will just try to have your force here. If I turn off cube projection, here you can see, see? So you can see that basically twice just push my forces down, and I feel like this one is actually working a little bit better. It might just be that our cube projection was too strong because we do not want to have these to be as strong, but you can see that they always try to kind of like they try to touch your cube. While the planar, it gets attracted to the cube. So it is slightly different. Now, the reason mostly that I want to do this stuff here, let me just leave it like this over here is because I still want to give it this organic feel because these branches, they would not be sticking to the side. What we can do is we can go ahead and we can do plainer and give it a nice strength to here. Let's move this down and let's have a look because I don't want to have them sticking out, but I want to have them close to the end. This will make everything easier later on. Now we can go to generate and let's see. We have the number. Let's start by setting the first a little bit higher. And now we have our last over here. Now, for our angles, we want to have our angles, see. Yeah, so these are really erratic, but because this is not real life, we need to have some downwards force. I think it is best if we just move them downwards a little bit. And once again, you can also use your direction over here. I can go to force and like a directional force like this. And then I see my just want to make sure that if I go to force, it's turned off and then here it is turned on, here, see, I can give it a little bit of direction. So I can push it down like this. And now it's just a matter of basically giving it like a bunch of different variation. So what I often like to do is, I like to just go next to every single window. So over here, what you can do is you can the sweep basically does some random rotations. Jumble does like, again, some random rotation, but it just kind of like I don't know how to explain it. It's just like some general movement. So over here we have this one, the roll. Now, I am aware that it will most likely Oh, no, here, it does not push too many in there. You can see that they push a little bit in here, but that is not too big of a deal in this case. What you can also do is if you want, you can go up here to your force and press height, and it will hide the force, but it will not actually remove the effect. We can also go over here to show and turn off our forces over here. Or I thought we would be able to do that. Oh, I guess not. Did they maybe they moved it? Let's put height on this one. There we go. So now you can see that this now our ivy branches. So that makes it maybe a little bit easier for us to go ahead and have a play around. So we have our spine. Now, the cool thing about our length is that over here we have our length based upon the parent, which, yeah, that's fine. Basically what it does is based upon the length of the branch they are attached to, they will increase their length. You can also do an absolute length, which will just do an overall increase. But the cool thing is with this, if you click on your graph over here, you can make your length really irregular, which I like to do. So you can go what it does is it basically tweets the length from the top to the bottom. So what I can do is I can say, Okay, at the top, I want to go ahead and I want to have maybe my length a little bit smaller because these are new branches. Then at the bottom, they become larger. And then over here at the very bottom, they become smaller again. So I can just go in here and I can basically play around with my length and just make them look a little bit interesting. So now you can see that at the top, they are not too large. Then in the center, they become quite large, and then they become smaller again. So it's basically stuff like that. Now that we've done that, orientation, yes, you can play around with your start angle, which kind of does the same as the direction in this case. Gravity, we already went over, but we already have a start angle, so we don't really need to do that. Our noises, we can see play around with the amount, but it looks like it's just giving me a curly effect, which is not the one I want. Your late noise over here is looking pretty good in this case. So in the other ones, the late noise did not really work well, but in this one, it seems to be working quite well. So I'm going to give it quite a bit of late noise just to give it like an interesting look over here. You can also play around with your turbulence. I would recommend just play around with these settings. The turbulence is basically like the noise amount. The reason I'm not going to go over these settings because then it would become like a ten hour tutoril because there's simply so much stuff in here to cover. Break is also pretty cool. It basically gives you a chance to break off some branches, but we don't really need it right now. Forces, we are where you went over our skin, so our radius, our radius, um maybe let's set it a little bit lower, but it does not really matter because what we're going to do later is we are going to actually replace these branches with planes because the branches right now they are 30,000 triangles, so that would be too much. But if we replace them with planes, it will be a lot less geometry heavy. But I think at this point, it is looking pretty cool. What we would later do is we would later basically hide our big branches and over here, our small ones. And then all that we have left is we have the ivy and because we then also have our um we also have our leaves on top of it. It will be very difficult to actually see like that there aren't any branches supporting it. Or if you want, you can still use your big branches and you can make them very thin. But okay, so that's pretty good. Let's go ahead in the next chapter. We will just go ahead and continue our first ivy plant. 5. 04 Creating Our Ivy Part2: Okay, so let's go ahead and continue with our ivy. Now that we have all of our branches in place, now comes the tricky part, which is going to be our leaves. So the reason that the leaves are a little bit ticky is because it's about the directions and everything. So as you can see over here, they are all facing forward and they are kind of, like, pointing downward. So that's what we kind of, like, want to get. But then we still want to get some variation in it. And, of course, we cannot do it by hand. It needs to be completely generated because there are so many of them. Now, we want to get started by creating a new material. So if we go up here to the plus minus sign, add new, click on it, and press Rename and just call this IV underscore leaves over here, and then we can press Okay. So we need to go ahead and we need to set up our textures because our texts will actually dictate also the mesh of our leaves. So if we go to texts, we heads text.com IV 01. These are the ones that we use. So I can go ahead and I can go drag my base color or my albedo into color. My mask into obste normal, into normal. And I guess if you want, you can also use your translucency into the subsurface. But it doesn't really matter. This is not so much about rendering. Let's do subsurface like 0.2, there we go. This is not so much about rendering. It is just about being able to preview things. Now, a few quite important things. First of all, just turn on two sided over here so that we can see it on both sides. Here, you can see it over here. And now, what we're going to do is we are going to create our leaf measures. To do this, you want to go to cutouts and meshes. And then you want to go ahead and you want to press edit over here. Now, what you can see is a few thing. Oops. Once again, added. If you click away from this window, it will go away, so that makes it sometimes a bit annoying. So over here you can see that we have a plane, and over here we have also this orange thing. So the plane is our geometry. This orange thing over here is basically your pivot point direction. So the first thing that you would probably want to do is you want to go ahead and you want to decide which leave you want to turn into geometry. We are going to turn this one, this one, this one, and this one into actual geometry. I'm going to set my pivot point at the very tip over here. And then what I want to do is I want to change my angle up here until my pivot point until the orange line is roughly going into the direction of our leaf. Now it is super easy. To create this leaf, we want to basically click on a Rd point, click and drag over here, and you want to do that with all of them. Now, there can be points like over here where I need more points in order to create my leaf. This is super simple. All we need to do is just click empty space over here or click on the edge, and then you can add some extra points. You just want to try and use as little points as possible. I'm going to go for something like this. And now we can see that it is encasing our leaf over here, and then it simply has this orange point. Do not click away yet. A few things I want to show you. You can go up here, and if you want to remove points, you can click over here on remove points, and you can simply paint them away like that. And this one is reset or clear the points, which I'm not going to press. Yeah, let me just place the back. So yeah, just so you know that you can remove them or not. Also, you can turn on and off the show opacity and also the show color so that you can see everything. Now, what we're going to do is we are going to press this little arrow button and we can assign our leaf over here. Now, you have different LODs. However, I personally like to do the LODs using unreal because Unreal engine can generate it, since we also need to do a little bit of work inside of Maya on these meshes before they are ready for Unreal. What I tend to do is I tend to just go ahead and just throw this into my high over here. If you want, you can just throw it in all of them. It doesn't really matter. Once that is done, you can click away, and now you can see that you have your leaf here done. Now, if you want to add multiple leaves which we want to do, you can simply press the art button and we had three no way add four of them, I believe. So now having these four, we can just press it on the second one and we can basically do the same thing. So you just basically grab an ivy point over here. Like that, and then we can also go out the piv point. Technically, the order in which you do it does not really matter, but you basically set it down, then you arts. Another thing that I did want to show you is that if needed, you can art tesselation. This is great if you want to bend around your leaves. Now, I might want to give a tiny bit of testlation like this, so only like one over here. And I'm just doing this so that I can do a little bit of bending. It will give me a slightly higher quality. It does mean a lot more geometry because even though it does not seem like a lot more geometry here, because if we have 1,000 leaves, it will become a lot. So be careful. Don't do it too much. You can also go in here. Yeah, I do for this one also. And I like to just add them to Als. But yeah, just do it don't overdo it because then it is no longer a game resolution mesh. So after this, we are going to do a lot of effort to optimize it, so you would not want to have that effort wasted because of some leaf geometry. But anyway, here we go. So let's do this one and give you like one extra geometry point or tesselation point over here. And then finally, we have one more. Which is the one over here, here, see, now I accidentally placed a 0.1, but it doesn't really matter because the cool thing about in pain in speed tree is that these points, they are quite flexible, here, see, that the jomtre is quite flexible in how you use it. So even if you place like an extra point, it does not really matter because you can often just reuse it and else you can remove it. Here on one tesselation point. Come on. There we go. Okay, so our leaves are done and our material is now done. Now what we can do is we can actually start applying it to three D. Let's go ahead and just make this a bit smaller. And for this, it takes a little bit of playing around. So just be prepared for that. Let's go over here into our branches. We get right click Add jom tree to select it. And we can do leaves and alternating. So these are new, but they are quite cool. Normally, you would use this one, actually. Yeah, let's use this one. These are new. I want to try them out, but I should not be trying those out inside of it toil. So over here, we now have a bunch of leaves. They are really, really large, but that's it no problem. What I can do now is I can choose my generation, and I feel like proportional would be interesting. And there are a few specific settings that make this workflow stand out from the rest that I want to show you. Now, first of all, let's go ahead and go into skin, and then over here, it will ask you for your material and your mesh. Now, you want to set your material to ivy leaves over here. Now you can see that the leaves are technically working. But what I like to do is, I like to set my mesh to over here like the first one, and then I just press the plus sign a few more times. Ivy leaves, second one, ivy leaves, third one and ivy leaves, fourth one. So now they are randomly using these different types of leaves over here. I think I'm going to set my subsurface to zero because in this lighting, it does not really work well over here like that. Also, what you can do is with your light. Oh, God, I forgot how. To be honest, I forgot how to rotate my light. I believe it is in here somewhere. Let me just quickly check this out. I found it was holding the Viki and then you can click and then you can rotate your light around. I forgot about that. We have our leaves now they are way too big. They are intersecting, they are not looking good right now. But that is no problem because that's what we're going to work. First of all, let's go ahead and let's just set the overall size using our size scalar down to roughly the size that you want your final leaves to be, which I think this is quite nice. If you want to make your leaves more optimized, it can be useful to just make them slightly bigger than they would be in real life. You often see this done, I believe in the last of us, it is often done also or charted, those kind of games, where they make them a little bit bigger than they would be in real life. But in turn, they do look a little bit nicer and also just in general, they fit a little bit better and they are more optimized. I'm going to go for around 0.45 over here. Now, what you're going to do is you are basically going to go ahead and first of all, work on the actual direction because right now they are a little bit all over the place. So if we go ahead and go into our skin over here, so that is all fine. Down here, we have our folding, curl and twist. This one willy comes into play with just the leaves. The folding will basically give us a little bit of a fold, which is nice because we look over here, you can see that there's always a little bit of a fault going on on our ivy. I think it is you'll see almost every single ivy has this kind of folding. We want to set our fold into the plus over here, which should give us on most of them. You'll see a nice little fold like that. The curling will basically give you a little bit of rotation almost. That's pretty good to maybe set into the minus a little bit. Then the twisting, you can also give a little bit just a random twisting over here just to add a little bit more variation. We have our vertex and our vertex is basically some random noise, I would call it over here. It's similar to the noise, but it does not often work very well unless you have very large amount of geometry. So that's all looking good, we got that one orientation over here. In our orientation, we have the align, so that one allows us to often already push it down a little bit. The fault, I don't care, but the facing, I do care about let's see, intermediate. You can also play around your different settings over here, and it just takes a second to find exactly the setting that you want. So let's do a global over here like that. And now what I'm going to do over here, you also have your up right and out rotation, as you can see, so that basically allows us to once you can push them down. But I think what I'm going to do is I'm going to try and use a force in this case, and we actually have a direction over here, so we should be able to use that. If we go to forces, let's turn on direction, and let's set this quite strongly to like 12 or something. And then you can see what it does is it kind of pushes the leaves all down over here. Now, having them all face me is a little bit tricky because the reason why it is tricky is because they are rotating around our actual branches, so there is no direction for them to face if they are placed at the back of the branches. Now, it doesn't matter too much because this is like hanging ivy, so you can kind of see it from side. So what I would do is, yes, you can play around with, like, a orientation. Here you can see, like the facing, and then it tries to rotate, but you can see that it does not do a super good job. I'm just going to go into generate and I'm going to boost up my numbers quite a bit just to see how that looks. Okay over here. So the one thing that I noticed that we might want to go ahead and go for a little bit more like denser ivy over here, but that's something that we can just do by adding more branches. The first thing I want to do, and this is a really cool technique, right now, all of these ivy pieces over here, they are intersecting, and I don't want that. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to go to collision up here and I'm going to set this to high quality. And when you do that, what it will do is it will basically remove any leaves that are intersecting. Now, as you can imagine, because a lot of leaves are intersecting, we now have way less leaves, but that is okay, because now if we just go ahead and we just to basically boost up the numbers a lot. So let's go to like 60, for example. And then if we leave it off, you can see that we add even more. So we just want to really like, like 180 or sometimes we just need to go like 200 or something like that. So that we already apply a lot of leaves. So that's probably fine. And then if we go back to our branches, and in our branches, first of all, I feel like if I go to generate that I want to set my first a little bit higher over here, see? And then basically, you want to just go ahead and increase the number of branches. And then this way, you can basically add even more here, see Ivy like that. So that's all looking pretty cool. I kind of want to see what planar does. If I go into my forces and go to planar, is that working that it stops growing, not too much like a little bit, like it does. Try to stop growing the leaves to go inside of the plane. But let's say that we have something like this. Now, let's go ahead and just fix a little bit a few problems. Let's go into our little branches. Let's get started by setting the first a little bit lower because else they are trying to creep up too much to the top. Let's try zero. Zero, no, I want to go a little bit higher. There we go, just so that we remove those. Next, proportional edding 21. Let's try 50. Here we go. So that's a little bit less. I know that's sticking to the ground, but that is no problem. So over here, as you can see, we now have our branches like this, and this also gives us the opportunity to still go in here. And for example, click on this one, and if I go to Note, I should be able to still change the length. It might be a little bit slow if you do not have powerful computer. But like this, you can see that I am able to control the length. And then we get, like, a nice looking IV like this. Okay? So let's go back to generator. So we got those done. These branches that you can see over here, don't worry about it too much about their thickness. You can set the thickness now, but we are going to replace those with planes. So let's see how it looks if we make it a little bit thicker because the thickness does sort of respond to the rest. So we got these ones, and feel like maybe I want to make my branches here in the last. Let's maybe, like, push that a little bit further in over here. That we have quite an interesting looking ivy. And that's basically the goal of this. You just want to get a nice and interesting looking ivy that also looks good when it's, like, hanging off something or, like, hanging against a wall. Now, as I said before, right now it is hanging against the wall. You can be careful, but you can play around a little bit if you go to your forces and set the cube collision. So right now it is set to 18, if I set it to like ten or maybe like five, see, we are able to mess up and make them more messy. Let's do two, see? So you are able to make your ivy a little bit more messy, and I'm going to go maybe like three I want to be careful because this definitely does not always look very good, that it has this bend, and that makes me want to force it down. So let's click on this one over here. Let's see if I can maybe. Oh, hello. Did not mean to do that. Accidentally. Feel like that's a bug. Yeah, that feels like a bug or maybe some kind of like a limitation because it's not allowing me to actually rotate it the way that I want to. Is there used to be also rotations up here. But I guess that they change here we go. We can do kind of like rotation over here, but we are actually changing the radius, I believe, so it's technically not a rotation. But okay, so basically, that is looking pretty good. I think that I'm quite happy with this. And now, if you would hide your trunk and the big branches over here just by pressing H, you can see that this is now your IV. So you can see that, yes, the ivy is technically not connected at the top, but this is where you would often have it sitting inside of a wall. Or what you can do is you can do what we did before, where if you have your a cube. You can also run a few branches this direction to kind of, like, cover it. But often, what I found is that in the way that we are going to use these pieces, this is more than enough, and we don't need to have also on top, like these big branches, but you can have them if you want. Like these bigger ones, you can and carefully maybe Set the radius lower and just need to make sure that here, this is what I mean, if I set my radius lower, it's actually quite bad because it is trying to compensate with the amount of branches that we have. So anyway, this is done. Let's go ahead and save scene over here. So that's looking pretty good. Yeah, here, see? So they are not all pointing down, so they all have a little bit of direction. So now what we're going to do is we are going to basically replace these wily tin branches with planes. And that's going to be a little bit of a tricky one. So it involves a little bit of baking down, which we will cover a little bit later on also. But it should not be too difficult. Basically, what we want to do is we want to go ahead and go into Maya and then can delete this one, and we want to create a custom branch, which is going to be just like a plane. So it is if we just create a simple plane like this, get rid of all of your segments. And this plane you basically want to go ahead and rotate it in 90 degrees. And let's go in here. You want to move it so that it is pretty much on the pivot point over here. And I'm going to go ahead and I'm going to scale this in, so it needs to be really thin as thin as you want your branches to be. And I want to have my branches be quite thin like this over here. Now, the reason why this is a little bit tricky is because I actually want to go ahead and I want to add some height information in here so that they do look a little bit like branches. Now, we can do this using baking or we can do this using substance designer. The problem is, let me just have a think, am I going to use substance designer at all? Because I don't want to use substance designer for one single thing in this entire tutorial. Yes, I am going to use substance designer. So I'm going to do this in substance designer. So I've been saying that word a lot. So we got over here this leaf that's fine. Just make sure that in your UV editor that this plane is still covering the entire area like this, even though it is very thin. We want to have that. Next, what we're going to do is we are going to select these edges, and we are going to add a few segments over here. And these segments control also once again how hiple your pieces are going to be. So I'm going to go. These do not need to be very high. I think ten should be more than enough over here. And once we have this little leaf, remember that inside of speed tree, the pivot point will be at the very bottom. So that's why we want to set this on the end. And then what we can do is we can go file and do an export selection, and we are going to call this one. Let's go up here, one up. And let's call this IV underscore, Tin underscore branch. An export. Okay, so we got that one done. And now, if we go ahead and if we go into speed first, and then we will do the rest later on, we can create already a new material that we will call bark over here. And in this material, we can go ahead and make sure that it is two sided and start by, I'm just navigating to it, applying our bark textures, which is this one, our normal and our roughness, which in this case, it would be like a gloss over here. If you want, you can even arch your bak. If you want to have a hipolyivy, this would pretty much already be like your hypolyivy over here. But of course, you'll see that it is looking pretty cool already. But of course, we are going to go for game ready ivy. So we have a bark now, if we go ahead and go to our little branches, this is basically a trick that you can do in the latest versions of speed tree, which really grew. First of all, let's save sine. Now, down here, we can convert in our skin tab, we can go to type from polygons to spine only. This means that it will read only the spins that we have generated, and then we are free to art whatever we want on top of this. And the way that we are going to do this is we are going to right click Add geometry to select it and add a mesh over here. And you can see that Yeah, so it does a spine. Oh, yeah, little because, sorry, I got confused by name. It does spine and then the spine still has the leaves. So the leaves are following the spine, which means that they will stay the same. And then we have a mesh over here. Of course, right now it is cubes, but you might have guessed it if we go ahead and we can go to our bark over here, Oh, no, sorry, go to our mesh over here because this is a custom mesh. And then in here, we want to basically apply a mesh. Now, you can do it by pressing the plus over here or you can go to file and you can, of course, go in here and art or import a mesh. I'm just going to use the plus over here, and I'm going to navigate 1 second to my other screen like this. And oh, wait, we can actually just go one back over here. So we want to open up this one. And if we just go down here, we have ivy tin branch. It is now located, and we just want to make sure that it has the same direction as our leaf. So we want to go set the orientation to y up left handed, I believe. Oh, no, wait, Y up. Yeah, y up, left handed, and then flip it in. I don't know exactly. I want to have it flat, but I forgot which direction I need to flip it. Come on. Is it not working? Else, I'm just going to rotate it if it's not working. Okay, so it's not working. In that case, I'm just going to go in Maya, and I'm just going to do a quick 90 degree rotation over here. Normally, you can just set the flipping, but I don't know why this time it decides not to work. So you can just re ex put it on the same file. Go in here and just press a little reload button, and there we go. So that now should work, totally fine. And now all that we will need to do is we just need to quickly grab the IV branch. No, I keep forgetting that. Sorry, I've been forgetting this for years. Go to your bark, go to the cutout meshes, select your ivy branch because you can only do it via material, and now click and drag it on here. And then what you can see is over here, we have our punch over here. They are a little bit too thick. Now, I believe that we are able to do some scaling in here. But if we go to our mesh, we should be able to do some kind of scaling in here, but use actual size, but I don't know if it is on the X and Y scaling. Yeah, here, it's on the X and Y scaling. So I will need to go ahead and I will probably need to do this manually. But as you can see, you can kind of see the logics of it. So we just need to go in over Oh, yeah, and our UVs are also a little bit wong, but that can be just like this tracing UV over here. So let's go ahead and let's make it here, only 2000. I'm going to make it a little bit thinner and I'm going to make it shorter. So I'm just planning over here, so it takes a little bit of thinking. I'm just going to edit my pivot inside of Maya by pressing added pivot in our tool settings. Turn on snapping to points, and I'm going to snap it to the below point. And I was going to make it a little bit shorter, which is on the YXs, I believe. Yes, on the YX so 0.5. Oh, no, sorry, X xis. There we go. And I was going to make it a lot thinner. So on the Z axis, let's do 0.0 0.1? Yeah, I think 0.1 should be enough. And now let's try and do another export again. So we basically just need to kind of get it into the right location over here. So let's go into our measures and reload. So is that fixing it? No, it is not. I think I have a feeling what it is doing is it is overwriting thickness over here. So if you go down over here to defamation, you should be able to also set the radio scale here. So that will control at least the thickness. That one is fine. Now, for UVs, we are running, wow, we are running way out of time. So what we'll be doing in the next chapter is we will go ahead and we will focus, first of all, on just fixing UVs, which should be a very easy fix. That's no problem. The second thing that we're going to do is I want to try and see if I can also get some skewing or some thickness variation just like we had before. This one might be a little bit trickier, but it might be just like a case. Let me just quickly try because I've never tried this before in this way over here. But it might just be, Oh, here, see, so that works totally fine. So like this, we can basically have thinner ends. That they basically go from thick to thin. So you can just set it by simply clicking on here to adding points in between your mesh, and then you can just move these points. So it is the little graph next to it. You will get used to using these graphs. So that's one. So, okay, next stop would be to fix our UVs, and then I will also show you how to, of course, just properly set this up inside of Unreal engine in the next chapter. 6. 05 Creating Our Ivy Part3: Okay, so let's go ahead and continue. So we are going to first of all, fix of fix our UVs over here. And yeah, so we left off with making this smaller, so it's fine. So I want to fix my UVs. And then what I want to do is I just want to go ahead and I want to of course, give a little bit of a non map information so that it does not look flat, but it actually has some bump. Now, I think what is happening with our UV is because we are over here trying to have a UV like this or a square texture on a thin UV. And I think also my UV is flipped. So let's just go ahead and have a look. So if we have over here this piece, um yeah, here, actually, I can see right away that it is flipped because you can see that our segments going horizontal and here they go vertical. So let's just select our map over here. I'm going to go ahead and I'm going to set my pivot point or sorry, rotate to 90 degrees so that it is flipped. And now I need to make a decision. I think what I'm going to do is I'm going to just change our texture a little bit for this specific one because we need to do this anyway because we are going to go into substance designer. So first of all, let's go ahead and just export this. IV Tin Branch over here. Okay. So at least that is now flipped in the right direction and we can go to our meshes. Branch and just reload. Okay. Of course, this would not do much right now, but let's just go ahead and open up Photoshop. Here we go. And let's go ahead and let's create a texture that has a height of This needs to be only Let's do 1024. That's even like a lot. Probably actually five, 12 should be better. And a width of, like, very low. So maybe like 64 or something like that. Let's see. That's still not enough, so we want to go probably 1024 by 64, so it's even thinner. There we go. So that should do the trick. Now what I'm going to do is we have over here our mega scans bark. I'm just going to go ahead and I'm going to drag in all three of them in here. Over here. It doesn't need to be tilable anymore for these specific pieces. I'm going to select all three of them, all three layers over here. I'm going to go to my transform or rectangular measure tool right click and do a free transform. Then I'm just going to go ahead and scale this up, and we only need to go ahead and make the tops and the bottoms or table. But to be very honest, you will never actually be able to even see it if you're a little bit off. Now that we've done that, we can just go ahead and we can save this basically. I'm going to go file and do a save copy. And let's make a new folder that we'll call IV underscore bar. And in this folder, I'm just going to save this as I always like to use Taka files, so TJ files. And I'm going to do IV underscore bar underscore base color, save up. And then we go for the norm map. Over here file, save a copy. Once again, TJ IV bar underscore normal over here. And finally, we can do last one, save a copy. TagAivUnerscore, bark, underscore roughness. Okay. So those are now also done. Now what we are going to do is we are going to first of all, make sure that it looks good inside of speedr and then we are going to add our norm map information. So let's go into our bark here in SpeedR. And I'm going to go ahead and just simply re drag in our base color that we just saved our normal, come on, normal and our roughness over here. Like that. Okay, so that's now already looking a little bit better. And I think what I need to do is I just need to set my stretching up. So let's go into Maya. Let's go back into UVTolkit. And basically the way that you want to do this is you want to select all of the faces. In your UVtolkit, let's go to the transform and just push it down at the bottom. And then you want to go ahead and in your scale. You want to make sure that only the V is activated so that you only scale vertically. And with the scaling of two, we can go ahead and we can press scale so that we have exactly two over here. If you want you can alter scale and then use snapping, but this is often an easy way to do it. I think we need to probably do it three times. So let's try this. Let's export and see how this actually looks. So we export this. We go over here, meshes, and we just reload. There we go, see. So now we already have a proper looking UV. So that fixes that. Now the last thing that will really improve this a lot is that we need to go ahead and we need to very quickly open up substance designer for this. Here we go. And this is going to be super quick and super simple. So all we need to do is create a very quick new substance graph over here. We can just set to empty, and we simply want to call this ivy, bark underscore, normal underscore, round or actually branch over here. And we want to set our sizes. Once again, to what was it? Let me just quickly check. We had 64 by 1024, that's preso. Am I doing it in the right direction? We can, by the way, close our library over here. So now that we have this one, what I'm going to do is I'm just going to import my norm map over here. Let's just press Import resources so that we actually have something. There we go. Perfect. We now have our norm map imported in here, and that we are going to do is we are going to basically give it a really nice round bump. The way that we want to do that is we want to go ahead and press space when you have your notes selected over here, and then you basically get all of the notes that you can also find in here. And type in normal and grab the normal combine over here. So we are going to combine two norm maps, the base norm map, and we want to go ahead and we want to combine this along with a custom norm map, and this custom norm map is basically going to be in our patterns. A gradient linear I think gradient linear two should do the trick over here. You want to go ahead and you want to click on it, and then if you just quickly scroll down here to the instance parameters, set the rotation to 90 degrees, and now you can see that we have a really nice round gradient. Then if we press space again and add a normal node so you can just press Enter, what this one will do is if we set this to open GL and the intensity to ten, for example, Oh, looks like even more 30, you can see that it starts to become round, maybe even more, maybe even 50. So we want to give it like a really strong round normal and then simply click and drag this into your normal combine. And then what you can see is that now it will just include this roundness. Next is exporting. So we basically go ahead and first of all, let's go in here, right click and save as seen, and we are going to save it in the Ivy bark folder and just press Save. And then what you want to do is you need to have an output so that you can actually export this. So if you press space, add output over here just by typing in output. And maybe if you want, you can go down here and press the little art item sign in the usage and set this one to be a normal. Then it will automatically make sure that all of your color spaces and everything are correct. Now we get Sav acne. Click below of this package so that we can right click and press Export outputs to Bitmap. And we simply want to set this to be a Taka. And then when you press Export, it will automatically export in the same folder. So now you can see IV bark normal branch output dottga. That's the one that we want. Can I go in here? Add this to our non map, and now you can see that we have this bump. Now it is up to YouTube, for example, decide, Okay, maybe I want to make my bump even stronger. I'm going to set to 100 and then I can go to Export again and reexport it. Then if I go to Spetre you should be able to just re track it on or just turn it on off. There you go. So that is now looking nice around. So from a distance, it will be hard to really notice that these are not actual geometry branches, but they are just very cheap or plain branches. So you can see that over here, our actual meshes are only 2,640 twist. Now, the leaves, they do say that they are 216,000 triangles, but this is not true. This is because it is not taking into account the collision. So the leaves itself are a lot less. That's okay. So this is perfect. So leaves done, branch done, texts done. That's great. Now, what I'm going to do is I'm just going to do two more things. First of all, let's go into materials. And in your ivy leaves, you have over here a variation slider. This is quite important to add some more variation. If you click it up, it will basically add some slight color variation over here to your actual ivy textures. So this is really nice. So you can push this up, and then you can go ahead and if you want, you can play around with your variation in here. So we can make this one, for example, quite dark. And then this one maybe you want to go ahead and, like, play around with the saturation a bit over here and just give it some very slight variation like this. So that's from a distance, it will be easier to read. So this is still too much. I'm just going to you maybe make this one bit darker. There we go. You can also set the amounts over here so you can really push it out if you want. But that's perfect. Now you can see that you see, it is subtle, but it is actually quite powerful to use something like this. Okay, great. We are now ready for export. What we're going to do is we first need to export this to Maya because we want to go ahead and want to set the pivot point in the right location and just double check our work. Then what we can do is we can export this to unreal. In this chapter, we will go ahead and just do the exporting and in the next chapter, we will set up our material and then you can actually preview everything. To export this, let's save a scene first, and then you just want to go ahead and want to go to File, Export to game over here. And then if you go ahead and you can go to your source files exports, and then we can go from underscore speed three. Let's create a folder. And here we can export this. Now, there are a few different types. If you're using the older versions or Speed three, so below 9.0, you might have a version, depending on your license. That is just unity and Unreal, which is this one. So that means that you can only export fire this way. They did change this later on. If you have this, what I recommend doing is you basically export this to Unreal you then import it into UnreL and in Unreal itself, you are able to then export it again to an FBX. So for example, here we are in Unreal. And if you have imported a model, for example, the ST model, you can always right click on a model, go to Asset Actions and export it again. So it's a workaround. If you are not able to export directly to FBX, to still export your model to FBX. However, of course, we don't need that because we can just set this to FBX. IV, generic 01, and press Save. And now in here. So for a preset, what I like to do is, I like to first of all, go to choose game preset and then click on UnreelEngine four, and then it will already set some default settings. Now, what we are going to do is we do not want any LOD, so we are going to go for highest only. We want art variations. Remember, that's the colors. Light MP UVs, if you want, you can add them, but you can also generate these inside of nul engine. In our atlas, we want to set this to non warping. So we do want to go ahead and create an atlas because we have these variations. And in order to implant these variations, you need to create a different atlas. So allow separate atlases, that's fine. We don't need to separate the materials per se. So we are just going to have everything it's like one atlas. Geometry, the scaling, we can fix that inside of Maya. Billboard, we don't need billboard, so we have that turn off, so we don't care. And our textures, we can set this to TGA because I like TJ. The max size, we want to set to 2048 over here because we really don't need to go any higher. And then what we can do is we can just go ahead and we can press Okay. And now it will start by packing all of our textures and exporting our geometry. And then you should have in here a oh, that's speed forces from Speedr. You should have over here your texture and then you should also have these atlases over here. You can see that they look different because they change the leaves, and of course, we have our normal bark atlases. So this is what we wanted. Now, if you go ahead and go to May at this point, I can pretty much delete this. If I want to change this, I can simply input it. I don't need to create an entire save file just for one single plane. But what I now want to do is I want to do I do want to go ahead and save my scene. And this will become my main scene. I'm going to go into saves and I'm going to call this foliage underscore setup. And this scene, you guys will, of course, also get, and it will basically contain all of our foliage. So we are going to go file and input. And now if we go to exports from Speed tree, we can grab our IV generic 01 dot FBX and import it. And now, it's really big. Oh, and it looks like the Y is rotated. I believe that you can actually set that in here. So if you go file and export to game, you should be able to set this in here, I thought you should be Oh, yeah, hear flip x. I'm not sure which one I actually need to have. Let me just quickly do some testing just to make sure. Okay, so it looks like I cannot get these settings to work, which is okay, so that's no problem. So let me just quickly do one final default export over here. And I'm just going to turn all of these off, and I'm just going to export, and then we will basically fix it in Maya. It honestly does not really matter. So let's go into Maya, file import. We are going to input this as our IV over here. And then what you want to do is you just want to go ahead and just hold J because J is snap rotation in Maya, and we are just going to basically rotate it like this. Next, what I'm going to do is I'm probably going to set my scale to 0.1. This scale, the final scale we need to set inside of Unreal because it is really hard to have a concept of how big IV should really be. In terms of our front or back, I believe that this is our front. Let me just quickly check. Yeah, here, see this our font because you can see that cluster over here. So this is basically our font over here. So that's totally fine. Now, the way that Unreel works is that it will set your PivoPoint at 000, which is where our pivot point is now. So what you want to do is you want to move this down over here. And at this point, the piv point will basically be in this location. And maybe if you want, you can move it a little bit forward to make placement a bit easier. And what I like to do is I then like to go in my channel box and layer editor, assign a new layer, right click and the tselect objects, or you can press this button to add them immediately. It's a force of habit for me to press this one. And I'm going to just call this IV score generic underscore 01. Now, I sh Oh, yeah, on the score L. It's because even though it is a layer, as long as your object is also called the same name, it will not actually allow you to name your layer the same. I don't know why because it seems to be two very different things. But basically, now that we have this one ready to go, because our materials are already fine, and we should not need to change anything specific in here, as far as I know, if you want to change anything specific, like you maybe want to remove some leaves or anything like that, you can totally do that. Like, who knows? Maybe I want to, for example, right click and go to Face. Ox, let's go to Object. Oh, I cannot do Object. Let's go face and just select everything. Let's say that I, for example, want to turn off snapping and I want to move this down a little bit like this that it is better, then you are totally welcome to do stuff like that. But at this point, this one should now be ready. So I should be able to save my scene, go to file and Expot selection. And now if I go to unreal over here, so I have already made this folder to unreal, I can call this IV underscore generic underscore 01. I do like to have triangulate turned on in this case. And as an FBX, I can simply press Export Selection. There we go. And now, if we go ahead and we go inside real engine, in here, what we will do is what I will do is I will have a new folder called Easy foliage tutorial. This is where we will place everything. Right click and create a new folder called Assets. Let's also create another new folder called textures. In our assets folder, I want to go ahead and I want to import to unreal IV generic 01. Now there's a few important settings. Make sure to let's do generate lightmaps just in case you want to use them. We are not going to use lightmaps by the way, because unrealizen five strong point is real time lighting. Just make sure that combined message is turned on. You do want to make sure that that one is turned on. And for our scaling, I believe we do want to set this to 100, yes, because we are coming from Maya, so we need to go upscale it from centimeters or from millimeters to meters, I believe, something in that direction. Because the file units, no, the file units are centimeters, we need to go to meters, I believe. Anyway, press Import, and then we can see soon enough. So here we go. So for example, if I now go ahead and click this model and drag it in, I can see that, we should have done only ten. So I knew that because we are centimeters and we want to go meter, so it only needs to be ten times bigger. So let's go ahead and just double click on your models that you can open it up and then you can see it over here. It looks really awful right now without material, but let's scroll down and set our import scale to ten and then press reimport again. At this point, you can basically decide how big you want it to be. For example, I can go ahead and I can place this over here and I can already kind of place this into position where in my level, for example, and let's say that I decide that I want to have it a tiny bit bigger. I can go here and I can set this to 10.5. And then if I press R input, here, see, you can see that it becomes a tiny bit bigger. Honestly, this is actually a pretty spot on scale. So this is looking pretty good. In the next chapter, what we will be doing is we will go ahead and we will import our textures, set up our material, and also set up a small test scene that is not this scene because this scene we will use later on, a small test scene to preview all of our foliage. So let's go ahead and continue with this in our next chapter. 7. 06 Setting Up Our Folage Materials And Test Scene: Okay, so what we will be doing in this chapter is we will go ahead and create a smaller scene that we can use to just quickly preview our foliage and then import our textures and set up our materials. So I'm just going to go ahead and I'm going to go file and just do a brand new level over here. And I'm going to go probably like a simple default level. That should be fine. Here we go. Okay, so this is going to be very simple. First of all, let's go ahead and go to file and just do a quick, save current levels, and let's save it into our a Where are you? Oh, God, so many folders. I'm looking for easy. There we go. Easy foliage stil save Preview Underscore Map. That is what I will call it. Here we go. Okay, perfect. So what I'm going to do is this scene over here, it is still the old scene from UnreelEngine four, and I do not like that. So I'm going to pretty much get rid of my let's see, my no, you know what? Yeah, player start I can get rid of. I guess I can reuse the rest. I guess I can just reuse whatever we have here. So let's also get rid of the base cube over here. And I'm going to go to create shapes create a brand new cube. Now, in your location, if you press the little arrow button over here, it will reset to zero, zero, zero, and then I'm going to just make it like 0.1. So I'm going to make it quite thin like this, and then maybe like 30 by 30 over here so that we just have a simple plane. Next, what I'm going to do is I'm going to go create shapes and create another cube over here. For this cube, I'm just going to go ahead and I'm going to scale it up and out a little bit. Like this, and this will be for previewing our actual ivy over here. Now, if we go to our source light, we just want to go ahead and set it to movable so that it is real time lighting. I'm going to go ahead and go into my light color and maybe, like, give it a little bit of an orange color like this. Next, maybe rotate it a bit or not. I don't know. Let's do something like this. Let's rotate it a little bit like this over here. Skylight, you also want to set your skylight movable. You can do a real time capture, but then it will require a sky atmosphere. So I'm going to go ahead and I'm just going to leave it as default right now, so that's totally fine. Leave it. It's just a quick preview what we're making here. And I think that's pretty much it. So we have a reflection capture, which is covering the entire scene over here. So yeah, this should be enough for us to just quickly preview, and we will just go ahead and improve the scene as we go along. So what we can do is we can go ahead and just import or drag in our IV generic. I'm going to rotate it over here. See is this the front. It's still difficult to see which is the front and which is the back. This is the front over here. There we go. And so, yeah, this one would be on corners, so it would probably be somewhere over here. If you want, you can turn off Snap rotation and do a little bit better rotation over here like this. So what I'm going to do is I have this. I'm going to go ahead and create my materials. Now for this, I'm going to right click and create a new folder that we will call materials. And in here, I'm going to make a right click material that I will call foliage underscore master like this. So the foliage master will basically be covering all of our materials. Now there will also be one that is just another material that is solid underscore master, and the solid master will be for our bark and everything. So let's get started with the foliage master over here. Click and drag this up here, and then we can get started. Now, the first thing I want to do is I want to go to my textures, right click New folder, IvnsceUwaGeneric, IV Underscore leaves because we are importing a custom texture. So if we go from speed tree, here we are going to import this custom texture. I don't need a subsurface, so cool and normal is the only one that is being exported, but that's fine. So we can go ahead and we can import this, and then we can also go ahead and do Ivy underscore bark like this. And then if we just grab these two over here, and then the rest we can do inside of wind wheel engine. One thing to keep in mind is that we have our NO map in OpenGL. Remember how we did that in substance designer. However, Unreal engine reads as direct X. So you just want to open it up and press the flip green channel. And I believe that do we need to do the same? No, we do not need to do the same because these come from mega scans, so these are already correct. Perfect. Okay. I'm going to grab my color and my normal of my ivy leaves, and I'm going to import it in here or just drag it in here. Now, what we're going to do first? Go to your foliage master. Let me just move this over here. Let's go to our blend mode and we are going to set this translucent and our shading model two sided foliage, and then also click on two sided over here, which will give us a base color and a opacity, but we want to have more stuff because we also want to have control over our normal our roughness. And yeah, we do have a subsurface color. The way that you can do that is by scrolling down, and in your translucency tab in the lighting mode, set this to be surface forward shading. Yes, that's the one surface forward shading over here. Now there are a few things that I want to do. First of all, I want to right click and I want to add something called a constant t vector. And what is it is basically a plain color. So what I want to do is I want to also add if you right click a multiply, and I basically want to multiply my base color texture. And then this plain color, if you right click and convert it to parameter, you can call this color overlay. Make it white. That's okay and applied here. So what are we doing? We are basically multiplying our base color texture with this color, and because it is a multiplier, whenever the color is not white, it will show up. So if I make this red, my leaves will become red. The reason I convert this to perimeter is because we are going to create something called a material instance, which I'm sure many people already know because I do require a basic understanding of unreal, if you want to follow this tutorial. But basically, the material instance allows us to change this color inside of our engine. So we need to do the same over here for our base color, right click, convert to perimeter and just call it base nscore color, and our normal right click convert to parameter, normal nscore map, like that. Next, what we want to do is so we have a color overlay so we can simply plug this into our base color. Over here, our Alpha X contains our mask, so we want to plug this one into our opacity over here. And then our normal, we can just simply plug this into our normal. But if you want, what you can do is you can hold S and click once, and that will create a scalar parameter and call it normal score strength, or you can right click and type in scalar parameter like that and set the normal strength, yes to zero. And if you then add a node that's called a flatten normal like this, the cool thing is that you can plug in your normal and your normal strength over here, and I believe, actually, I need to go for minus one for our base normal strength. And then if you plug this into your normal over here, what will happen is it allows us to control the strength of our normal. Now, I just realized something is going wrong, and this is a bug that happens with speed tree that I believe there is no way to solve it inside of Speedre because even if we try to export our material, here, we can try. Let's say, export the game Ivy No, see here. So I do not think that there is an actual fix for this. Basically, what is happening is if we open up Photoshop, which I still have open. Perfect. Oh, only it's on my Wong screen. Oh, God. Come on. Just let me go. Thank you. Okay, so if I open up over here, leaves and go to my Alpha, this is the problem. For some reason, Speed always decides to make the Alphas in terms of specs over here, which is not what I want. Super easy fix simply go to image adjustments and levels and simply push your white slider beyond the little curve that we have over here. So that you can be ressured that this is white, and then just press Contras to save it. At which point, if you go into reel here, we can right click and just reimport our color or base color, see, and that fixes that. Okay, so we got that stuff done. Another one that I want to do is I want to add my subsurface color. And the way that we do that is we add a constant three vector, convert to perimeter and call this sub underscore color and make it like a light yellowish color, I would say, or light yeah, light yellow greenish color, something like this. It's like a base. And then what you want to do is you multi multiply this using a scalar parameter, so a click, and this will be sub surface underscore strength. And we want to set this to one like this and simply plug this into our subsurface color over here, which will basically allow us to control both the color and the strength of our subsurface. That's pretty much what we need for now. Oh, wait, maybe like a, maybe like a scale perimeter. So S click for now. Let's work out roughness. And let's set this to 0.7 by default, which basically one means that it is looking very dull. Zero means that it looks very shiny, so I'm going to go a little bit in between that. Plug this into your roughness just to give us a little bit control over that. And now we can save scene and we can actually check this out. So let's go in here into materials. We have a foliage master, and just right click and create a material instance and call it IVs generic underscore 01. And this basically what I was talking about. If I open it up, you can see that now all those settings that we turned into a parameter, we now have control over those. So we can now go ahead and go into IV. Here, I just press a little search button to find it. I can then go back into my materials and click on my IV generic. And simply add it using this arrow button in here. And now we should have a two sided generic IV. I think I should have gone for masked instead of translucent, didn't I? Yeah, I should have gone for masked. So let's go ahead and go in here. And let's go from translucent to masked over here. And then all we need to do is just plug in your Alpha into your abaste mask. There we go. That should give us a better result. Hmm, still, I feel like I'm missing a lot of leaves. Or is that just me? Let's have a look. Yeah, I'm definitely missing, like, a lot of leaves over here. Interesting because I don't seem to be missing them here, so I'm quite curious because they should be two sided. So I'm just trying to kind of, like, have a look around to make sure if I'm missing some, I can also go ahead and I can not in here, but I can double check in here. So if we go to ID and show wire frame here, look at that, see? So you can see that it is missing a lot of stuff. Now, most likely, because I do like to always keep in debugging to see what is going wrong, the first thought that I have is that if I would, for example, add like a plain bark material, if it comes back, I know that it is the amount. If I just quickly click on my plain back material and just quickly in the material, just set it to two sided. I just need to do this because else I cannot see what I'm doing. So two sided? Yes, see. So here you can see that everything is working totally fine even as some AO in here, which means that most likely something is going wrong in our UVs in our leaves. You can check your UVs actually over here. You can set this to zero, and here you can see, these are UVs. So here it looks like that they are flipped. See? It looks like that somehow they managed to be flipped around in here, which is quite interesting. So could it be that maybe those settings that I did? So if I go to export the game over here, I set this setting over here. I turned this off because I thought it was for our geometry, but it might actually be for our UV. So let's go ahead and just re export this just to double check. And let's see if that fixes anything. So if we go in here. So if I go in my UV editor and open this up, yes, that is definitely one. And now I did export this, but it looks like that it still does not import it. So let me just quickly file and do a quick import re import over here our IV generic. Oh, that is curious. That is interesting. I'm going to Undo this. Oh, God, I cannot Undo, so I'm just going to reopen my scene so that I do not accidentally lose what I just accidentally deleted over here. So, if this is not working, what we can do is we are able to add a texture to this now and then flip this around. To do this, I would probably need to go ahead and I would need to go to face and if I just what was it? Control click because I want to select and I forgot how to actually do this. I want to go ahead and I want to select biomaterial. So you want to go ahead and convert selection. Let me just quickly check because I have not used this feature in so long, I completely forgot. Actually, I found an easier way to do this. If we simply select all of this and then hold Control and the select sorry, hold Shift. Control shift. Come on, let me shift. There we go. Okay, so it didn't allow me to do it to select these pieces. So we need to be flipping it vertically. Yes, so it needs to be flipped vertically. So if we go ahead and if we go over here, let's see, flipping flipping. So symmetrize no flip on the VXS is that it? Yes, that looks now, correct. Let's try that out. We are flipping it on the Vxs over here and I've never actually had this problem, so that's quite curious. But then again, actually this is the first time working in speed nine for me. I'm right away just making quite complicated, well, not complicated stuff, but still quite intense stuff. Maybe that is the problem. Now we can go in here and if we just re input this, there we go see. It is now flipped around. Now if I just go ahead and just turn off my EV, grab my IV generic and hopefully, if I apply it, there we go. That is looking a lot more logical. Let's save sin yeah, that is looking more logical, definitely. So now I just need to check. So this is the front, okay? That's fine. So you would kind of like place this next to the plants or whatever over here. And now there's a few things that we do want to balance out. So if we just double click on our material. So yes, we do have this AO that is going on inside of here. This is something that I tend to fix with lighting. There are settings in here, but this is an unreal agent five things. So right now, because it is using the far, not far distance shadow. Oh, God. What is it called? So I have a brain freeze. Distant field ambient occlusion. It is trying to apply that in here because we have a two sided. Now, there should be ways that you can reduce the effect in here inside maybe like your lighting, over white distant field, self shadowing, or maybe not. Maybe that is not possible. But anyway, I tend to fix this using ese. So effect distance field shadows. But I tend to fix this using a balance of our subsurface color, along with our just general lighting inside of our scene. So we have this over here. I want to go ahead and just quickly check if I set this to two. No, I want to go with a normal of minus one. I'm just making sure if my normal is in the correct direction. Yes. Roughness, I want to go 0.9. The roughness being flipped? No, no, the roughness is not being flipped. I don't think, the colors, I don't really like the colors. Let's do roughness, zero point. Let's do zero. Okay, let's do 0.8. Our subsurface color, as I said, it's the two, one, zero. Okay, so that one is way too strong. So let's do 0.1. This will look way better than scene. I will do, a little bit of balancing out later on. I'm going to make my subsurface color a little bit more orange over here. And I'm going to make my color overlay, maybe a little bit darker and maybe go a little bit towards the green value. But this is all balancing out that we would need to probably do properly in our scene. So if we have this, let's set up my roughnesculy to 0.6 over here for now. And then I can see that I have this classic bug where you can no longer move. So it's at inside of unreal, which allows you for some reason. Basically, it blocks your movement, and you need to switch back and forth between a software, a different software in order to get it. But, okay, so this one is working okay for now, we still need to do a lot of stuff. But at least what I want to do now is I want to go ahead and work on my solid master, which is going to be super easy. It's literally just us going into the iv bar, selecting these two pieces, throwing them in here. Base color. Roughness. Let's go ahead and let's go to your foliage master and just quickly copy over these three notes over here. Paste them in. Yeah, you can just plug this in here. So this is for base color, and this one is for our roughness and this one actually was supposed to be normal. Sorry about that. And then just right click and convert to parameter this base color. Do the same with your normal, right, click convert the perimeter, normal map, just like that. So super simple. For now, all we need, we will be improving this as we go along and simply right click create some material instances and just call this IV underscore bark because we will be creating more different types of foliage materials with this. So we have IV bar, and now if we go in here, just apply it. In your solid master, just make sure that you turn on two sided and press safe. Give that a second. And then it should give us a pretty good effect, but we'll see. Saving takes surprisingly long. There we go. Okay, cool. So here we go. Here we can see our foliage over here. If you feel like it is too dark, you can always go into your ivy bar over here on this color and set this brightness to 1.5, for example, or maybe even two to make it a little bit brighter. And then if you want to balance it out a little bit, you can then go into your ivy bar material, which I will drag down here. And then if you click on your color, you can then just, like, mess around with the color to give you a little bit more control. But anyway, so that is looking pretty decent. So having this, also from a distance, yeah, I think the bark is not too thin, that's looking good. It looks very much like it is just a simple geometry, even though it is not. So that is looking pretty decent as like a begin. If you want to go ahead and just, like, preview this quickly, we can always go into our and that's the last thing I will do in this chapter. We can always go into our tunnel here collapse tunnel saves. This one is the one I need, I believe. There we go. And if we don't go ahead and for example, so this will be generic. So let's say that we have it over here, I can go assets. I can drag it in here, and then I can also immediately, test out some stuff. One thing I want to do with this foliage in this specific scene is I want to turn off if you go down here, in your settings, you want to go down to rendering and then turn off receives decals because I have a bunch of decals in here, and I don't want to actually have those on. So having that done, you can now see that I can place my foliage in here. I can scale up and down however I want. And then from a distance, it does look a bit like foliage. Now, I definitely need to go at it and I need to do some more balancing. So I'm going to place one over here, one over here. And what I want to do is basically in our next chapter is we are just going to nicely balance this stuff out. So if you go ahead and, sorry, it's because of my God race. If you go ahead and click on this box over here, you can rotate based upon your object direction. Don't do it too much because, of course, it would look strange if your entire IV plant is rotated like that. But what I want to do is I want to go ahead and if we go to, like, a distance, I want to basically make this look good because right now it is looking quite awful. So that's what we'll be doing in our next chapter is we will go ahead and we will balance this out, specifically like our roughness and everything. We just need to play around with things. So yeah, let's go ahead and continue with that in our next chapter. 8. 07 Balancing Our Ivy Material: Okay, so what I want to cover in this chapter is I just want to do some balancing, basically. So I want to balance out my material, and I just want to make sure here, there is this little bug going on. It looks really strange. I think it has to do with the subsurface scattering that you can see over here. But yes, there's basically a few things that I want to cover. One thing that I have had a look at and that I feel a little bit less confident about is that we are exporting this using custom atlas that has the variations in it. I think bad side of it is not worth the good side of it. What I mean right now is that we have over here these extra atlases. However, they are way less refined and we don't have the ability to use the roughness and we also don't have the ability to use the translucency this way. I think what I want to do is I rather just want to go ahead. And use our default. So if we go ahead and create a new texture fold that we'll just call IV Underscore leaves over here. And so I still want to keep the old one in here. Then what I'm going to do is I'm just going to go into my textures, text.com IV, and I'm basically just going to import these for over here. So let's just go ahead and import these. Double check. I think I need to flip, I need to flip the green channel over here like that. So that is also done. That's fine. Now what I'm going to do is I'm just going to go ahead and I'm going to let's see. First of all, grab your translucency over here. And I guess I think we will make the system a little bit different. What we're going to probably do now is we are going to first multiply our translucency that we have just added, and you can right click, convert the premter subsurface. That's what I will call it. So it has different names depending on which program you use. And then we multiply it. So we multiply the subsurface with the color so that we can slightly change the color around, and then we can control the strength of it. So I think that is a little bit better. I'm going to also just by default, apply these textures. We still need to later on do it over here. And the reason that I'm doing that is because right now we are going to use a custom Alpha. So I just want to grab this Alpha over here, and I want to use this into my Opacte. Um I think you have right click break pin. This is the mask. So yeah, we need to be in the opacity mask, so that's fine. Yeah, that's already starting to look quite a bit better. So we got those all done, and then, yes, we do have our roughness, but our roughness is fine for now. Maybe later on what we can do is we can just throw in a quick grunch map to give it some very slight variation. So we do that. Then there is one thing that we do need to do, and that is that we need to export this, and then yes, we do need to set it up again inside of Maya. But we just want to export this to gain and I want to export this with the Atlas set to none, which basically means that it will not try to create an atlas. So then we can just go ahead and press. Okay. And that should also fix our UV stuff that we had to fix later on in here. So for now, you know what? I'm just going to delete that. I'm not too worried about the scaling and everything because we are so early on in the project, so I don't need to match it up exactly. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to go, why do I have so many maps? I'm going to delete all of those. But basically, I changed again. No, no, no, no, wait. I'm looking at it from a different direction. Let's go ahead and rotate this. And then I'm just going to go ahead and scale this down again. Move this down over here like this. I'm just going to quickly check. I need to flip it around again. That is really strange. I wonder if that's a bug, because it never used to do this. But aka let's just select all of these, and then maybe we'll shift and like deselect these bits, and I need to flip it on the here, I even need to move it. I never like moving my UVs like this. It's always risky to do that kind of stuff. But as long as they fit, that should be fine. Those are now in place. That is fine. What I'm going to do now is I can just go ahead and do save scene and do a reexport over here, and that should pretty much fix everything. If we now go back into unhel over here, Right click reimport. And then just do a different leaf materials. Oh, the reason it's doing different leaf materials is because it's still asking us to add variations, which actually, you know what, that could be in our advantage. I don't know why it imported like this because we still have the original scaling, but okay, I guess that what I want to do is I want to set my scaling list. That is weird. So let's do a scaling of five. There we go. Really? Did I make it that much bigger? I must have made it way bigger than I really expected or than I noticed. But anyway, this is pretty cool. So what we can do with this is we can simply add like a few extra materials. So right now, I just want to see which one is our bark. Alright. Okay, so this one is our bark. So if I just go ahead and in my materials, I like to just make this smaller. So this one is the bark. And then for now, what I will do is I will just make all of them the same ivy over here. Oh, we even have four variations. That's interesting. So I made those ivy pieces over there. It seems that it still does not properly do UVs, which is interesting because these are not details. No, these UVs. Like, the mask is working. Oh, I know why. I need to open this up and I need to replace them in here. Sorry about that. I'm quite forgetful at times. So I just need to replace my base color and my normal. There we go. Okay, so that's already looking better. I'm just going to quickly check in my rendering. Received decals is turned off. So it still has, like, a little bit of like I don't know what it is. It's almost like a shadow problem. And I have a feeling or, like, the suspicion that it comes from our normal map. Yeah, I feel like that is the case. Let's just not risk it, and let's actually get rid of our norm map strength because I normally do not use it on foliage. I normally only use that on, like, bricks and everything. So Okay, so it's not that bad on that. You can see that here. We are already starting to get here you can see it better. We are starting to get like small improvements. So this is just part of the deal. It's just balancing out. So I'm going to have my two materials on here, and I'm going to go in here and I'm going to basically just see. Let's first of all, make this one a bit darker. Like that. And now if we go in here, let's have a look. So first of all, let's set our subsurface scattering. If I set you to zero. Okay, so it's definitely here 0.1. The subsurface scattering is adding a funky effect to it, which I don't really trust, to be honest. Yeah, you cannot see that much here, but here you can definitely see it, see? So I'm going to have this quite low, just to avoid it for now. But I do want to have it later on. So I wonder exactly where the problem is. Well, it might not be a problem. It might just be some kind of like a limitation. The next thing that I want to do is, so I want to go ahead and have control over my color, but I also want to have control over desaturation. So I'm going to go in here, and after I multiply with our color, I'm going to add a saturation node or a saturate, not a saturate. Desaturation node, sorry, desaturation, throw this in here. Add a scalar perimeter. Remember, as click and call this let's just do D set. Set do zero and plug this into our base color. Was zero gray? Yes, zero is gray, and one or minus one is that it looks duller, I believe. I think. Now, wait, minus one is that it becomes saturated and plus one means that it looks more gray scale. So we now have these, so now let's do some balancing out. Let's start with our color. Let's make the color a little bit more like a yellowish color and then just tone it nicely down and then add some desaturation of zero point here, C, and then if you do 0.3 maybe, we can very quickly get like interesting facts. So I do want to go for a little bit too colorful, so not this dull. But also, here, this is quite a good one. So we want to go for maybe a little bit colorful, maybe slightly darker green color. So let's see. I don't know if, if I do darker green. I don't know. It also depends on your environment, what looks best. I think in this environment because it looks so peaceful, it might actually be nice, yes, if we go for, like, a more slight yellowish tone and have everything like a little bit brighter. So something like that's pretty good. And then desaturation, 0.2, no 0.4. 0.35. Let's do 0.35. Okay, so we got that one also done. That's pretty good, actually. Yeah, that's looking pretty good. Even over here, of course, it doesn't look logical in this place because we are going to have a unique one here. But, for example, over here, it might look logical to have it hanging sort of like in this location, like this. A little bit more. You see, so you get some quite interesting effects. And if you go to your camera, you can see, like, Oh, yeah, here, so we have some IV and stuff like that. I do have lights over here that are already compensating a little bit, but not too much yet. So the subsurface color, what it will do is it will basically whenever we have a light, it will let the light shine through on the other end. And here we can see like a little bit what we have now when I place a light behind it. So now what we can do is we can just play around with this a little bit more. So here, I said it's to one, you can see that the light shines through really strongly, but it never really tends to look very good. So if we and it looks surprisingly flat, I kind of expected it to be stronger. Minus one just in case, no. Don't worry. I was just me trying something out. 0.2. 0.3 maybe. Let's look like over here. Yeah, so 0.3 looks pretty decent. And now for the color, we can go in here, and you can even make it like a really strong color to get started with. Here, let's do a bit of a yellowish color like this. And you can also increase strength. So here, let's do, like, a slight yellowish color and then simply tone it down until it does not look as strong anymore. So around these values look quite nice. Something like this over here. Yeah, you know what that can work. So we got those pieces. Now what I'm going to do is I'm going to quickly make them a little bit darker because when we play around with our subsurface, everything often becomes a little bit lighter. So you kind of want to compensate by just setting your color a bit darker again, here, see. And now you can really see the effect over here where the sun is hitting, you can see that it shines through. And here you can see that this is in shadow, and it is like quite a bit softer. My bark, I also want to once again mess around with a little bit more I don't want to have this as noticeable. I feel like that would not look very nice. I know that in our reference, it is quite bright, but in our reference, we have way more leaves, basically, because they are sitting on a wall, which kind of hides it. So I'm just going to kind of, like, play around with this stuff and set my roughness 0.8. Let's set it, like, a little bit duller. And I think that is looking pretty good. I think we got a pretty solid material right now for our foliage, just like an easy material doesn't need to be too difficult. But I quite like that. Let's also go into, like, our preview map. Here in our preview map, it is also pretty interesting. What I'm going to do just a close of this chapter because this was just a balancing chapter. I'm going to make my light a little bit more orange and maybe also make it a little bit stronger over here to like six or seven. And what I'm going to do is I'm going to let's see, skylight. I kind of want to do I have some HDRIs? HRIs are basically just like some cube maps over here. I don't know if I used one for the very beginning. N. Well, it's not that important. It would have just been nice. What I can do is I can go to create visual effects and add a post process volume. And in here, I can just do, like, a bunch of stuff like playing grounds with my Bloom amount, which in this case, doesn't do much. Setting my exposure. I like to always set my exposure to zero by zero. And by the way, in order to see the effect, we do need to go all the way down to our post process volume settings and turn it on. You can see that this is very bright, but then if you play around with your exposure, here, see, we can set this to -20, that's -15. There we go. See? And then we can just mess around with our bloom a little bit like this. And we can also do some color grading, which is nice. So here's some vignetting on top of it. Let's go down to the Misc, and then for our color grading, maybe I can actually use my color grading that I used in the tunnel scene just for the fun of it. It does look interesting in, like, a scene like this. Be this is the colour green that I use for my tunnel scene. See the difference? So I pushed the green a little bit more, and that's why over here, it looks a little bit different. Let's set this 2.6 over here. And what I'm also going to do is, let's go ahead and go into our global Gamma. Gives a little bit of a yellowish tint in here. And then what I also want to do I want to go into my shadows and my gamma, and I want to give this a little bit of a bluish tint over here. I could have just copied over my post effects, by the way, from my other scene, but sometimes it's fun to just mess around with these things. And in my lumen, I'm just going to set my lumen quality of my reflections and my GI nicer to. There we go. Okay, so that's like a nice preview scene for us to get started with. So here you can also see it in action where oh, sorry, let's set our Pivot point to be world oriented. Yeah, I can play around to this a little bit more, and then you can also see how it would look if you, for example, repeat it. But don't forget often, you would not always just repeat it like this. Sometimes you would just move it and intersect it a little bit, and then maybe, move it down a bit more, just that from a distance, it will look totally fine. So this is quite a nice one to have a generic piece. And what we're going to do in the next chapter is we are going to create another generic piece on top of this. And then what I want to do is I want to show you how to actually create some unique specific pieces, so that are really designed specifically for your environment. But as you can see, this is a pretty solid start already. I'm going to have these, and I'm going to do one last thing. I'm going to create a quick rectangular light over here. I'm going to rotate it, ta ta, I'm going to set my source width and height and maybe my barn door angle, also a little bit lower set my color to be like a nice orange color, and maybe add like a little bit of an increase in my light. And I don't know. This often just gives me a little bit of shadow response. And also just in general, it will give me some better lighting in this specific effect. Oh, and set it to movable. Let's not forget that. Here, let's set it to, like, a small rotation. I like this and maybe let's tone it down a little bit more to 12. And now what I can also see is I can also play around with my roughness response. So that's the last thing. I know I will say that is the last thing very often in these kind of tutorials because it is just a bunch of balancing to get it perfect. Sometimes I literally play with this for like an hour or two just to get it absolutely perfect, but I cannot do that right now. So 0.4 it does have something when it is a little bit shiny. 0.5, maybe. 0.52. Let's just do 0.5. 0.5 should be fine. There we go. So that looks quite interesting. It has a little bit of a shine to it, which I quite like. Perfect. Okay, let's go ahead and save our scene and continue to the next chapter. 9. 08 Creating Generic Ivy Variations: Okay, so we now have our first IV variation done. So now the difficult part is basically over. So we got some really nice looking IV, as you can see over here. So what we're going to do now is we are going to create another generic variation, and then I will show you how to create unique variation. So that's the really nice thing about speed tree. You can actually randomize. So for your generic variations, it is super easy. One thing I do need to keep in mind is that, yes, we can randomize, but this one over here, the big branches that you can see, these, if you randomize them, they will once again not be at the front site and they will just kind of go all over the place. So I can actually show you here. Let me just save my scene. And basically, in the randomizer, you can go to, for example, big. And then if you go ahead and I believe that you actually need to go in A in order to find this 1 second. Let me just move this. And if I scroll down, where are you? Ah, here you are. So here you have your randomized seat, so you can randomize the generation forces, spline, all that stuff. So let's say that you would randomize the generation. As soon as I click that, it should, as you can see, randomize it, but it doesn't really work because, of course, now it's trying to randomize in all the Wong locations. So that's basically what I want to show you. Now, let me just quickly close. No, I do not want to save and open it again. Here we go. So that we are back to normal. But this doesn't mean that we can just go ahead and we can do some manual editing for these and then we can randomize the rest. Let's go for like a Schocher one, I think. So this is quite a long one. So if we just go ahead and we set this to node up here. Actually, you know what? Let's hide this stuff over here because else it becomes a little bit overkill. Okay, so let's see. So we click on Node Let's make this a little bit shorter. So let's make this one shorter and this one. Where is my start angle over here? What if we make this one like super shorter than this one a little bit longer, or we will leave it a little bit longer. That might look interesting. Yeah, let's give this a little start angle and also make it shorter. And I kind of wanted to see if I can move this one. Yes, I can. Okay, so let's see something like this. So we have this one over here. Now if we press H to unhide D, so these bits, yeah, it looks quite a bit shorter. Now if we just go ahead and go to leaves and these ones over here, there we go. Oh, and let's unhide the big ones. Yeah, you know what? That looks a little bit That looks quite nice. If I go ahead and have a look, I think that will look different enough for us to have another variation. So here you can see how quick it is to just add another variation to this. So I'm quite happy with this. So let's just go ahead and let's do a file and a saves. And simply call this IV generic 02. And just like this, you can make as many variations as you want, pretty much. So, because we are reusing the same textures and everything, there isn't actually any the only expense that you would pay for is that you have multiple different models that need to load in, but that's pretty much it. And that's not a huge expense unless you make a very large level. But anyway, let's go ahead and export this. IV generic 02, save it should still have all of our export settings, yes, so we can just press Okay. And now if we go into Maya, we have this one, which we can I just need to re art my selected object. There we go. We can hide it. And now file import. You know what I'm going to clean this up a little bit. Because that's a little bit too overwhelming from Spettr. Um, let's see. These two, I believe that I actually imported. So I'm going to go ahead and I'm just going to get rid of these texture maps, which it always automatically exports, but I don't actually need them. There we go. So IV generic CO two, import. Hello. Oh, it has the same name, so it replaced. That's Aquard. Let's just quickly open scene. Let's just reopen it. So what I did is because it has the same name as this model, it replaces model. Maya tends to do that sometimes. So let's go ahead and go in here, IV generic Sire one underscore A, so that now it should not override it. So now if I go ahead and just right click assign the selected object and hide it, now it should not be overwritten. So if I go in here, really, it's still overt. No, wait, it does not. Okay, this is a very interesting bug back I don't know what it is, but this is super, super analogical. So let me just quickly, let's restart and let's see exactly what's going on. So I think what is happening is that we are changing this name, but we should change the LLD zero. It looks like it is grouped right now. So let's click on the parent over here. Go to edit and do an ungroup. And then this one we can basically go ahead and delete. And then this one we just need to do like a double click and call it Ivy generic underscore 01, okay? So now it should be its own individual model. Here, let me just quickly S. Oh, wait. It's probably grouping because of our layer, but this should still be fine. So if we now go at import, IV generic CO two, there we go. Now, that seems to work. So this one I'm going to assye to my layer over here. And now the second one, there we go, see. So now we have the second one. That was a little bit strange, but okay. So let's go ahead and do the same thing, add it. Ungroup, I did not realize that it groups these things. Ivy underscore, generic underscore 02. And then if I just go ahead and I rotated 90 degrees, I turn on my old ivy that I can kind of scale this down and make it roughly the same scaling. And now I can turn off the layer again. So we got that one also done over here. That's fine. Maybe like quickly reset your PIV point. So that should be fine. So if I now create a new layer and call this IV un score 02. Yeah, let's do that. Let's just call it IV un score 01 and 02, that's easier. And assign my object. Okay, perfect. So now that is working. So we got that done. I believe that we probably still need to change our UVs in some way. I'm not completely sure, but that's what I feel like, so let's go ahead and go up over here to it looks like that we lost our image over here, which is, Oh, wait. We lost it because I removed it. That's why I lost it. That is no problem. Like, I can go ahead and I can just apply it. All I need to do is I just need to quickly select these pieces. Oops. Okay, so the bark is still here, but this one we lost. So just select these pieces hold shift, and then deselect all of this stuff. Come on. There we go. Okay. And now what I need to do is I'm just going to quickly assign favorite material. I'm just going to quickly assign a new material to this. And here amber two. And then if we go into our color, you can click on this button over here and then go to File. And this way, you can basically apply a color. So I can go in here. I just need to quickly navigate. So I wasn't thinking about that when I exported my mesh because, of course, it exports with the texture, so it's referencing that texture. But if I do this way, I can still go ahead and go to my IV over here, see? And then I can still apply it like normal. Although you know what? I'm going to actually apply probably my Alpha. I think that's a little bit easier to see. So we got that one done, so that should be fine. And so this one is bark. Yeah, there should be bark still. I hope I hope that I did not mess anything up, but we'll see soon enough. And then just these like these ones. And now Uv took it, I can go ahead and I can flip over here and then move them into the correct position like this. See, the UVs are a little bit awkward that they are flipped. I'm sure that I can mess I can keep messing around with the settings, but luckily, it doesn't take too long to actually fix this when everything is in place. So that's why I'm not going to, like, try and play around with the settings too much when I can just do this. Which I don't know. It can be logical. It cannot be logical. It kind of depends. Often you only need to do this once because you don't often likely to go back and forth too much after the first one. So we can just export this IV generic CO two. And then if we go into unreal, we can go ahead and let me just go over here to assets. And then if we go exports to unreal IV generic 02. Oh, wait, before I do that, let me just quickly check. I set this to uniform scale of five. Okay. So I let you know that so that I can import this and can set this uniform scale also to five. And now we will always scale everything based upon this uniform scale. So that's fine. So let's input it. Double check if my material did not mess up. It looks like it did not, so that's good. So then what I can do is I can just go ahead and I can assign our correct material. So we have IV generic 01, and we have IV bar over here. So save that and have a look. Yeah. It's looking good. That is feeling surprisingly thin, all of a sudden. Don't know why, but okay. Anyway, if that is bad, then we can always just make it ticker. Now, the nice thing is inside of unreal is that we can simply duplicate, for example, this one, and then we can go into assets and just click and drag this onto your static mesh to replace it. And now you can see that now we have two different variations. You can imagine that if you go ahead and do, for example, this kind of stuff, that you have this one, and then you have, another one, and maybe you kind of, like, even go for, like, a double like this, then you can very quickly create walls that it does not so much look like these are just two pieces. And that's basically the power of this. You just go do this, here you see. So it just feels like it is all completely unique. You can kind of see sometimes the piece come back, but if you have two or three pieces or a three or four, this will look very good. But up close, it will look totally fine. The only thing that they do not understand is here. You can see that these ones are a lot thinner than they are over here. And I do not really like that. So what I'm going to do, it's the last thing I'm going to fix. I don't know why they randomize like that. That's really strange. Oh, by the way, you can actually also randomize this stuff. So maybe it's cool to just quickly do that. Let's save sin just in case. It's going in here, going to, and that's randomized to generation. You see? So you get randomized generation until you get something that you like. Uh, I accidentally click twice, and now it is frozen. Okay, so that seems to be a bug for speed 39.0 is that if you click on generation two times in a row, it crashes. But that's no problem because we saved. So that's why I'm doing that. Let's go ahead and go in here to one randomization, like that. Okay? So that's now even more different. That's great. And now, if I go into my meshes over here, because they are very thin for some reason, we were going to go down to, I believe, our radio scale. A, wait, let me make this a bit bigger because else doesn't work. Mesh radio scale. So these are like a little bit ticker. Well, now they do look fine. Yeah, it's strange. Okay, so let's just leave it somewhere in this range. If I have a look at this, I do feel like there's quite a bit of empty space. So maybe I can do or play around a little bit more like my generation. Here, see, now there's less empty space. So that's what I quite like. So I'm just going to go ahead and I'm going to save this, and now I'm going to do one more export game. Hopefully, last one. Over here. Yes, I want to export it. And I'm just going to go ahead and I'm going to set this up. Oh, wait, here. One a bit? W a bet is one? I never saw it. Sorry about that. So one of bet that this probably fixes the UVs. Honestly, I can't believe that It's because like I see these settings, but I don't always read them because I see them so often. So let me just quickly delete or actually, nah, maybe not deletes. Let's go file. Import. Let's import our IV generic 02 over here, and then it will most likely, it will have replaced Um, okay, I should have deleted this one because now it's just getting confusing, but this is the one that we need. So let's just rotate this IV, nscoreGeneric, un score 02. And I'm just curious. Here see? Okay, so that fix it. So when you go into export settings, just do not press the flip the flip texture coordinate stuff. So that's a little bit awkward. It took me so long to find that. But yeah, it's not that big loss of a loss of time, to be honest. So it might also be nice to just know how to fix problems if you come across them, even though this was a problem that had an easier fix. But anyway, so we have this one, so we can just go ahead and reexpot this again, like this. And then all we need to do is we need to go into reel, right click reimport. Yes, reset the leaves to FBX. That is one that we need to do. But then all we need to do in here is we just need to quickly apply our leaves to the other variations. And later on we can just have a few different color variations. So we now have this stuff over here. And as you can see, that is working already, like a lot better. Yeah, so now it is a lot more visible to see all of these extra branches. Which looks fine. Yeah, I might not really like this specific one over here. So if you ever have one that you think, like, no, that is too obvious, how it is here, I think it is this one. Like you say, like, no, that is too obvious. You can always just try and, like, move something in front of it like this to kind of, like, hide those really specific ends. So that is one way that you can just quickly work with things. And for example, for these ones here, you can also just press the lead if you want. I do like, kind of, like, stuff like that. And when you then export it again. So that's fair if you want to do very specific. If you're making this for a game, I would say, like, yes, you want to, of course, be very specific because in the game, you can run around and all that stuff, and you can really look at it up close. But for tutorial, I'm, of course, not going to spend a huge amount of time. Only thing I'm going to do is remove those little top bits, also, because they do not have a branch, and they just feel a bit of There we go. And let's also remove this one. Okay. Let should do the twig. Let's go at the next bot. Real import. Okay, perfect. So now that we have done this stuff, yes, I'm going to go over the unique variation in the next chapter, but we still have a little bit of time left in this one. So let's just duplicate the IV generic and just call it IV generic 02, and maybe duplicate it again and call it 03. So if I have my IV, 01 over here, just going to drag it down, it would be cool if I quickly grab some of these materials. So here we have 02 and then 03 again. And if I then open them and let's also strike them over here. What we can hopefully do is if we go into our view and just press G over here to hide our selections and everything, I should be able to go in here and maybe like in my color, slightly change the color of some of these. You see, I can make these a little bit lighter over here. And that's what just like that extra little bit of variation. And these I can make a slightly lighter green color over here. And you can see that very quickly. You see difference between this and this. It is just like that extra little bit. These ones might be a little bit too green, or it's really annoying that it does not remember my window position. That's something that I always am a little bit bothered about. That I just had the exact same window here, but it still cannot remember. Yeah, let's tone that down a little bit. But yeah, basically, we can just play around with this until we get it to our liking. And now we can just also go into generic 02, and I'm just going to quickly do it like this because I'm not in the mood to move my window scan. Here 02 and then click on 03. Like that. There we go. And now we have a bunch of different extra variations also. So that's extra good. Stone down my light and maybe, like, duplicate it over here. There we go just so that we have some nice lighting. Okay, perfect. So we got those done. In our next chapter, what we will do is we will go ahead and we will move to our actual tunnel scene over here. And I want to basically show you. Yeah, that's looking nice. I want to basically show you how to create unique ivy, for example, ivy that is like hanging all the way over here and stuff like that. So ivy that is specifically made for a part of your scene. And that's what we will be covering in our next chapter. And after that's done, we will just go ahead and we will start doing placement. 10. 09 Creating Our Unique Ivy: Okay, so what we're going to do in this chapter is we are going to go ahead and go over on how to create very unique looking ivy that is specifically based on your level. For example, having ivy grow over here. That's the one that we will be doing. So this is great if you are making something very specific and you just need to have the ivy growing in, like, very specific ways. For example, also on the car would be a great one to have it grow over here. Now, this isn't too difficult to do. It's just a little bit of a workaround, but we can still use the Ivy that we already created. So first of all, you would need your model. Now, I assume that often you already have your model just sitting in May or whatever tree modeling program you have because you made it yourself. However, if this is not the case, you can go ahead and go, for example, over here, inside of UnwelEngine. And if you just select your model, and I'm just going to go ahead and I'm going to actually look it up in the explorer over here. And then all I'm going to is right click Asset Actions and Export. And I'm going to go ahead and I'm going to export this. Easy foliage. Oops, swung folder. And if we then go ahead and go to Export from Unreal and just call this, sealing hole, A, it should be fine. So let's just press Save. And yeah, it's all good. Okay. So we got that one. Now we should be able to just right away get it into Unreal engine. I hope that it all looks correct and there isn't anything strange going on. But let's go ahead and do a file and do a saves and immediately like save this as something else just in case. I'm going to call this IV score Unique underscore 01, and I always do 01 in case I have another variation I want to make later on because I can often not make up my mind. So we have that done over here. Now we want to go ahead and we want to go up here to collision. Art? Oh, no, sorry, that collision art. Let's do it over here. It changed a little bit since UnreelEgine eight. So file, and let's just do a normal import mesh at set, and we are going to go from Unreel sealing hole A, open it. Okay, so that has loaded in fine, it looks like. So let's see how it goes. Let's now go to collision of forces. Oh, yeah, forces, geometry, sealing hole A. Okay. You know what? I'm just going to go ahead and I'm going to temporarily hide all of this stuff over here. So we got this one and it's really, really large. So let's just go ahead and fix that first. Now, if we go ahead and just go down here, we have our force. We have our geometry. There used to be like a scaling here. But I can remember like, Oh, yeah, here, transform. There we go. Here, transform. That's the one I meant. So let's do 0.1 in our uniform scaling. That should scale it down on all sides. And I just want to, okay, I guess I do need to actually have a look. Zero point, I need to go even lower because I want to kind of, like, have it fit along this piece. So let's do 0.01. Is that too much? 0.02. 0.02 should be fine. Now, one thing I am worried about is that we have these Alphas over here. So to be very honest, I think that this mesh, specifically, we just want to go into Maya and remove these alphas because these alphas, they are dt over here. That's not actual geometry. This is just a plane. However, that means that inside of speed try, it just read as a normal plane. We can already place this into position. That is no problem. So we got this one. I'm going to go ahead and set my angle to 90 over here. So that's also good so that we have this. And then you can kind of place in place. And for us, it works almost like the cube. So we got this stuff over here. It's just like it's a little bit more fiddly to get everything working. So I'm going to go inside of Maya, save my scene, and it's just create a quick new scene. And I'm just going to go ahead and I'm going to go file import, and I'm going to import hoops, our ceiling over here. And just leave it the same scale that it is before. All I want to do is I just want to go in here and quickly double click and just delete around the area that I want to actually have my foliage, which is just this area. I'm not going to delete it everywhere, but I want to delete anything that I do not like, like, for example, these planes. And to be honest, I'm also going to delete these pieces because sometimes the collision works a little bit funky on like, really thin pieces like this. So if I do this, at least they will not be as thin. And let's see, just in case I'm also going to, like, remove them over here, that's fine, and maybe also remove this one. There we go. That should give us more than enough space. And if we then overwide it, we can just reload it inside of unreal. So we can just form real sealing hole over here. And if I go in here, I should be able to simply press the reload button on my meshes. There we go. So that fixes that. Next stop, just add like a nice gray material over here, and now we can get started. Okay, so what we are going to do for this is we are basically going to hide everything and start with the very base, which is going to be a trunk. And you probably guessed it. So this trunk, we just want to go ahead and press W, and we want to move it over here. Um, and then you can also choose the scaling and everything. So yeah, I think something like this would be nice. So let's see. It falls off. I want to have it let's see that our main shot our main fold shot will be something like this over here. So it will fall off on this side. On this side and in between here. That's where I want to fall off. So make a plan of how you want this to look. So that should be fine. Once you've done that, you can go ahead and you can go to the second one, so you can press nhight on this one. And what we're going to do is we are going to basically get rid of our cube collision over here. And instead, we are going to go for our ceiling hole A collision over here. So we got those. Then what we can also do is we can also just like, first of all, like, make them not as strong. To be honest, the ceiling hole collision, we might not even need it. We might just need a gravity or like a direction, to be honest. Here I do ceiling hole? Oh, no, no, sorry, we do need it, because the direction is too strong. So without a collision, it does not know that it cannot go through it. In that case, here, let's do a little bit of both. Let's do our ceiling hole collision at 0.2, and then we will have our direction at zero point yeah, I think, actually, that was fine. 0.25. And now what we can do is we can just go ahead and once again, click on them, go to notes. And let's say, here, let's make this one like a bit longer. I just want to make all of these longer because I want to have them, kind of hanging out. It's an interesting start angle. I'll see if I can, like, improve how they behave because right now they are sticking out a little bit too far. Whoa, God, I didn't mean to do that. Just meant to push it like this. Here, let's do this one. This one, actually, let's make this a bit here, a bit longer. Oh, that's quite nice. Let's do a start angle. So we are going to have this one, hanging over here. And then it is quite nice that we still already have a few branches just sitting in here. Like that. So let's see, how far out do I want to have this? Just go to, like, one of my camera angles so that I can see. Okay, so that's really low. So if we look at our reference, it was actually quite a bit higher or quite a bit longer than I wanted to do. So let's go ahead and make these actually a lot longer over here. With our length. This one, I don't know why this one is giving me such a strange looking. You can also, by the way, you can, like, set the settings customly, I believe, on top of everything whenever we have our notes over here. We'll see, we can do size of parent and stuff like that. Start role. Maybe I can No, I cannot alignment. Also not. It's too bad that I cannot I do not think we can do it with forces. No, here. So that's too bad. I hope that they will add that in the future, that you can actually have the forces, like the intensity of the forces based upon your branch. But for now, I just kind of need to play around with this, because I want to have this one like hanging. But right now I don't like that what it's doing right now. So it's just kind of like giving me this really strage Like, these are all hanging, but this one, it just isn't budging for some reason. And I do not really like that because here, I can roll it, but it does not really seem to work exactly the way that I want. That's a difficult one, to be honest. Yes, I can just remove it. So I guess that's something that I can do. I can just delete and then just place this one into place and just make this one longer because this one does work. I don't know why that one specifically is being so annoying, but but okay, so we have these pieces over here. That's fine. Now, as you can see, if we now go ahead and go back to generator, that's the thing with our forces. So we have a force over here, but because we have the ceiling hole, they have the urge to tie and curl back up on the ceiling. That's why we need to keep it low. But if we then maybe also just play around with our direction a little bit more, we can have them hang a little bit longer like this. And honestly, once you've done that, you can just unhide this one, and you can see Okay, that's a little bit crazy. Direction. And we had it at planar. Instead of planar, I want to just have the direction and maybe have the ceiling hole over here and set it to be like a lower version. Okay, so in our direction, I kind of, that's a little bit annoying that it's giving me these bows. I don't like them. Because that's not how Ivy would grow. So Ivy would not really have these bows over here. Now, there is another force that I can sometimes try. You go to forces art and like a magnet. And basically, with this one, yeah, it will just be attracted to the magnet, which can sometimes be a little bit stronger here. So if I do that, it gets attracted to the magnet, but Damn, it doesn't look like it is working this time. Let's have a look. So yes, you can do it by hands. Like you can manually get them to go like this. But once again, I do not like that. I want to minimize the amount of time I need to work on this. So, what I'm going to do is I'm just going to go ahead and I'm going to have a look off camera because I want to make sure that I don't mess around with this for too long because there are so many settings. Okay, so I guess the easiest way to do this to get it like a fairly decent area is to go to spine and then set the start angle to be a little bit lower, so that it really flows off like this. And then you can also play around with your gravity like a little bit over here just to have it down. And I feel like that is probably the best way for us to go about this. Oh, and we can probably, like, increase it. Now, over here there are still a few that are bent, but in order to fade this out, we are going to have basically a generic ivy behind this to basically hide the fact that over here, all of these pieces are sitting like this. We are going to hide that using generic ivs. Now, what I can do is I can go to generate and maybe some first a little bit higher over here. That seems to be a bit better. But there we go. That looks pretty decent, I think, let's go ahead and unhide our meshes. Okay. Yes, that can work. That can work. They are a little bit thick, however, so let's set the radio scale a bit thinner. And now comes the big one, our leaves. Let's see how they behave. So they definitely work. That's fine. I'm going to go ahead and for these ones, I'm going to first of all, make the size a little bit less because it's a little bit too large for my taste. So let's set the size to maybe like 0.2 inch over here, yes, that's better. Let's see. So for our directions, what do we have right now in our forces? We have a planar, which I want to turn off, so the planar unfortunate doesn't work. Okay, so without planar, yes, that looks a lot worse, but that's probably because of our direction, isn't it? Yeah, it's because of our direction. So oh, that that is a bit tricky. Let's see if our ceiling hole can do something because we are losing. The reason that we are losing so many is because of the rotations, see? So because they are planes, that's how we seem that's why it feels like we are losing a lot of them. Let's turn this off. So if we do planar, planar surprisingly does make things look good, but that's interesting because the planar is sitting over here. So I guess that it just happens to be a lucky accident that it reflects in a decent way. Let's for now just turn it off, and then let's see if we can maybe work around with our orientation over here. To see if we can maybe play out like our facing to get something that looks a little bit interesting, but still have it. So it's really hard sometimes to properly see which direction we are going. Let's see, the up and the right. Oh, yeah, here, the right seems to be quite well. If we set this to the minus, so that will move things down quite a bit, that's pretty good. And then we have the out, which also seems to move things down. That's also pretty good. So, down here, I like it. Like all the stuff that we have here, I like. I just do not like the top. So I'm just having a t for the top that maybe we will just, like, have another ivy plant sitting on top of this. But it would be great if we can just do, like, a little bit of just something. But that's tricky. This one is trickier than you might think to get it specifically in these areas. It just so happens that actually, honestly, even now planar also doesn't do much anymore. I think the planar just happened to rotate them in a favorable position. And what I also think is that a lot of them are hidden. Here, if I go in here, like a lot of them probably hidden. Now, we can try to have a ceiling hole turned on and then maybe like quite a low level in the hope not that it grows towards the ceiling, but that it maybe just avoids the ceiling like this. But, yeah, that's the direction. Yeah, you know what? I think this should be fine. I think I'm going to leave it as this. The only thing I want to do is I want to go ahead and I want to temporarily hide these pieces. Then in our big, I want to just go ahead and go to notes and I want to make this one over here a bit longer. That might be a little bit overkill. Let's do a little bit less over here in the hope that it gets me here. I think that will look a bit nicer if it's really hangs down like that. But as you can see here. You get the point. Oh, sorry, there's a notification that is causing my back count to see. There we go. So, you can see the point. That is looking really cool and you get all of this unique stuff, and then if your height, your branch over here and give the second to reload. Excuse me. Collision. Is it broken? I think. Okay. Yes. Does this work? Okay, as I said, speed 39 has come out literally two days ago. So it might be that the version is not the most stable version ever yet. But anyway, this is looking good. I like this. Actually, yeah, it's looking really cool. So I'm going to go ahead and I'm going to save this now. Over here. And now we are going to go ahead and go on with the export. Now, the export, that one is going to be a bit interesting because, of course, our scaling is a little bit uneven when it comes to very specific works. But for now, what you want to do is you want to make sure that you hide your collision because ZD exports your collision, and you don't want that. So you hide your collision, so all that we have left is this piece, and then we can go ahead and we can do the normal export to gain. From Speed tree, yes, IV, unique 01. That's also fine, save. Over here, yeah, I'm fine with the scaling and everything because this is what we will adjust inside of Maya. So yeah, we kind of just need to mess around with it a little bit inside of unreal. But the nice thing about this is because this unique one, you kind of only need to do the scaling once, and then you're done with it. So we have this exported, and now if we go ahead and just reopen up our original foliage setup scene. No, I don't need to save this over here. That is fine. So we can add this one over here. Let's go File Import. From SpitrivUniqu, raanimport. And I'm going to do this in a very basic way. I'm going to do the typical whole J to rotate. Oh, here, see. And it's also like rotated in an interesting position. But that's all, no problem. So we just want to go ahead and we want to scale this down and maybe use this as like a scale reference once again. But the scale reference does not really matter right now. So I'm going to have my Pivot point in a location that will be the easiest for me to see if my scaling and positioning is correct. So let's say something like this, and then press the new layer and assigned select objects and call this IV underscore Unique underscore 01. IV unscore U un score 01, then, fine. The name already exists. So that should be already good. I can just go ahead and I can export or save my scene. Export selection, and we are going to export this to unreal IV nscoreUUnscore 01. There we go. And if we go in here, we can just go ahead and we can go to assets. And I'm going to navigate to unreal IV, Unique 01. Yeah, we can just do a normal import. And basically these kind of plants, yeah, you would just do like a bit of placement. The reason my engine is very slow is because it is compiling the shaders right now. So if we just quickly open this up so that I can set it up right away. So let's go ahead and find our materials. Let's see here, yeah. Okay. So we have a ivy bar that's this one. And for the rest, it's like generic IV one. Two, three, and let's do one. Again, you can, of course, add more. But okay, so that is now set up, so that's done. Okay, now comes the tricky part, the scaling. So over here, we want to go ahead and just import our unique ivy. Let's turn on snap rotation and rotate it exactly 90 degrees because that seems to be the most logical place. And let's see. Oh, wait. Also go down here because we have decals on here, here, the moss decals. So we just need to scroll down t received decals, turn off. Okay. It's move this up a little bit, and now it is just a matter of basically scaling. So if I have a look, where are my forces? There you are. As soon as you go to forces and you click on it, it will show. So let's use this one as like a guidance to where the scale needs to be. And of course, where the position needs to be. So I think we need to scale this up a little bit more. And this really needs to be in the center over here. And then we just need to kind of, like, probably push it back a little bit or down S. No, we don't want to push it back. We kind of want to place it over here, and it doesn't need to be perfect, of course, but I still want to try and make it so that we do not have, everything floating. I think, something like that. Yeah, that looks really. Yeah, that actually looks quite cool. And you also have the subsurface scattering over here, which is nice, so you can see, through them. And if you would have a sun lens flare, you get, like, the typical gamey look where you have flare sitting through it. And, of course, yes, we have the metal in here, but that's no problem because that intersecting, yeah, you don't really notice it. So if we have this, if I would now go in and throw on a generic one's turn on my snap rotation. And let's move it over here. You can see if I turn off my rotation, let's set my rotation to be based upon my model. But here you can see that we can very easily hide the fact that we have those pieces over there, just by adding one extra piece on top of this and just like nicely placing it here. Once again, just turn off received decals. There we go. So that from a distance, you will never, ever be able to see it. Even if we go a little bit higher like this, it will just feel natural. Of course, if you go very high, logically speaking, you would then need to, like, art probably like another one over here, and then like another one to have it actually come from, like, the outside. That's if you would go like this high or something like that, then you would have something like that. But that would take a lot of time. So we are just going to keep our camera angle a little bit lower so that you don't notice. But I will like that. That is looking very cool. So we now got these pieces. In the next chapter, what we will do is it's going to be a bit like a bonus chapter. So that chapter, we are going to just go over on placing some ivy here to make it look nice and realistic and just showing you like, easy ways to place everything. Also place some ivy down there. And then what I want to show you as, like, a quick extra is I want to show you how to create some ivy root decals that you can use on, for example, walls, but that you can also use, like in these areas to have the roots running everywhere and stuff like that. So that would be very cool. So I'm really happy about this. And to be honest, I think I actually like it more than the original from my original scene. Although, yes, it feels a little bit more stylized, but it does feel, it just looks nice. So let's go ahead and continue with this in our next chapter, and don't forget to save your unreal engine scene. 11. 10 Placing Our Ivy: Okay, so what I want to do in this chapter is I want to get started by just placing all of our foliage around here just to get a little bit more like this effect that we can see over here. So as you can see here, it just has some nice hanging foliage on both sides and also like a little bit here in the back. So that's what I first want to do. Then I want to go ahead and create like some roots, like you can see over here. But hopefully we can improve our roots a little bit better. And yeah, just in general, finalizing the ivy chapters, and then we will continue to all of the grass chapters. So let's go ahead and just continue. I'm going to go ahead and so we have these ones over here. That's fine. Over here, I want to probably grab this one and place it roughly over here. It does not matter too much that it is, like, floating a little bit in my case, because I will be previewing it from this side. So I'm mostly focused on how it looks from this area and not how it looks from the top. But of course, if you want to avoid the floating, you can once again grab, for example, one of these ivy bits and do something like this to kind of hide it a little bit better. You can even if you want, rotate it a bit to fake it even more that there's just a little gap in there. But anyway, so we got those ones, and I'm just going to place it over here. Maybe like rotate it a little bit like this. Let's see. Let's move it a bit more like here. There we go. And then we have this one, that's fine. So that's probably it for this one. Let's see if I delete this one, yeah. Okay. So definitely want to keep this one in here. So we got this stuff. Let's also see what it looks like if I, for example, replace this version with our IV generic 02. Okay, so we want to go for probably like 03 like that. That's totally fine. I just want to try stuff out before I decide if I want to leave them. Now, I'm going to probably have some more ivy. Here, let's do a 02 over here. Yeah, let's try and place it nicely down here. And then maybe if we also do like a 03 over here, sorry, 01 over here. So we move this one and nicely place it around here. Let's see how that looks. And I keep going back to my camera angle just to make sure that everything looks a little bit logical in those areas. So that is looking pretty good. I quite like that. Now, let's go ahead and let's go on to the other side where we can see a little bit on this area, and then we have a bit more here. I can remember my original scene that I made a few more variations. So we are currently, working with less variation, but that should not be that big of a deal. Wait, let me just turn off my Gotray over here. There we go. So we got this one, that's totally fine. I'm going to probably, I don't know. I guess that I don't need to have them, so much higher. So I'm going to have one over here, and then I'm going to place another one. Probably like over here. And then maybe let's place like one more, but this one is going to be like a generic zero, two down here. And now, if you feel adventurous, you can actually also use your unique version on multiple locations. So what we can twice, we can twe the unique version and, like, throw it a little bit in here and just hope that it is clipping just in a way that you cannot see like any of those really unique pieces because they will be hidden inside of other meshes. And it is something that very often gets done in Levart so we have, something like this. And now over here, you don't really notice that it is the same version that it is clipping, but it is definitely there. If I would press height, see? So that is actually quite a big difference. So that's another way that you can just quickly, like, you know, maybe, like, scale it up a bit and just clip some stuff in and just kind of, like, be careful that it is not sticking through the ceiling too much. A tiny bit like this, if you cannot see it, is fine, but else just move it up a little bit. But it all depends on, like, how you are making your level. As I said before, if you are making a game level, then you want to go at and you want to be very precise. But if you're just making like an arch showcase that's like from specific angles, then you can cheat quite a bit more. I'm going to have another ivy plant probably over here, and I'm going to kind of just have it laying. Actually, you know what? It might be nice to catch some shadows by having it hovering a little bit like this. So that way you get, like, the shadows below it, and sometimes that does look quite nice. And you can sometimes see me switching my pivot boat to object over here. So that. And if I then combine this with maybe like another version over here, like this. And then if you want, you can even combine it more with maybe like an IV 02, just to break it up and place it like around here. There we go. So that is a little bit covered. And then what we can also do is we can also, for example, grab another IV too. Maybe like rotate it's a little bit. Like this. And what you can see now is that we have decals intersecting. So whenever we have that, we just want to quickly go down and turn off the received decals. So let's do the same over here. Turn off received decals, just in case this one over here also turn it off. There we go. So now you can see that it has this nice little bed of ivy, basically. And over here once we have some grass. It's all kind of like tie together. As soon as we also have some grass and everything, it will just nicely tie in together. So we got some stuff over here, so that's looking pretty much acud to what I want. Now, what you can also see you can see that over here, like, they are a lot lighter, and I think that this is just like the subsurface scattering. We can over here, if we go from a distance view, we can go into our material and just quickly check like our ivy generic over here and if I just make the smaller because it keeps scaling it up, I can see if I can maybe let's say if I do one, here or see. If I do probably 0.4, I am able to give it a bit more. Here's 0.4. 0.4, just to give it a little bit more shine. And then what you can also do is you can do the same thing that we did in our test level, where we basically just use some extra lighting to basically increase the amount. But it is looking pretty nice. I'm going to go ahead and I'm going to probably grab one of these and just make it a little bit nicer on the stones also because it would not really make sense for the ivy to just be hanging there. It would also like grow on the stones a little bit. Now, technically, what you would have is you would have lots of roots here and maybe, like, less ivy on these areas or even, like, still dense ivy. So that's why we are also going to create some decails later on. Still, I just want to nicely have it flowing over, as you can see over here and actually also over here. So if we are doing this, we can just as well do it right, even though you guys will not have this level, but I want to explain to you that creating foliage is not just about making the foliage and making it look the same as in real life. But it also comes with smart placement to make sure that the placement is logical and that it just in general, looks nice and a little bit like the way that foliage grows. So over here, I can once again, cover this up with some overgrown foliage or over here because this is like an abandoned tunnel, this foliage had a lot of time to grow very large, like years and years, I would say. So yeah, seeing that, actually, no, it has, like, a little bit sticking out over here, which is not too good. So let's just rotate this back and maybe then push it back in a little bit more over here so that it's not sticking out as much. And then I keep going back to my camera angle over here and pressing G to basically height everything. And also, what I can do is yeah, your screen percentage, normally, the default is 100, but then it doesn't look as crisp. So if you want, you can quickly set it to 200 to really get, like, a nice sharp effect. So yeah, that is looking pretty good. I quite like the foliage over here, so I'm quite happy with that. If I press G, I should have over here like a few different lights, and I'm just curious if I grab this light and I basically place it at the back over here to fake the backface lighting a little bit more. And then if I go in this light and I turn off my shadows, so scroll up to light and then turn off cast shadows, what you can often get is here, if you look see, you can get less darkening. If I do 0.5, you can see over here. So this is zero, and then 0.5 or maybe one even, it will just give us a little bit less darkening. So I'm going to go for 0.5. And because we turned off our shadows, the light is also a lot cheaper to render, because the shadows is what makes it often quite expensive. Next 1 second, let me make the smaller. What I want to do is I just want to go ahead and I want to quickly add some extra foliage here at the back that you can see, because that is also looking quite interesting. And then what we can do is we can go over with the grass. So here at the back, what we can do is we can pretty much grab this one, this one, and let's also just grab this one and this because why would we do all of this work again when we can just steal it. And reuse it. So over here, this is not exactly the same. So as you can see over here in my level, because it is so far away, you can see that I did not bother with actually making a proper unique piece. And that's once again, just like a timesaver. But the nice thing about this is that I am able to just, oh, my God, I am able to now nicely just, like, fake the hell out of this and just place like some random ivy that is kind of like hanging from tops over here. And maybe what I can do is I can have another one and that I actually scale it up a little bit and just have it, hanging against the side. So placement wise, it's a lot easier because from this distance, see, you barely notice anything. You just notice like a little bit of ivy just randomly floating here, and that was the goal. It's not always about making it look correct. Sometimes it's just about making sure that people understand your message that you have with your art. And my message was overgrown without needing to spend, well, I already spent like, I don't know, 100 150 hours on just creating the scene. So I didn't want to, like, spend another 50 extra hours just to make these really far distant pieces look correct. So often I even go to, like, this view, and then I simply like, move it around a little bit so that I can see what it looks like. This is looking pretty good only over here, the subsurface scattering, I don't really like in this area. I know that I have a shape over here. So maybe just here, see if I set my sauce with. I think for this one, I just need to, like, kind of move it back and maybe, like, move it up. But my shadows are a little bit funky in this area. Go over here. Okay, see here. That works better when it is a little bit darker in these areas, and that it just has the light mostly focusing on this area because it just makes it stand out a little bit more. And honestly, this one we can kind of like leave here. So I'm probably going to leave it at this. So as you can see, that was just like, a little quick overview of how to do some nice foliage placement to make it look interesting when you still have very little pieces because that's also about this uto. It's about easy foliage, but also minimising the amount of pieces that we have. Now, last thing that I'm going to do is, I'm just going to quickly go to my preview map, and I just want to quickly duplicate this cube because it would only be logical if in our preview map, we still art some of the pieces that we create, even though they are unique. So what I can do in here is I can pretty much do the same where in this case, I'm just using my preview cube to kind of like fake having a wall over here. So it doesn't need to be perfect. I just needs to showcase a little bit more of like the preview. You can, of course, if you want. Oh, no, wait, you guys cannot do that. That's why I'm doing this because you guys cannot have the same concrete as I have. But basically, I have this over here. It doesn't look very good, actually, to be honest. So what I'm going to do is I'm just going to kind of, like, fake this a little bit more. And the way that I want to do that is I want to grab this and, um, let's see, I almost feel like it's cylinder. There is a way to do this, but it's a little bit overkill to do it for this tutorial. So if you go up here, I will show you very quickly. If you go up here and you go to Oh, God, where are you? Edit plug ins. There is a plug in nul gen five, and if you type in modeling, it is called the Modeling Tools Editor mode. If you enable this and then restart your engine, you will get this button over here, and when you click on it, you will basically get modeling tools. And what I'm basically going to do with this is I'm going to just quickly grab a box and place it over here and press complete. And sorry, this is not what the tutorial is about. So it is just something see it as an extra bonus. In the next chapter, what we will do is we will create our roots because those take much longer than what we have time for. But what you can do is I can create some boxes and I can basically do like a boolean inside of unreal engine. So I can grab these boxes over here, and I'm just going to very quickly cut them out. I know that there are modeling tools like the bevels and everything, but those tools, they are a little bit buggy, so often it is easier for me to just quickly do like some bullying functions over here. So something like this, I then grab my model then what I do is I grab the model that I want to do a Boolean on and I press Boolean over here and then accept. Once again, grab my model, grab a Boolean, and then click on Boolean. Like this. And I'm basically just cutting away some shapes until I got something that looks pretty decent. And once you've done that, you can close this. Terms of materials, I would just quickly, throw on a random white material again. And then what I'm going to do is I'm just going to basically nicely close this off by having another wall over here. And I will just make this, like a nice presentation scene a little bit later on. But for now, this will do. So we just got a wall, and then if you want, you can even have another one. Over here. There you go. It's not perfect. But it does sort of work. And then if I grab, for example, one of these pieces just to make it end correctly, let's use IV Generic 01. Then you guys because this is the presentation scene that you guys will get. So that's why I want to make sure that everything is still in here. And yes, I could do this in my free time, but what's the fun of that when I can just show you in case someone is interested. If you're not interested, you can just skip. You can just go to next video. So that's the power of these kind of videos compared to live streams. And I'm just going to kind of have another one maybe sitting over here. You know what? Except for one more. That has, like, a fall off over here. See? And very quickly, you can create, interesting scene out of basic shapes. That's why I really like foliage. Although making the foliage is often to make really, really high quality foliage, is quite a pain. So, of course, this is high quality foliage, but it's not the highest quality that you can get. But in general, it does add so much to your scene. You already seen it a little bit simply by us creating, like, a tiny bit of foliage, for our tunnel scene, how much that it adds. But here we go. I don't know if I need to have the cast shadows on. Yeah, I do. There we go. See? Tata, good enough for now. So I will later on, make the scene nicer, but I just want to have a proper preview. Awesome. Next chapter, what we are going to do is we are going to work on IV roots, which are going to be a decal. So let's go ahead and continue with this in our next chapter. 12. 11 Creating Our Ivy Roots Decal: Okay, so now that we have our main ivy done, what we're going to do is we are going to go ahead and take a slight detour in a slightly different topic. So you can kind of see this as like a bonus chapter. And that's that I want to show you how to create some ivy roots specifically. So without leaves and just like a decal, because these often go hand in hand with these kind of measures. Now, this is actually quite simple. So we are going to go for some roots that are let's say that we will have them, like, growing upwards because then I can immediately also show you how to create ivy that grows in the opposite direction, basically, so that's not hanging. Now we have our IV generic 01. I'm just going to do a saves and just call this IV underscore root underscore decal underscore 01 in case you ever want to create more. Here we go. Okay, perfect. With this, we do not need a mesh, and we do not need leaves. In our spine over here, we are just going to go ahead and go to our skin and set this back to polygons over here so that they become actual branches like this. Yeah. The only thing is that they do now have. Well, yes, so they have the wood material, so we need to replace that later on. So let's unhide my trunk. Let's also go into forces and showcase our cube collision over here. And let's just quickly hide because if we do not hide it, it's really slow. And let's basically just grab our trunk and let's do 180 in the rotation. Although we probably don't even need to do 180, we can also just change our roots. But let's just go ahead and have this like the bottom over here, like this. And then we unhight these ones. And now what we are going to do is we are just going to go ahead and moving this up I think we just want to I don't think the rotation is actually going to work. I think we need to, like, Oh, what I mean is I don't think we can just rotate here, see, we cannot just rotate this piece, so we need to do the rotation for these pieces customly. So let's just move this over here and I'll show you. Well, actually, I don't need to really show you. It's very easy. We are just going to go ahead and set probably the start angle. I think that's the easiest one. So over here we have our start, no. This one, also no. So I guess this is going to be a lot more Awkward than I thought. Let's go ahead and let's do this a little bit different. So what we can, of course, do is we can just go ahead and, like, here, click on this little dot and just delete it, and then just delete these branches. Yes, always, yes. Okay. And then just re add them to add some new branches over here, and then just go into your generation and just quickly set the mode to proportional, probably, so that we are just creating a few new ones. So for these ones, we are actually going to go for, like, way more branches because that's what I want for this specific decal, because we want to go for where are you? Here we are. We want to go ahead and we want to get something that's similar to what you can see behind here. So just like really a lot of stuff all winkly and all that kind of stuff. So let's see if we get something close to that. It will not look exactly the same, but it should be fine. So let's just go ahead and have a bunch over here of roots. Let's set our first down to zero, and our last down to one. Next, what we want to do is we want to go ahead and we want to set our let's go to our spline. Let's set our length. Let's just randomly do something like this that the length basically becomes a little bit random over here. Next, we want to go ahead and we want to set the orientation. I think we want to set the oritation little bit higher. Yeah, for the rolling, it doesn't really matter because we have them on all sides. You can try and do alignment, but that often also does not really do much. Anyway, let's go ahead and let's go in our shape. No, not shape segments. Where are you? I cannot find you. Um I'm looking, of course, for the thickness, so that's the length. So where is my thickness? I thought this was always in shape. I'm going to find it in here. If we just scroll this up a little bit. So the segments is basically your actual geometry. So even though it says radius in segments, that's not the one that you want. So we have a length orientation, shape, Oh, am I so blind? I must be Oh, here we go. Skin. H Okay. Wow. I don't know how I messed that up. Anyway, I'm going to make them a lot thinner like this, and now we are really just going to have them like forcing them on here. So let's get started by yes, making them a lot thinner, something around 0.2. And then what I'm going to do is I'm just going to go ahead and probably set my length, my general length to be a little bit bigger. And now if we go into our forces, we are basically going to do a few things. So first of all, we want to have the plane. And I don't know the cube. I think we just want to go ahead and have planar over here and sets like really high to like 50. So we are really pushing this out over here to the planar. I'm going to set my start angle even stronger over here. There we go. So we got that one. Now, we don't need the direction for this, but I just want to see if it will work for us to have a magnet, else, we will just cut out all of these pieces, but it would be nice if I can have even more branches thanks to the magnet. So we can go into our branches, forces, turn on the magnet and Ah, that, it does not do exactly what I was hoping. Like, it does pushes them through. So what you can do is at this point, you would be able to, for example, grab this piece. And, like, throw it down here. It can just be straight. Honestly, we don't even need this cube here, I can just be straight, but it does not exactly do what I want. So instead of a magnet, where are you? Instead of a magnet, maybe we can try just like the direction that might give us a better result if we do a direction. And then if we scroll down and set the angle to 180. Oh, no, sorry, that's the wrong angle. We need to go on the see Well, none of the angles work. Then I just need to do it manually. Then I'm just going to do it like this. Oh, yeah, here, one minus one. Okay, so we had to go into the minus one. Anyway, so we now have this. So if we now go to our forces and try direction, what if we set our direction like also 50? Like, really, really high. Okay, so that does allow me to have these branches. Don't worry that they are sticking so far out because we are going to basically bake it onto a flat plane. So that's why I'm not too worried about the amount. So I'm going to first of all, set my number down a little bit. Over here, because these are just going to be large branches over here. Then I'm going to set my scaling. I'm going to give my scaling. Let's set a point here. So double click and make these smaller. And I'll set a point here and make these smaller over here that they are really focusing into the center like that. For the rest, jumble basically just allows us to do, a little bit of random variation, something like this. Oh, that's really far out. Forces planar. Yeah, we cannot set a planear any higher. So let's try something like this, and now you can just grab your little branches and just drag them on top of your branch again. And then if you unhide them, they should behave the same. So as you can see, this is what we have right now. That is really, really strong. So first of all, let's go ahead and set our planer, also really high for this one. And our direction, we can we can play around a little bit with our direction, like moving it upwards like this. And then what we're going to do is we are going to play with the amount and introduce a lot of noise. Let me just first move this down. So yeah, let's play with that. So let's get started by just reducing the amount of leaves or the amount of branches that we have over here. Let's set the number to seven to get started. And the way that you should see this is if we activate our cube collision, this is how we will be baking. So you will see it from basically this position. There is a way to turn off the scaling Oh, I always forget overlay. What is it text axis indicator? No, height indicator. There we go. So when you turn it off, then you can turn off your like the little guy. So this is basically how we will be baking. So it will be going from this position. And what we can also do at this point is I'm just going to quickly grab our bark material over here and I'm going to assign this back. And I'm also going to have my bark material on my large branches because this is one of the few times that we will also here, so you can just replace branch material. This is one of the few times that we will also actually bake down our branches. So having this, yes, that is looking good. Here, it's really irregular. I think I'm going to make it even more. So if we just because as you can see here, it is like all over the place. But I don't want to make it look too cliche, even though it might look good in real life, it will look like noise if we do it in three D. So we don't want to overdo it. I'm gonna go ahead and go to um you know, I need to go in here because I cannot find it properly. So we want to go ahead and do like over here, our late noise, see? And then you can mess around with that. If you want, you can also mess around with your early noise over here just to give it a little bit more Well, noise. That's basically it. So we got those done. Maybe make the thickness a little bit thicker. So if we go to skin, this time I remembered, let's make this a little bit ticker. And then if we go ahead and go to generate and set this maybe to, like, three, three, three. Yeah, four. Let's do four. And then the only thing that I do not like is that there isn't a lot going on in here. So if we just press W over here, I'm going to just do, some slight manual movement just to reduce the amount of, like, cluster branches that we have over here and over here because that's a little bit too over the top. I still want to have it somewhat even. Because that will work best for a specific decal. If it is not because if I bake this, it will become a little bit too much. So maybe you can even also go ahead and delete a few. So whenever you have that, you just kind of want to see if you can maybe move some stuff around. Maybe let's delete this one also and then move this one over here and then move this one over here like that. And if you want, you can also while you are moving, you can also quickly just push some of these forward over here to give them a slightly more favorable position. Well, actually, you know what over here, I can actually use a few more. There we go. That's looking pretty good. Yeah, down here, if you want, you can also play around it. But, of course, we will basically cut it off at the bottom over here. So this is what we will see pretty much. So that is looking pretty good, and that gives us a very solid concept of what I'm trying to tell you. So now that we have this stuff, we can hide this, we can also hide the trunk, so that all that we have left is just a bunch of branches. And then, of course, if you would want to create real ivy, like ivy that is climbing instead of hanging down, you would do is you would just make sure that these branches, you would place less of them so that you do the same thing as when they are hanging and just against the wall. And that's pretty much the same thing. And then you would just place your leaves on here. But anyway, so we can save scene. We can go ahead and we can export this to game. And we are going to call this Ivo Digal 01, underscore HP. Yes, on the score HP, that should be fine. So let's save. I don't care about any textures or anything like that. That's all good, so let's press Okay. And once we've done that, we can go into Maya over here. And I'm going to get started by turning that one off. I'm just going to go ahead and create a quick plane over here. Set this 20. A to rotate this and scale it up. And then we are also going to import. R IV Root decal HP. And this, Oh, God. I did that again. Sorry, I need to reopen my scene. I keep forgetting that I have my LOD zero over here. Add it ungroup. Ivy, underscore Unique, underscore 01. There we go. Try it again. I'm just going to already import my hipoly. The order in which we do this kind of stuff does not really matter. So we just want to import it. We want to rotate it nine degrees, scale it way down over here. And yeah, I guess the order doesn't matter, but I think I want to just rotate it at 180. I think this area looks a little bit better. You basically want to have this in front and then you want to have a plane behind it, and the plane is what we will be using for our baking. So what we need to do is we need to go ahead and we need to create our plane. Just get rid of any segments. We don't need that. This will become a decal. So if we just go ahead and scale it, we can move it. And now on the side, you can kind of like decide what you want to do. If you want to scale this big enough so that you are basically hitting both sides. And nice thing if you do this is that you don't have to make a tilable because a decal does not have to be tilable. The only thing is that we will have some more empty space at the bottom, but that should not really matter in our case. So what I'm going to do is I'm just going to go ahead and I'm going to go to my I don't think I actually have a view, because this is probably like the back view. So if we go to our site view, Oh, we don't have the cameras for there's no problem. Like, yes, I can create an entire new camera and everything, but why would I do that, when I can just kind of like preview it here. Basically want to have your plane, not touching your hipoly but still being very close to it. Something like this. So we have a plane and we have a hipoly. So basic concepts of baking, what you can do now is basically we can, first of all, because I keep forgetting that IV root underscore HP. And I'm going to edit ungroup and delete that. There we go. And now we can, first of all, save acne, add this to a new layer that we will call root underscore decal underscore 01. And then we can export, first of all, the loople and ole will already have its UVs and everything. And I'm just going to export this in here. So let's just call this IV underscore roots, underscore LP. So that's fine to just leave it there. And then if we go ahead and also export this one, we will call this Ivo underscore HB. And export that. Perfect. Okay, I am going to use Momset because that is by far the easiest I find to do something like do something that is sticking out very far away from your low poly because you can in real time, edit your cage here, Mum set. However, you can also do this in normals or in substance paint or anything like that. But anyway, for Mm set, we are going to go ahead and just a brand new version of Momset super easy. We don't really need to do much. I'm just going to go up here and add a new bake project. And then what I want to do is I'm going to go ahead and import my IV roots low polen hi pol by dragging it in here. And you can just use left mouse button to round, alter, middle mouse button to pan around. And now that we've done this, we want to drag our high ply into the high, low poly into the low, and then your hypols automatically hidden. But if you just turn it on, you want to click on low and first of all, turn off out the bake, set this to none because else, as soon as we make a change, it will try to already bake, but we have not done any settings yet. And then in your Max offset, which is your cage, you basically want to go ahead and want to set this in front of your hypol like this. So what will happen is it will now bake like this. Now, lastly, what we need to do is we can go ahead and just delete all of our materials so that we have one left, create a new material that we'll call bark by clicking on the name and drag this onto your hypol and you probably guessed it. All you need to do is you need to go to your textures and drag in your albedo map of bar, your no map Huh? Normal map? Okay, weird. And also your Ruftus map over here. So now you can see that we now have our bark just like that. So quite easy. And now all we need to do is we just need to go ahead and set up our baking scene. So I'm going to go in here, textures. Let's make one that I will calliv Roots decal. And this is basically what we're going to use to save all of our textures in. So let's copy that location and then down here into the bake you want the pass location IV, roots underscore 01, and press save. And now that you've done that, pretty much all you need to do is actually, I'm saving it as a PSD. I roots under score 01, I can just as well save it as a TGA so that we can right away import it into reel. We don't even need to go anywhere else. We can just throw it into n reel. So let's save and now in the configure, first of all, set your samples to 16. Next, set your Act yes, we want to leave our padding on for now, but for our mask, we want to probably turn it off. No way, it does not matter. So let's just leave on the padding to moderate. Resolution two is more than enough. And in your map, you just want to go ahead and configure and let's turn everything off first. And we need a normal map. We need down here an albido map, a roughness map, and we need Alpha mask map over here. Yes, it's Alpha mask, quite. I'm not confused. No, Alpha mask. That's correct. Okay, now if we turn all these four on, what it will do is it will literally bake this down onto our plane, and it should give us, correct looking textures. So we can just go ahead and first of all, do like a save us. And if we just go ahead and save this in text bake scene and bake. And give that a try. So we have our TGA over here. We can quickly go if we want into Photoshop and just double check our work. So it is the U visa flipped. That's a bit annoying. Roughness, normal, and roots here. You can see that everything is working. We need to flip it 90 degrees counter clockwise, I believe. So if we just go in here, I need to grab this, and I need to rotate it. Yeah, counter clockwise, like this. The reason it takes a while you cannot actually see the rotation, so you need to make sure that it is correct. And now if we go ahead and export this again, and if we then go in Mm set, it will automatically update so we can just press bake again, and it's very, very fast to do this. Gone are the days off that you need to wait really long for the baking. And then if I just quickly double check. Perfect. S. So now here we have our IV roots. And yeah, that's pretty much looking good. So now we can already throw this into unreel. And all we need to do is then just create like a quick decal material, but that is super easy to do. So let's go ahead and go into textis. Right click New folder, IV Underscore Roots. And in here, I'm just going to go ahead and I'm going to import all four of them, yes, all four of them. And you just need to go into your normal and you need to flip the green channel because it is an open GL normal. And once you've done that, actually, these things over here we can close takes a while to close because it is saving like this. And if we just go into materials, we just want to create a new material, this one called decal underscore Master. And I will go over this very quickly because most of it is just the same thing over and over again. You want to get started by just importing your textures over here like this. I totally fine. Here we go. Now what I want to do is I just want to go ahead and do a very quick constant three factor, convert to perimeter and call this color overlay. Don't forget to make it white. Multiply it with our base color so that will control the color and throw this into our base color. Next, what I want to do is I just want to go ahead and I want to click on my decamsterT turn this into a decal, we want to set the material domain to the fd decal, the blending mode to be masked, and the decal blend mode to be de buffer translucent, color normal roughness over here. Oh, sorry, we need to set this for master translucent, which allows us to art in a norm map, a opacity map, which is a mask and also a roughness map. And then if you want, you can also convert this to perimeter, base color, mask, normal roughness, just like that. Super easy. He does it. Now all we need to do is just go in here, decal master, right click, convert to material instance and just call this IV roots under score 01. And now the nice thing inside of wheel is that the material, because it is set to defer decal, it will detect it to be a decal. So you can literally just drag it in and you can see right away that if you rotate, let's do a proper snap rotation like this and maybe scale it flat. If you scale it flat, you will have less leftover pieces. Just make sure that you don't scale it into the minus. But now, if I move this up, you can see that now we have our roots over here. Yeah, you can basically go ahead and you can scale this however you want, or what you can do is you can, of course, do some balancing. So if I see this, for example, what I would want to do is I would go ahead and I would make my colors like a little bit. Darker over here. And now, this is also the first time I'm seeing it on a plane. And I would say that I probably want to make everything like a little bit thinner. So what I will do is I will make it a bit thinner, but I will not go over the entire process again. So I just in the next chapter, we will just be done with this because it's like an extra. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to set my skin over here, the parent a little bit thinner, and that will automatically also make the other branches thinner. So if we just have a look, so we want to make it thinner and is there anything else that we want to do? I don't think so, because it is not meant to be something that you really, like, see from a very large distance. So that is totally fine. And also the great thing about this stuff is what you can do. You can simply turn it upside down to 180. And then if, for example, throw it in here, and you click on your IV. So let's just select all of our IV over here like this. What you can do is you can turn off the received decals. And now, it will look like you have roots that are coming out on top of everything else, see? So that will add like an extra bit of realism to your IV to have the roots like this. The nice thing about decals is also that because it is projected, they work on longer shapes. So I am able to, for example, over here. Maybe I do not want to, like, scale it down, but you are able to basically place your roots in here. And because they work on longer shapes, here, you get some dead ivy like that, and it will just properly project just like that. Yeah, that's pretty cool. Pretty cool. So this done, what I will do is I will just go through the process of just exporting this and re baaking this. And in the next chapter, that's going to be the grass chapters. So we are going to make small grass, faded grass, long grass, water glass, grass and grass with cats. So that's going to be quite a bit of work. But once we got the basics done, it will be very easy. So let's go ahead and continue with this in our next chapter. 13. 12 Creating Basic Grass: Okay. So as you can see, I made the roots quite a bit thinner over here. So now that this is done, now what we're going to do is we are going to get started with our grass. And let's get started with an easy one. So we have over here if we go to Textis Mega scans. I forgot which one it was Miriam, no. Ray grass. Yeah, here, grass. That was the one. So let's do this one because these are like clums of grass, and the clumps, although they do not always look as high quality, they are easier to make, compared to the very thin pieces. So what we can do is if we go in Speedre because once again, this is an easy folicitol and speed tree makes everything very easy. So let's create a new file and we can just make a nice blank file. Although you can see over here, you have, like, a grass file, so you can kind of already see how it works. Oh, the blank one is new. That's pretty cool. They have some new files in here. So let's go for blank over here. And what we are going to do is, first of all, let's go ahead and set up our materials again. So we have three of the grass materials. So let's just go ahead and do that and call this grass on score 01. Grass underscore 02, so that we still get a nice amount of variation. Grass under score 03. Okay? That is all done. In 01, I'm going to grab my albedo, a normal and an opacity, and I don't really care about the rest for now. Turn on two sided, go to number two. Give me a second to navigate to it. Color, opacity. Normal because I'm just making this very quickly inside of speed. So I don't need to have translucency and roughness and everything. And number three, hoops, that's the wrong one. Number three needs to be this one. Color normal and Obase. Perfect. Now, you might have guessed what we're going to do next. Same thing as with the IV. Go to your cut out measures, and on the first one, simply press Add it. And this is how these ones look over here. So yeah, pretty basic. Now, what we're going to do is these do need definitely a little bit more geometry. So I'm going to get started by just adding my here, adding a nice square plane, and also don't forget to your pivot point. And then in tessellation, I'm going to give it probably like two tesselations over here because we need to do a lot of bending if we want to make this look fairly realistic. And then just apply them, and that's pretty much all you need to do. So we have this one. We can go at an art. And then the next one we can go in here. And the next one we do need to do a little bit more moving around like this. And then over here, what we need to do is we need to go ahead and we need to set the angle a little bit, and then once again, give it a bit more tesselation. Oh, hey, it's trying to. For some reason, it's still giving me an extra etche over here, which is a bit annoying. In means try this. Oh, no. Let's get rid of that one. Didn't mean to do that. Yeah, there we go. Let's try something like this. And let's apply. And we need two more. If we are going to use so many materials, we can just as well use all of them and not try to do things a bit quicker by, like, not using all of them. So we have this one over here. And hopefully, with all of these pieces, the variation will be enough that it does not look very basic because technically, the technique that we are using, it is a very old technique. I'm talking like techniques that are already being used in games for I know what seven years, ten years. I honestly, I don't know how long, but it's something that you can see really like the classic games. Even in, like, uh, assess grade one and everything, you can see it. So around that time frame. Oh, wait, even grand theft out of San Andreas, you can see it. So this is like the old school methods, although we are still making them a little bit higher Poli, of course, than they would be in the very, very old games. But yeah, so I don't know why, I say very, very old games, but that makes me really sound like millennial because I'm from the PS two era, or maybe just the PS one era. So, um I can understand that there are a lot of people that have, what do you call the NAS or something like that. And I just don't know anything about those type of consoles. So I just need to give it some testlation. Perfect. That one is done on to the next one, and the next one just has one big one, and it is Oh, hey, it looks like it's out or detected already. Sort of like the direction. So that is pretty good. Only the angle needs to be a little bit up. And let's give it like a bunch of teslation over here. So let's apply this one. I'm not sure how many times we're going to use this one, but the nice thing is that you can control how often you want to use one specific material. And finally, we are just going to go ahead and grab this one. Just get rid of this line. I don't need it. Sometimes I miss click. So that is also new in speech nine. It is that it is trying to automatically already set your masking over here and set your angle. However, it looks like it is not always good. Maybe if you have a single leaf, it will be pretty good. But for this one, it's not yet good enough for us to use. So we can just go ahead and do this. And then finally, the last one, we can go ahead and we can set that over here. Going to give it like an extra segment. You can see me sometimes, like, cutting off very small pieces just to make everything fit a bit better. That's not that much of a problem. Like, you will never be able to see that. Over here. And don't forget, later on, we will also have an optimization chapter where I will do a bunch of optimizations. But anyway, so perfect. So this is now done. Now, the way that this is going to work inside your speech tree is very easy. So what I like to do is if you want, you can add a zone over here, and this is basically like a circle in which we will have all of our grass. Or, honestly, nowadays, so this used to be the way. I think nowadays, we can even just leave it. So we basically just want to go ahead and straightaway add a leaf because if you add a leaf after the tree, it will basically can I zoom in? There we go. It's cool that they did this. So basically, what we can do with this is we can just add a bunch of leaves and then take it from there. So here you can set like your number. Now, the numbers, they will always go around like this. And if you have a zone, it would basically contain it. But nowadays, you can just go ahead and do this to do the last and the first. So what we're going to do with this is, first of all, let's set this to probably like proportional. And then you can add quite a bit of them. Then what I'm going to do is I'm going to get started by already just adding my first grass over here. And having my first grass, looks like that we need to rotate this to the let's see orientation. Up, no, not up. Right? No, out. Okay, out, needs to be to 0.5. So now it is rotated like this. Next, what I'm going to do is, I'm just going to go ahead and in my generation, I'm just going to already set my scale a little bit higher. And now we basically just want to give the bunch of variation, and then we are going to add more leaf types. So we got this stuff. We can, of course, decide to like the number, but let's get started with one that is not too dense. And then your first, you want to keep quite close, and then your last also not too far away, and just kind of like playro with it and decide how white you want this grass patch to be. So I want to have it something like this. Now don't worry. It will look very bad until the very end. So we got something like this, that's fine. Next, what you can do is you can also go over here and go for a sink. And what the sink will do is it will sink it below the ground, which for this type of grass might be good because the grass kind of it has some roots, so you kind of want to have it sunken into the ground a little bit. So we have that one done. Rotation doesn't really matter. So we can do, what is it? Sweeping is probably something that gives us variation. Jumble also, it will just give some random variation. And if we now go to our skin over here, so here we have our leaves. Now, what you can do is we can already add this one. So let's add four and do grass one, grass 01. Grass one, grass 01, cut out two, and just add all four of them to get started with. And then we will add more later on. But first, I want to just play around with this. So we now got our grass, and then if you go down here, you have your folding, and this is like the big one. So we have a folding, we have a curling over here, and we have a random twisting. So this can give us quite a bit of variation. Then we also have vertex variation over here, which is also quite nice. And you can play around with the noise to make it smaller or stronger. And then we do have some scaling. Now for the scaling, what you can do is if you have your Y scale over here, you can actually click on the graph. And if you then randomly give it some scale, so I'm going to give it some let's keep the scale quite large at the center because it goes from the center to the outside. Scale it down a little bit. But then in between, I do like to sometimes just go in here and just give it some random variation like this, which will basically randomize your scale a little bit. That's like a nice workaround to just do some quick proper scaling. Orientation. So we have our folding over here. That's fine. A line can be quite nice to give it a little bit of an outward line so that when we push this a little bit further in, it will show that it is basically pushed in. So here you can see the orientation, it has, again, our deform. But basically, if we go to generate and set our last to be like a little bit smaller and our first yeah, we can basically just make this like a small grass patch and now you can see here. Now it's starting to look a little bit better. Let's go into our skin. Add another one that is going to be grass two, grass to cut out. That one is a little bit more sunken. Let's set the weight here. You can see the weight. So let's set the weight down a little bit. And the weight is basically how often it is being used. And then we want to have two more. So we can go down here and we can go grass three. And again, grass tree and then the second math over here. And what we can do with these ones is, Oh, these are a lot bigger, actually. Hm. And you cannot. Well, you can, of course, scale the individual sizes, but then you would need to do it by hand. So I'm just going to leave these for now, and I'm going to actually add those later on when we have these ones. That's where I'm going to probably add them as like a little extra around the edges. But for now, so this is looking pretty good. We have over here, this is our grass 02, which will give us some more stronger bits. I want to have these bits mostly on the inside. So let's just go ahead and set a point here and move this down so that it never really generates these large bits on the outside. So we got that one done also. The size over here is just like our grass size. But that's looking pretty good. Like, from a distance, you cannot really see that these are just like planes over here because we have them all rotated nicely and stuff like that. So that is pretty nice. Orientation, as I said before. Like, you can set your align. Oh, sorry, no. Yeah, that is my align, but that's not the one I meant. No, not face. I think it is right, up. No. Not a folding. Where are you? In generates just our rolling. Oh, I guess it is just our rolling. But you can play around with that if you like your rotations are not correct. And of course, what you can do is you can also go down here and you can change the generation. So if I just quickly first save my scene, and I will call this. Let's do grass underscore, basic underscore small. And then we will also have grass score complicated or advanced or something like this. So as I said before, you can go over here and you can randomize the generation. So you can very quickly generate different grass bits over here until you get one that you like. Yeah, so that's pretty much it if you want to generate some very quick grass. So that's pretty good. I quite like this one. Let's set the sink a little bit less intense over here. And let's actually see how this looks. So this one, it is turning out a little bit bigger than expected. So this would be, it would be perfect for this kind of stuff. And then we will also have, like, some smaller grass that is just, like, growing here. Like see, it's hard to see, but there's, like, some really small grass. So this one is perfect for, like, a bit more watery grass, so a bit larger. Now exporting this is the same as always, you save it. You export it to game, and you can just call this crass basic Smile over here and save it like this. Yes, that's all looking fine. Just go to press Okay. Now if we quickly go into Maya, we can turn this one off. We just want to go file import. And I will clean this up at the very end. Grass basic Smile over here. And if we then just go ahead and quickly set it in like the correct location, and what you can also do, actually, if you want, at this point, we can also like try some stuff out. So although for the IV, I did not really bother, but just because we are now going to create many variations, if we click on the grass basic small, we can go up here and set the scale to, for example, ten, which will make it a lot smaller like that. The flipping would still not work as far as I know, because I already tried them out. So for some reason, flipping the actual rotation of your geometry does not seem to work. But we can press okay. And the scale should just work. So if we go in here and we import this and we have where are you grass, basic small here see, so now it is quite a bit smaller. And what we can do is we can just go ahead and give this a few tries. So that is number ten. So if we now try this once more, we can go for ten. Let's do three and press Okay. Just to make it a little bit more manageable. So once you've done that, go in here, one last try. Import. Here, see, three. We rotate it. And I guess that we want to set this to maybe 0.5. So next time we will go for 1.5 or 0.3. 1.5. Let's do one. Let's set this to one. Sorry, this might seem like I'm going back and forth a lot, but it's preparation. It's for later. Later, this becomes quite important. Or at least it will just make your life easier. Let me say it like that. So it is nicer if we just quickly do it in here. You'll see. Okay, so that one is done. So we just give the quick rotation. We quickly go ahead and we ungroup this. I should really add the ungroup to my custom shelf, actually. Here we go. So that it is up in my shelf. And now that we have done this one, we can just go ahead and assign a layer. Like this, and then we can export it to unreal. So to unreal, grass, score basic, nscore small, and export. And then we can just review it inside of Unreal. And then in the next chapter, we will just create a few variations of it, also create the more complicated one and stuff like that. But for now, for this one, we can also use the same material, all we need to do is in textures, create a texture that we call y unscoreGras zero, one, 02 and 03 because we have different textures for this. In number 01, we want to grab our we don't need the roughness, so we can save some space with that, so let's just grab these. 01. 02. 03. Quickly double check my norm map to make sure that it is correct, which it is, okay? Now if we just go in here in our materials, we can grab our IV generic 01, duplicate it, and just call this ray grass underscore 01. And if we open this up, we should be able to simply replace our pieces. I am missing one. I am missing my mask. Here we go. Let's right, click, convert to parameter mask and press Save. In. I just forgot to expose it. That's why it is important to do that. And now in here, you can just go ahead and have your albedo, mask, normal translucency. Our color, we set back to white because that's the default. Our sub coolorbably let's start with a greenish color, but we can change it later on. And for the rest, everything should be maybe set the desaturation to zero for now. So we can save this. We can go ahead and go into our assets. And then if we go in and import because I forgot that I did not do that yet. So let's import our grass basic small. It's all fine. Yeah, I'm happy with that. It's way too slow way too small, did not realize that that are that we have it so small. So, of course, because we are not really working with specific metrics for this because to keep the metrics from speed tree to Maya to unreal, you can do it, of course, but it just takes a little bit too much to focus on when we can just make it easier by just doing this, for example. But here we go. So we got, like our grass, now all we need to do is we need to go ahead and we have our materials. Looks like we only need two of them, so where are you? Re gra 01, duplicate ree gra 02. Open this up. Replace this one with number 02. And then we just need to figure out which one is which, which should not be too difficult. So let's this grass 01 and 02, that should be corresponding with this. 01, 02. Save. Go over here and press G. And now you can see that here we have our grass. And of course, yes, with a typical grass fashion, it is really subtle because it is just like one of them. But first of all, what you can do is you can go ahead and if you want mess around a little bit more with the colors just to see if that looks good, for example, in my subsurface, let's say this to 0.1 or 0.2. So the color maybe, like, a bit darker over here, small stuff like that. Yeah, that's looking fine. And now, what you can also do, which is quite an important one, which we will use later on, if I just quickly save my seam because this can be a little bit buggy inside of Unreal five. But if we just go over here to activate foliage and if we then drop in our asset, which is going to be our basic grass, nice is that we can literally paint in the foliage. Now, let's start by setting the density to like 0.1. Click on your foliage, and then what you can do in here is you can set the scale, for example, from 0.8 to 1.3, and it will randomize the scaling. Now if I just click once, Oh, I expected more. Maybe we need to set paint density a bit more here, see? Then you can paint in. I honestly expect it way more. So normally, when I do this, I get like 500 in one go. So I don't know why it is only six. In that case, you can set the density per kilometer. You can set this to like 200, and that will basically paint double the amount. But, or we can go like 500 even more. Yeah, and then you can basically, paint in some extra bits of grass. And then it already starts to become a little bit more nicer. Now, we are going to have more and larger variations. So this would be like something you would use later on. Let's do ten. No, no, I just want to make sure that I have it correct because I'm a little bit thrown off by how little we are placing because normally you really place like a lot. So I guess if I go 2000, see, that's more what I was expecting this kind of stuff. So now we already place 71 of them. Of course, this is hypol but once we have our once we have our LODs sorry, our LODs, then what we can do is they will be a lot more optimized. So right now, if we do, for example, this and we can close this window, you can see that very quickly, we can just add this nice bit of grass over here. And just to quickly show you, if I go ahead and I go in here in my grass basic small, just to already show you how to do the LODs for this kind of stuff, you can simply go down here and set the LD group to be foliage and press yes. And now what it will do is often it will generate multiple LODs. So if we go ahead and set a number of LDs to three and press Apply, it will generate LLD. So if you look at the triangles, right now it is 400 at zero. Then if we go to one, it is 200 and if we go to two, it is 100. You can even go to number four, so you can go even higher, and it will basically halve it every single time. And then it starts to break. And basically, another thing is that if you go to not show, go here to IT level of detail coloration and turn on mesh LLD coloration you can see when the species are basically switching from here, if you said this to LD out when they are switching to the different LOD. So you can see that here. This is quite nice, and then you can no longer see it. So you save this, and that's basically it. Now it is optimized. So now if you go in here, I believe that in here, I can also do level of detail coloration. You can see that here. That they quickly switch to the different LODs and I'm going to keep them nice and high over here. However, you can always go in here. And if, for example, click on LD 01 and you go down to your selection, here you can set your screen size. Right now it is set to auto computes, but if you turn this off, right now, when the grass is filling the screen for less than 0.25 28 blah blah blah. It will basically turn to this LOD. And like that, if you set is lower, or if you set is higher, it will turn quickly. So the higher this number is, the quicker it will turn to that LOD. So just keep that in mind. Here we go. So yeah, basically, that is now working. We don't really have, like, a distant field occlusion set up properly, so it does not yet look as nice as it can be for later on, but it is looking pretty good. So like that, yeah, we got, like, some nice cars. So let's go ahead and continue on with our other variations, and I will do that a little bit later because I'm getting a sore throat. So I will continue with this when I take a break. So yeah, let's go. Let's go on. 14. 13 Creating Grass Variations: Okay. So now that we have our base grass done over here, the nice thing is that we can pretty much use this setup for all of the other grass. So what I'm going to do is I first of all, want to just create a quick variation of this that is like a much larger patch. So for that, we can just go ahead and well, first of all, save this scene, and then simply do a save us, and we can make this grass basic underscore large over here. And if you want, you can do underscore 01 or something. I kind of broke my rule because I forgot to do that. But now with this one, all we need to do is we just need to go ahead and go over here in our generation. And we basically want to go ahead and just make the last to be quite a bit larger to like the size that we want. And then, of course, just increase the amount. So we are increasing the numbers. So now you can see that we have a large patch. Now, once we get to something this large, you do want to introduce a little bit more variation. So let me first of all, play around a little bit more over here with the patch. So yeah, that's looking pretty good. But as you can see, everything is pretty much the same height. There's some small variation, but it is not very nice. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to go to my size scalar over here and just press little button next to it for our graph. Let's get started by first of all, reducing our grass bits at the end. And then I'm just going to go ahead and I'm going to make this really irregular, like over here, because if you place it very closely together, even though it goes from the center to the outer side, when we place it dis close together, it kind of just randomly like randomizes. Randomly randomizes. Yes, that's maybe not the best explanation. But as you can see over here, now we just have, like, a bunch of different cars bits and stuff like that. And let's see. So rotation, we don't need to do anything, but we can go into our let's see, not our skin, probably, although in our skin, we might want to just introduce a few more of the larger bits and maybe push this further out over here so that we have a few more of these really large grass bits. Here. In the deformation, I just want to go ahead and mess around with the folding and the curling, like a little bit more curling. We don't want to do too much. But once again, we like the folding or let's say, like a twisting, you can use over here these sliders, if you want. I quite like to also play around a little bit bit like my vertex. And let's see. So we have our orientation over here and our orientation, we can yeah, we can actually play around with our line a little bit by doing something like this. We're just giving it some randomness. And then maybe at the outer side, it would be nice if they are kind of sticking underweight if we want to stick them out, and then over here. So we just basically add a bunch of random variation like this. Now you can see that everything is just like a lot more irregular, which will look quite nice for grass. And maybe I'm just going to go ahead and set the last a little bit in so it is a little bit denser over here. So yeah, like that, we can just have a larger grass patch like this. So I'm saying like that, like this too much. So sorry about that. But anyway, I'm going to save this. I'm going to very quickly export this to game, and I'm going to call this basic grass basic large and let's just go ahead and press Save and press okay. So that one should do the trick. Now, if we go ahead and go into Maya, all we need to do is so we have this one. We can just turn it off, file import, and set this to large import over here. C, and it is already the right scaling, or it should be the right scaling. It's all J, let's double check. Oh. Oh, wait, this because we changed it up again. This is getting more and more confusing by the minute. So yeah, I'm not going to risk it. I'm going to scale it up again like this because else we would need to go inside of unreal again and then again need to change it, so that might be a bit overkill. So let's just ungroup, get rid of the top group, and just rename this, and then apply it to its own layer, which will also rename like this. So that one is fine. I'm not too worried about this. I can just go ahead and save my scene. And I can export this, once again, grass basic arch. And because we can just reuse all of our materials because we are using the same thing, we can simply go into real over here. I'm going to import grass basic arch. And let's press Import. It's just double check. Okay? See, so the scaling now works, and you can see that it is much larger. So now if we just quickly open it up, all we need to do is apply our correct materials. And, of course, right now, I'm still doing this quite slow because it is a tutorial. But when you do this outside of a tutorial, this will go so far. So then it is no problem to add like variations because within 10 minutes or like 30 minutes, you can create many different variations. So we have this one over here. You can see that it is not as dense, but that is fine. I quite like it if it is not as dense, because of the fading, we can always just go in and, like, give it a few duplications. Oh, sorry. This is a selection bug. It sometimes happens inside of unreal. What you need to do is you need to select your original, and then you need to click away again. Like this. And then it fixes the bug. It's really strange, but it's just the unlengen fiber still in the Beta as of the time of saying this or recording this. So yeah. But yeah, basically now you can see that this is really nice. We now have very dense grass, and then we basically can have the grass kind of fading out like this with our smaller grass. And now, what we're going to do is we are also going to create some more like individual grass, which will be great later on, for example, for in the water and everything. These are also pretty good for in the water, but those will be even better and also, again, to fade them out and everything. But as you can see here, that is already looking like quite a nice and irregular wild grass patch over here. So I'm just going to save my scene once again. And now if we just go in here, let's pick our Let's once again open up. Let's go file and just open up our grass basic small again. And then we can later on also do the large not, or should I? No, wait. I'm going to start with the grass basic arch because I quite like the variation we added to this. We are now going to create the grass that is individual strains. It is much more higher ply, so you kind of want to just keep it quite small, but it does look really cool. So I just want to show you how to do those because they are pretty straightforward. File save us, and let's go ahead and call this grass underscore. Complex underscore. Yeah, let's start with arch. Grass complex arch over here, and then we'll make the smile later on. There we go. So that is now saved. And what I'm going to do is I'm just going to go in here and I'm going to basically remove these. Then add a new one. And we just need to have one of these because we only have one material. Just call it grass and press Okay. Now you can see that over here, yeah, it will be like an arrow, but that's no problem. If you go down into your skin, you can already, get rid of these bits and then leave one left, which we can make grass. And now this can be quite time consuming. So let's add like a few of them. Oh, it would be nice if I actually add the material, also. Let's go ahead and find our material. So we found it in mega scans, and then swamp grass, I believe, is the one that I want. No, wait, Swamp grass is not the one that I want. This one was the tall watergrass, so that's fine. We can do that later. Scrub that was the bushes, so we don't need to do that. Where are you? Is it just Gras? Oh, we just called it grass. Okay. I just called it grass sorry, I shouldn't blame you for my own not being able to properly name things. So we got this kind of stuff here, that's all fine. So we got that imported. So we now just need to go in here, you basically want to go ahead and mostly focus around these areas. I'm going to just have a very quick time labs where I will be setting up all of these little meshes and we are going to go for like five, probably five different meshes and most of them are going to be in the green areas. Let's kick in the time laps right now. Okay, so all of our meshes have now been led. So now, honestly, all I need to do is I need to go to grass, set my mesh to mesh cut out over here. So this is the first one. As you can see, it looks like that we went quite white with our meshes, in this case, but that is just going to be because of the scaling most likely. So what I want to do is I just want to go ahead and I want to give it a few different meshes. So let's do grass, number two, grass, number three, grass number four, grass number five, and actually went with one extra. Grass number six over here. Okay, so we got that stuff. See, it is very white right now. What I would recommend is. So first of all, let's go ahead and go into our generation over here. So our size scalar is fine. It's probably meant to be like that. But I think what is going on is it is probably of vertices. So let's go to orientation and then here in the vertex amount. Let's see, okay, so that's not the one. Let's see. Twisting Twisting is also causing some problems because we are twisting it like really strongly in the previous one, but these ones here, see, there we go. These ones we cannot do that strong of a twisting because then since they are thin and they have less geometry, they will simply look bad. So that's looking better now. See, we also have a folding over here. Which, interestingly enough, it is all going into like a strange location. Let's play around with the angle a little bit more. Oh, turn on two sided. There we go. That will matter quite a bit. And with these ones, I'm going to set my size scaler a little bit smaller over here. I'm going to also make these a little bit more condensed, like you can see like this. However, let's then also reduce the number because else this becomes a bit overkill. So right now we are sitting at 1,500 twists. So let's see if we can get to 1,000 or something like that. Ii would be quite nice. Thousand might seem very might seem like a lot, and it is pretty much, but for up to date A games with LODs, it is often easy to handle something like that. So let's see. We got this stuff. Now, we can always go into the orientation, and down here, we can always, mess around with our scale if we want to make them a little bit thinner, but that should not be too bad. I can also see that these are really large on the outside. So let me just quickly go. Let's see. So this is our size. So if we go over here and set our size scaler to be quite a bit smaller like this that they kind of, like, flow off a bit better. And then maybe like over here, I also want to give it quite a strong variation like that. Okay. Let's set our first to be a little bit lower like this. So let's set this to, like, zero. Okay. So we got that stuff now done. So it's starting to look already like a little bit better. So it's very much similar to our grass. It is still a little bit high, and I don't like the entire look, so I'm just going to mess around with a few things. First of all, let's try to, like, play around with line. And over here, we also have our scale our Y scale, and I'm going to probably, like, and he'll make this a little bit lower. Oh, and I want to get rid of my sinking, by the way, because that is now causing problems. So let's set my sinking to maybe like 0.01. So we got that stuff. So it needs to look like pretty decent from a distance. I'm still not happy with, like, the si scalar. It is giving me a surprising. Where are you from? It's these ones over here. I think these ones need to be fair here. We need to toe those down. And then there's another here you can see the rings, so you can see that over here. We probably need to again, give it a bit of variation. So that's already looking a little bit better. From the top, of course, it will not work very well, but that's okay. We are mostly looking at it from the side. And to maybe, improve the top, you can once again as I said, you can do stuff like a line folding, in this case, folding does not do much. Facing could also give you a little bit more variation. So if we just try and play around with this a little bit more, and for the rest, we can also go ahead and we can also just once again mess around with our fold. Maybe our vertex amount can give us a little bit more variation, but not too much because else it gets stretched. I quite like our curl, but it seems like maybe I feel like one of these, I don't know which one. Oh, wait. I forgot to do teslation. That's it. I forgot to do the tesselation on these bits, and because I forgot that, that's why the folding is not working as well. So this one has tesselation. Okay, so now if I twist or if I curl, it should that should have done it. It doesn't really look like it has, to be honest. Like here, it has given me some tesselations. That's fine. But this one has testilation, but not a lot, to be honest. For this, as I said before, we need to go quite high if we want to do this properly. So maybe give it another layer. And what we can also do to figure out which one this is is if we go to our skin, we can, for example, mess around with our weight to see which one I we reduce this, which one is currently causing the problems. A, think it is the first one. Yeah, I think it is the first one, actually. Grass cut out. Why are you causing me problems? I gave you more than enough geometry. I gave you all this stuff, and still it's complaining. Let's give it like a tiny bit more geometry just to see, and else it is just an awkward folding. Else, we cannot really do too much about it, and then we just need to go into our orientation, and we just kind of need to reduce the false amount and everything, or at least a curl amount. Yeah, see here. I think it is just quite awkward that it doesn't work. You can also create custom mesh if you want, but that would take way longer to then import them and get them to work properly. But over here, it seems like that the folding. Here, it seems to work for all of them, except for one. I need to fix this. I don't think I can ignore it. Okay, so grass cut out is not Wait, I'm already losing pieces. Let me just try this again. Let's go ahead and add our layer. Hey, look at that. There's a bug going on. See? Did you see that? That was incorrect. That was a problem. Anyway, I think now it is fixed. So first of all, grass cut out. That one is looking fine. Grass cut out two is the problem. So we can go grass cut out two, add it. Give it some more geometry because I assume that that is the problem, that it is just complaining. There we go. Now we can go grass cut out three is fine. Four also has problems, so we can go to cut out four, give it even more geometry, which I don't really like, but for now, I'm going to go for the highest quality grass that I can get. Number five has a problem, so let's go over here. Give that a little bit more geometry. And then what we will do is we will once it is in place, we can always optimize it inside of vial. And number six is also the problem. So we had much more problems than I expected. So let's go ahead and UV present might not work. I should work totally fine. Number six is doing something really strange. I'm not sure exactly what it is. Because it should work totally fine. Um, let's leave number six for now. I don't trust number six. It's not really important. So one, two, three, four, five, grass grass grass and grass. Carto two, three, four and five. And let's get rid of number six. Okay, so we now know that it works. So sorry about that. It just had to happen like this. So we now know that this works, and now what we can do is we can basically play around a little bit more with the curl and give it some more proper curling and twisting and everything to make it look a bit more interesting. And we got also go into our generation and maybe, like, compress this a little bit more Let's do 0.5 probably. And there we go. I think this is like a pretty solid base for our second type of grass, which is going to be these grass plates. So we are now pretty much ready to export this. And then of course, after that, we can just make some more variations. So let's go ahead and go file, and let's do export the game. Quite easy. Grass complex, large. Yes, that's fine. Although in the end, it's not that large, but these ones, you don't really want to overdo them. So I'm going to start with just one variation probably. And then later on, I can always have a Tents chapter where I will add multiple different variations because it is not that special anymore after this. I noticed that I'm in the wong program, so let's try it again. Let's import our grass complex large over here. Now, let's first of all, just double click on the name and then just do an ungroup, rename this, add it to a layer. Renamed the layer. So that stuff is just it's the same thing over and over and over and over again. But that's no problem. And then I'm just going to quickly match it up with my other grass over here like that. And there we go. Let you do the trick. So I'm going to go ahead and I'm going to export this, and this one is going to be grass complex large. We do need to set up a new material for this, but that should be fine. So let's go ahead and let's export to unreal. So I'm doing this always on my other screen. So when you hear me talking like that, it's just because I'm doing stuff on my other screen. But anyway, so now if we go ahead and input this here, that looks already quite interesting. Let's go into our textures. New folder, and we will just call this grass. And I'm going to input my grass textures. Just give me 1 second to find them. Here we go. Now if we go to materials, we can just grab the grass and duplicate it and just call this grass score 01. Open it up. Let's drag in these pieces over here. Here we go. Let's open up our model. Let's apply here grass one, go in here. There we go. We can apply it. And you should get something like this. Now, the occlusion will be quite a bit stronger because we have still quite a bit of grass in between, but it is not quite nice. This one. I think what what I will end up doing is add this one as like my grass to be used outside of my water after all, because I feel like in the end, this one actually does look better if it would be inside of the water. So we got this one, and maybe like with this one you want by default, make it like a little bit smaller. If I have a look at that, it might be nice. If I just go in Maya, let's make it a little bit smaller over here like this. And yeah, that should be fine. And then we can make more variations of this later on. For example, like a variation that does not have as many grass bits in here. That's something that I can create. So let me just quickly re import this. There we go. And another thing that I want to do is I just want to quickly go into my grass. And if I just grab probably like the albedo, what I can do is I can scroll down and I can just change the brightness. So the albedo of your grass, you can scroll down and set the brightness to like two. And if we do that and then play around a little bit more with our desaturation, we can at least match it up to be a little bit closer to this grass so that everything feels a little bit more in place and a bit even and not like it is two very, very different types of grass because then it will not blent very nicely. So let's do like 0.3 0.5 maybe? No, point, let's do 0.3. And in our color, Actually, you know what our color is fine for this. Maybe our subsurface scattering? No, that doesn't really matter. Okay, yeah, in that case, then I'm happy with this. So we now got these ones also over here. So we got that grass patch. Let's go ahead and well, first of all, save our scene, and let's quickly add our grass complex large over here. Set our scale from 0.8 to 1.3. That's my favorite numbers. And if I have a look, so this one is 2000, so let's set this one to 2000. And then we can just go ahead and let's add, like a grass patch over I don't know, like over here. And there you can see that this one looks like this. So it definitely looks like a lot denser, and it's definitely like a different look, as you can see over here. But oh, wait. Sorry, it's because I'm adding two different types of grass. Ooh, that actually looks really cool, you know? That looks really cool. So let's keep that in mind. You can hold Shift, by the way, to just undo the grass placement. It is a little bit buggy in UnrelgenFive. But if you just turn off the little check box that only this one will paint. Now this is just our normal grass over here. So that's nice that we can use this one like that. Perfect. So those that are also done, we are going to do an LLD pass later on, but you can definitely see the difference between these type of grass bits, which they feel very, very high quality and because they are all individual, and they are also quite more expensive. And these bits, which are great for, like, fillers. So they are great to, like, fill large areas. But you can see that they are quite noisy. You cannot really make everything out because they are thinner. And also, if you look at it from the top Oh, no, actually, from the top, it's not too bad this time. But yeah, just in general, these are great fillers. These are great if you just need something higher quality and you just want to kind of have them all individual like this and you can clearly see them. You can also see it a little bit, like stylized or realistic versus stylized in a way, something like that, because it is like larger shapes. Okay, in our next chapter, we will start focusing on our water grass. So that's going to be These ones over here. These ones over here. Yeah, like these ones over here. So like the extra grass next to it. So let's go ahead and continue with this in our next chapter. 15. 14 Creating Our Tall Water Grass Part1: Okay. So now that we have our base cast done, now what we're going to do is we are going to get started on our water grass, which is going to be mostly focused between what you have over here and also the ones with the cattails. But the cattails come a little bit later. We first want to just get like a normal one. Now, for this, we have over here. So we had the tal water grass, and I wanted to combine that with, I believe, my swamp grass over here. Actually, the merium grass that we have over here, I don't think we actually need it in the end because last time I checked, we kind of already get that effect from this grass over here, here, see? So like the little bits. So yeah, I don't actually need the merium grass. That saves in an entire texture. That's quite nice. Okay, so what we're going to do is if you look at your reference, you can see that this type of grass, it is not like this where it is just all over the place. Are clusters. So they're always really long clusters, and then they are placed quite close together, which will create this effect. And specifically because near the end, they pen out. That's how we can get this really dense effect. Okay, over here, they are quite dense, but yeah, you can see, that's why they kind of like pan out. So that's kind of what I want to create. Now that's not too difficult. It's quite similar to what we've been doing so far. And you might have guessed it, the first thing that we're going to do is we are going to go in here, create a new material. And call this one tall Water grass, then grass over here, and then I will create another new material, and this one will be the um, swamp grass, which is like just the dead bits. Suppose okay. Tall water grass. Let's go into our settings, turn on two sided. And let's go in here. And yeah, so that is this one over here because it is slightly different than the one that we have for this one over here. So we can just go at them. We can albedo, pass the normal, that's everything I need. And just right away, also go to our swamp grass, two sided, and let's make this one albedo, normal opacity like that. Okay. Perfect. So that is done. Now we just need to go ahead and we need to go into our output measures, and let's just add a few of them. And let's have a look. I'm going to have, maybe, like, four variations. I think should be fine. Four or five. So it's just going to be, for example, here. Let's say this one, we set our angle. We place it over here. Now, these, they are going to actually be very large. So knowing that they are going to be very large, we can push in a little bit more geometry. So we can place them here and then we can go into our tessellation, and we'll, crank it up to give it quite a bit of geometry like this so that we have a nice segment. Honestly, I think I might even want to go a bit more like this so that we just have a nice segment every few centimeters and then apply it. So that's fine. That's one. Then number two, that's for number two. Let's pick this one. So we will have two big ones. One that is probably like this one, that's a little bit less, and then one that is quite a bit thinner. And I think that will give me a nice variation amount. Let's go over here. Like this. A plenty of segments. These leaves because they are so large, there will be less of them, so there will not be like 100 of them like we have over here. So the next one I had in mind was this one over here. So let's go ahead and set the angle. Oops. Didn't mean to create a new one. It very easily does that, that it just creates a new one even though you don't want. But okay, here we go. Make sure that it falls within your shape. And we can apply this one. And finally, the last one, I'm going to go for let's do like this one over here. This one looks pretty average and thin. The reason why you don't want to go for, like, super specific ones like the ones over here, is because when you do that, you are able to see it repeating very easily. But this is why we have those dead grass bits later on. So we have these ones over here. And now we're just going to, add some dead grasp bits to this. Yeah, let's first finish this one. There we go. And it is in the swamp crass over here. If we just go ahead and go for maybe like three of them here see. So the swamp grass, that one Williams like the dead ones that we can just add on top. Now, you can see that they are not very straight, so I do want to try and get always like the straight ones because if I'm going to start bending it, it is nicer if it is a straight piece compared to if it is already a band piece because then the bending will just look extra strange. So, this one is not too difficult. Let's give it the binch of segments and apply like this. The second one is a bit more difficult. Let's go for let's do this one over here. They are very thin. So I wonder how they will actually react with our ticker leaves, but we'll see if we can make it work because I do want to have the sticking out, but the annoying thing is that in Spettr you cannot probably as far as I know, you cannot set a scale of individual leaves like that. Here, I'm just going to add one extra segment here. Do another one over here. There we go. Like a bunch of tesselation. No, I don't want. I guess with teslation, we have no choice but to have it like that because the tesselation guy, needs it. Yeah, you see. So I will just keep ignoring it. Which is a bit annoying. So then let's just go ahead and leave it like this. And we will see how Oh, no, wait, now. Oh, I don't trust that. It is behaving quite strangely, but we'll see how it goes. So let's just leave it like this. Then the last one, I'm going to go ahead and I'm going to go for probably like this one over here. I think this one should be fine? Give it by just segments and apply. Here, this is strange that it shows this, but it doesn't show it in here. So I wonder if that is like some kind of a bug or anything like that. But anyway, so we got now these grass bits done. So as I said before, these grass bits, they are clusters over here. So I want to go at it and I want to basically create one cluster and make it look very good. And then what we can do is later on we can scatter those around closely together to create the fuller effect. So knowing that, over here we have our grass complex large. Let's quickly do a saves because it didn't mean to do all of this work in just this one. And let's call this water grass underscore tal over here. Tall, yes, and then tale with kettles. After this, so that should be fine. So let's save. There we go. Okay, so for our leaves, let's first of all, go into our skin and going to get started with probably only having the tal water grass first, one, two, three, four, Okay. Two, three, and four. And I like to do it like this so that I can control the weight and everything. So it is like a tal watercrass not too special. It seems like it has enough geometry, so that's fine. Now what we're going to do is we're going to go into degenerate and let's set the number way down to like 20 or something like that. And as I said before, they are clustered, so we want to really, like, have the last actually pretty much in, like, one point, see? I kind of want to have them out a little bit, but I don't think we can actually do that. So if I go in here, 0.01, here, see, it's already 05 on no wait here, we are able to go lower 0.002, something like that, for example. Next, what I want to do is I want to get started by setting my size scalar a little bit up, so this will be the general scale over here. And then what I want to do is I want to go down to not my skin. Oh, wait, over here, let's all set my size over here. So those are quite tall, but I want to go down and set my scale over here. You'll see it to be quite a bit longer like this. And next, these are a little bit straighter. So we do want to go ahead and we want to play around with this bit more, and I assume that these are going to be see, not the folds. Here, the curl is giving me quite a bit of work, but that's not just it. I think it is like the angle, the align over here. Here, see? Yeah, the align is causing some problems. So over here, so now we have these quite long bits. And let's see, so the folding. Yeah, the funding is fine. Like, I do want to have it. I do want to give it a little bit of irregular because you can see it over here, so one goes here, here, here, although they are often facing outwards a little bit, although set to zero. But that is okay. Like, we don't have to have it perfectly. We just need to get something that looks logical. See, twisting and then we have our curling, okay? So nice thing is that once we have this one, what we can do is we can just go ahead and scatter it around, and then later on we can just add the cat tails and everything to this. So this is looking pretty nice, yes. I'm going to go ahead and I'm going to see if I can add my grass or my other grass to this one else we need to kind of, like, have it duplicated and just add it on top. So if I go for swamp grass one and swamp grass number two, Okay, so that does work. Yes, that does work. But I feel like that if we do this, so if we go one more and do swamp grass, Number three, we kind of need to go into the generate and set the number a bit higher. So that we have the sum cars. And then for Sam cars, I'm going to go ahead and set the weight probably to like 0.8, that they do not appear too often. I think, actually we need to go for like 0.5 because there are three of them. So I'm just trying to kind of get a nice balance. Between the default leaves and like the sum grass. So the sum grass is pretty much like just the dead ones that you can see over here. So that looks quite good in general. I'm going to go 0.3 maybe. I really do not want to have these too often. So 0.3. Okay, so we got those done. In our generator, we can also just play around a little bit more with our sweep and our jumble if we do not like it. But let's say that we get started with something like this, and let's save our scene. So this is going to be the normal tall grass. Now, the cool thing that we can do is now we can start by basically scattering this around. If we go to our tree, what we can do is we can right click Add Jome tree to select, then we can add a zone over here. Now with the zone, if we go ahead and set the frequency up, what you get, is you get many different types of zones like this. And then if we go into our generate, we are able to set the first and last quite close. So what you can see is you get all of these different zones, but they are slightly in different locations. Now, last time I checked, I was able to set the scaling of the zone, but I guess, um here, size scalar. So I can set these a little bit smaller like this, and it makes it a little bit easier to see and then do something like this. And now, if you drag your leaves on top of this, you basically get a bunch of these bits, although they are very small. So I guess that we need to set our size scale up anyway in order to have them I mean, in order to scale them. So we have these we can have them in, like, a little cluster. So I think this is far enough because you can see that there is quite a bit of, like, space, but I do want to go probably for, like, a bit of a dense or one for now. So maybe not this dense, but maybe, like, what you can see over here. Let's see. Yeah. So if I have a look at this, I'm going to set my last little bit out like this, and I do want to go ahead and just play around. Let's see a offset. So try to, like, get some nice areas and maybe set the frequency down a little bit because right now, here, this is what I mean. So here you can see that we just get all these nice little clusters. So that's fine. And we can have more or less of these. So if you want, we can do two variations of this. But what I'm going to do is so I'm going to start with then probably the basic variation. And I just want to play around with some of my settings. I don't care about those placement, angle. There we go. The angle is maybe a little bit interesting. So I always like to give it a little bit of like an angle to the outside. Radius, we can go ahead and we can set a radius lower here. So that is the one that I actually had to change. Hang No, I don't care about that alignment, I don't care about that. So yeah, most of this stuff I don't really care about. Just a position a little bit smaller like this. There we go. So that is looking pretty good. So you can see that it is not as much as I was expecting to, but I quite like this because what we can do is we can have one of these. And then we have another one that is like the cattails. Because for the cattails, you probably don't want to go for, like, a massive area that is full of them, because you kind of want to be able to place them. So if we do this one, we can just add a bunch more zones and create, like, a larger patch. So first of all, let's see if this one actually looks the way that we want. So we can save this. And then what we can do is we can go ahead and pretty much just export this. So let's go export the game. Water grass Tal. Yeah, so I don't need to give it a different name because I'm just going to do Tal underscore large. That's what I'm going to do later on. So let's just save this. This one I keep needing to scale it up. So let's set this back to I believe, that's what is the one that we had in plus O. And now, if we go ahead and go in here, we can import Water gras tal like this, I'm going to double click copy name, ungroup, delete the group, and then paste the name. And then what I'm going to do is I'm just going to rotate this. And these ones do need to be quite a bit bigger. So I'm going to go probably for a scale of like 2.5 like this so that they are quite a bit larger because let me just see yeah, if this is the one, actually, we probably even want to go to three because these are going to be quite a bit larger. Like often in real life, I've seen them easily being as large as a person. So I will not make them that large just yet because this is going to be inside of a tunnel and inside of the tunnel, you would not have the full sun and everything to really, really grow these things really large, but I still want to get them quite large to an area like this. So let's just add this to a layer. Over here, save scene. Let's export this one. Just like that. And we also then need to set up our materials again. So let's go in here. Let's have a look. So I'm going to go, first of all, let's go to our textis swamp nscore grass. Let's import. Textis. And then the next one was going to be tall water grass. Tall underscore water unscoe grass. And import those also. So that stuff is all basic. We go in here. We, for example, grab our grass era one because that one looks the most the same, duplicate it. Tall water, grass. Open it up. See, and now it remembers my window. It randomly does it. It randomly starts remembering windows, and then later on it just forgets it again. Another one, swamp unscoe grass. There we go. Okay, so our swam cars, we can just replace these over here. Tal water grass. We can replace these. Just like that. So that is now also sorted. And next, we can go to assets. By the way, these things, if you want, you can already, get rid of them because we should have everything already replaced. So if we just delete that, Oh, is still one that is using this. Oh, we probably use this material on like one of these. So I believe it was like the Bark tree. So if we now delete delete. Come on, delete. Thank you. Here, see. That makes it look a little bit cleaner. But this one, of course, I placed this one on here, so that's why we cannot delete it. To unreal. What a grass towel Import. Open it up. Now nel engine five, you can also apply your content browser down here. The reason I don't like it is because of what you just saw is that it just very easily gets rid of it and you cannot really dock it in the layout because then it does this, so it's not the best way of doing it. And for me then needing to again navigate over here, that's why I personally just go down here and we go for tall water grass and swamp grass. Save Asne and now if we go assets, test this out. So let's say that we place it like in here. So it fits really nicely. It needs to be a lot bigger because if I place like a few of these, this is supposed to be quite small grass, still high because it will be in the water because that's what I decided to swap around. But if I have something like this over here, let's say that I have like a cluster sitting in between here, something like this, just to try out the placement, I most definitely want to make this quite bigger. So let's set the scale to maybe like five. And then the rex put this again. See if that looks a bit better. Here you see? That's a lot better. So now you can see, like we have the tall grass over here, and that is fine. Now, it tests like the screens, not skin space, ambient occlusion. The distant fields and everything that are inside of here, yes, they are a little bit dark, but don't worry about that. We can go ahead and fix that. And also, what we can do is in these cases, you can probably go into our material. Probably we only need to do this in the tall water grass and set the subsurface scattering to like 0.5, maybe even one, which will kind of reduce the amounts and will also look nice if you are inside it. Because who knows? Maybe you are making a game that's like from this level, you just want to kind of, like, walk through it. So anyway, that one's looking pretty good, as you can see. It's just some nice tall grass that we have. Just to stick with what we've been doing so far, we can once again go over here, quickly artist 0.3 by 1.3. Density will be less. So this time we are going to go for 1,000. And now we can just go ahead and let's say that. Over here, here, see, that's quite nice that you can place it. And then what you would probably want to do is once you've done the base placement, you can then go in here and set the scale to, like, Oh, wait, I said 0.3. That's really low. I meant 0.8. But anyway, we can do like 0.50 0.3 to 0.5. That's too low. It's to 0.8 to 0.4, we can here, make them smaller almost as if that is fading out. See? So that's how you would have that fade. And then you can go ahead and go for 0.3 by 0.4, and then you can have the really small fading over here. At which point we need to set our density bit higher because else it cannot register properly. But, yeah, you get the point. So you can have some nice fading. And you can very quickly create some really dense swamp grass, as you can see over here. I don't like these small ones. They are not looking very good, I guess, because we need to have like 4,000. I think we need to have, more of them, and maybe set us to 0.5 by 0.4. Yeah, yeah, that feels a little bit better when it's a little bit denser like that. I know that this is just like a tasin but I like to just quickly show off the work at the end of our chapter, what we've been doing. There we go. See? Swamp grass or random grass that we can now later on, we can just nicely throw in some cattails just by placing it in here. So this is looking really good. You can also see that this responds differently compared to this, and this is because when you do foliage painting, it is a little bit more optimized, but it also takes into account with your shadows that it is very close together. That's why it's not looking so dark. This is really nice. So although it has a little bit of I don't know what it is, like a sort of a motion blur. It's probably because we have a lot of really thin strains. Anyway, next chapter, what we're going to do is we are going to create a larger variation, and then we are also going to create a cattail variation for which we probably need to create like a custom texture. But let's go ahead and continue with this in our next chapter. 16. 15 Creating Our Tall Water Grass Part2: Okay, so I was going to make, like, a larger version. But honestly, when I see this, because we are not going to be having, like, really huge areas of these plants, this actually looks fine. So because a larger version, it will simply be still the same amount of polygon count. So the only thing that we would save is this number over here. So the number of instances, that's what we would save. But honestly, in foliage, if you use the foliage system, 100 or 200 instances is nothing. You can go thousands and thousands before it starts to struggle a little bit, especially religion five, it can probably go even higher. I'm just going to leave this and I'm going to get started by focusing on the cattails. For our cat tails, as you can see over here, we will need to have unique texture, but basically what we need to do is we need to make this inside of Maya, just a and then the bottom ones, we are basically going to have those in speed tree, and then we place the mesh on top of them also in Spettr and then we can still, nicely generate to get like a bunch of different variations. I don't know if I have any other here. I have another image. So it basically looks like a corn dog, that's pretty much it, but like a little tip. And if we go inside of Maya over here, we can just use this. Stern off this layer, create a new layer and just call this cat tail over here. And yeah, honestly, this can be, super easy. So let's do, I don't know, like a cylinder or something like that. So let's create like a cylinder over here. Oh, let me just zoom in. I'm going to set the subdivisions quite low because this is, of course, going to be quite small. So let's set this to like six. Okay, six is too much nine. Yeah, let's do like nine. Let's scale this down and up over here. Yeah, something like this. And once again, the pivot point will be at the cent at the 000 point over here, because the same counts for pain. So we just kind of want to have this here. You want to decide on the thickness just by scaling it. Yeah, it seems about fine. And then what I'm going to do is I'm just going to go ahead and select the top and the bottom edge, and I'm going to do Contra B, which is like a bevel, which for some reason freezes. There we go. And I'm going to set my friction really high and then set my segments up like this. And let's see. So yes, I want to do this, but I think what I want to do is I want to go ahead and I want to scale this out a little bit more because I feel like that it was not looking exactly the way that I wanted to. Now, if we go in here, I have a feeling like there is a double vert C here or not or no. But just in case what I like to do is, I like to do Control Shift A, merge verte Cs, and then over here, make them like really small. So something like, yeah, this. Okay, and then you can see it is like a tiny little tip always sticking out. And I feel like that we can also create that. So if we just quickly select this stuff over here, and maybe, like, flatten it and, like, hold shift and then scale it down. So we are just extruding this out. And then I'm just going to scale this in and then do something like this. And now I can just grab this edge to basically decide if I need to, like, make it maybe a little bit thinner. Selection is being a bit strange. So let's make it a bit thinner. Let's make it a bit longer over here. Okay, so we got that stuff done. And then what I'm going to do is I'm just going to give it a few extra segments over here. And this is both that inside of speed tree, we can make some very small changes to this using vertex, sorry, I shouldn't say so often, using vertex deformation. But also in here, I just want to make it feel a little bit more organic by slightly moving around these pieces and maybe also like selecting few vertices and just making them a little bit less Perfect. Like this, because if it is just like a perfect capsule, almost like a tablet or something. And when I say tablet, I mean, as in the medicine form, then it just does not look as nice. So let's say we have something like this. I'm just going to shift shift right click. Shift click. Sorry. No, I'm just going to go in here, soften. Sorry. So having this done, why do I keep saying, um so often? Don't worry, I do actually realize that I'm doing this, but I don't understand why I am doing it. So I'm going to go ahead and for the top faces, I'm going to go ahead and do, like, a heart shading over here, hard edge. And maybe it would be better if we also do that over here. There we go that from a distance. Although sometimes you kind of want to keep these at your soft, but then it will probably translate to everything being soft. So let me just quickly add these to myself. I know, here, see, so that does kind of work. Can this one maybe also be soft? Yeah, here, see. So I only had to make this edge over here hard. But anyway, there we go. That does kind of look like a catail as you can see over here. So that's fine. The kind of stuff like a little bit of bending, we can do a little bit of bending in here. And the way that I would do that is I would basically just go ahead and go, first of all, let's edit my pivot and move it down a bit. And then if we go to deform, non linear bend, it allows me to set my curvature. So if I set is to like ten. Yeah, it's fine. Like it doesn't matter in which direction, so you can rotate it. And I'm going to set my low bound to zero. And I'm going to move my bend down a little bit over here and set my high bound to like two so that it does properly bend, and then maybe the sets to like four or maybe like three or something like that. There we go. Just to give it a little bit of like a bend just to make it even more organic. And then we basically just remove our history. We once again place this properly on like zero, zero, zero. That should do the trick. So the next thing that we would need is we do need a texture for this. And as you can see here, the cat tails, they are like a brownish noise texture. So we can probably do this very easily inside of substance designer. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to go ahead and I'm going to save machine, and I'm going to open up substance designer. Here we go. And let's just create a quick new substance graph, and this time we can set it to metallic roughness and just call this cat tail, and we are going to make the resolution probably like 512 by 512. It doesn't need to be very high. If you want, you can, of course, make it higher and then lower it down inside of the engine. But basically, what I'm going to do is I'm just going to have a noisy brownish look and that should be more than enough from a distance. So I'm going to go for probably something like this. The way that I would do that is I would need let's see. I don't need metallic declusion or height map, so I would just need these three maps over here. Then for our normal map, let's go into noises and let's go ahead and just combine a normal noise. So over here we have a white noise. Let's combine a white noise, which is this type of noise. And I want to combine this with something like a B&W spots tree, for example. So what you can do is you can art space and art, again, like a normal note. We've been over this before. And here you can see, different types of noise. So we have this noise, and we have this one. I'm going to set both of them to open jell and make the really strong noise that we have below here. Let's make that quite subtle. And then this noise, we are basically going to combine it. And we do that using a normal combined note. We just simply plug these boats in here. Set is the high quality, and there we go. We just have some general noise, and that should be more than enough for this. Now for our base color, you can see that it's pretty much just a brown color with occasionally a little bit of a darker color in between. The way that we can do this is we can go ahead and add a gradient map over here. And what you can do with a green map is you can plug in a noise. For example, B&W spots two. Then in here, you can set you can basically assign colors to the gradient values. And because this gradient value goes all the way from black to white, we can literally use the entire range. But a cool thing that you can do is you can go in here and for example, grab your cattail, let's say, something like this over here, and then you can press pick gradients, and you can actually go in here and you can just pick a gradient and then it will try to pick the colors within the gradient. So if I just try to do this a little bit more here, you see, you can see that it's trying to pick the colors and you kind want to just try and pick a nice color. So only in this case, it looks like that these colors, they are so even that it is hard to get. But let's say that we have this as a base. We can always go in here. Say I make this one like a little bit browner, and this one also. And then I can go in here and, for example, change this color around to make it a little bit like a duller brown. I can click again and I can make another color, so I can do something like this. And like that, I can just very quickly create some general colors here see, maybe I want to have a little bit of darkening in here. So we get something like this. So it's just like a general color, but it does still contain that noisiness in it. We can add this to our base color. And now for our roughness, what we can do is we can simply use a histogram range over here. And what you can do with this is if you plug in a noise like your B and W spots, we can set a range. So we want to set this quite low so that we don't have a really strong contrast value. And once we've done that, what we can do is we can add a histogram scan over here, which allows us to basically control if we want to make it very bright or very dull. If it is dark, so black, it will look very shiny. So we want to go for, like, quite a dull look like you can see over here. You can also play around a bit more with your contrast, and you plug that into your roughness. So super simple, super basic, but more than enough for something like a cat. Then what we can do is we can just go ahead and we can save sine over here, and I'm going to save it in textures, Oops, cat, tail, and save. And then we can also export it into the same folder as a Targa file. And it will always use your saved folder, so you can just press Export, and there we go. Okay, so that is now done. So now if we go back to Maya, we can simply go in here, right click Assign favorite material Lambert. Color file, open up the file. Navigate to your folder, cat, tail, base color, and open it up. And if you go up here, you can go to textview, and then you can see the texture, which right now probably because of my UVs is not working, I think, or it is just simply way too dark to be used inside of Maya. But that doesn't really matter because all I need to do is I need to go to my UV toolkit. Oh, God, we have not a lot of space. And in here, I basically just want to UV unwrap this. The way that I'm going to do that is I'm going to go ahead and I'm going to, let's see. Let's go ahead and First of all, actually, let's first of all, just grab the entire model, and let's go to UV and do a camera based. And the reason I'm doing this is to remove any seams. And then I want to grab a seam here. So just like a nice round bit because else it will just not be able to break up. And then I'm also going to go ahead and hold Shift and grab a seam down here all the way to the top, like this. Except for the very tip, so we can hold Control like this like that, and then just do another seam here. So the way that you can out the seam is going to cut and sew in your UVTkit. Press cut. And if you don't have your UVtolkit you can find it up here somewhere. So on the way here a tools, and then here hide UVtolkit or show UVtokit. And now what we can do is we can simply go to unfold, press unfold. That's now unfolded. And then what I like to do is, I like to go to modify and do orient shells, just to orient them. And then I can just go to modify and just do a quick layout. So now they are also in here. So that's it. That's all I really need for this. So that's now UV Nwp You are not really able to see it, but that is mostly just because the texture is so dark here. You can see it like a tiny bit, but we are going to balance out this texture a little bit later on in wel, because in Maya, it always looks dark when you have darker textures. They look darker than normal. But anyway, we can go ahead and we can now export this. And we are going to export this two froms ooh. Let's just do down here. Cat tail, underscore top, and expot selection. That's fine. And now, if we go into speed three, what we can do is we basically want to add some branches in here. So the branches are going to be these bits, and we can just make the colors green, although gradients would be nice, actually. Yeah. Let's just make it green for now. You probably won't be able to notice the gradients. So what we're going to do is on our zone, we want to go ahead an art geometry and art branches over here. Let's just quickly hide my leaves. And they are not showing the way I expected them to. 1 second. Let me just quickly go and add them to the tree. Oh, wait. Actually, I think it's better if we use a trunk. So it might seem stupid, but let's use a trunk like this. And let's just reduce the amount and the length and everything a lot, and then we can do that. So let's set the absolute length to one or maybe like three and set the radius, which you can find in skin this time I'm starting to remember to like 0.1 or way lower even. We need to go like 0.020 0.01. And then for the tip, it looks like the stack actually stays quite thick. So we want to probably go in here and just move this up a bit to keep it quite thick like this. So we got these pieces over here. Now, if I go ahead and I add them to my zone, we get one of them on each and we can unhight this, and then I can see that I'm still way off. So let's set the radius 0.005. Okay, it does not like me doing that. In that case, I'm just going to go only to my spine and set the length. And I want to basically have the length like this. And then if we go into the degenerate, we want to set the number. So we are going to go for a number of, for example, three, play out with your first and last to have them sticking out a little bit like this. Actually, it's set the number to one, actually, because else it will probably become a little bit too much. So let's do one. Can I set my radius any lower? I want to go really, 0.00, seven. I can do that, six, I can do that. Five. Okay, five. That is probably low enough, 0.005. Now what we need to do is we just need to mess around with this a bit. So if we go to let's go to our spine. By the way, you can use your gravity also to bend it a little bit. Looks like we have very little segments in this probably because of the radius. Now, you can go to your segments over here and you can twin and set the length segments a little bit higher like this, and that will just give you a few more segments which allow you to do some interesting stuff like bending. For example, we can go up here and we can see the start angle I don't really care about too much. Gravity also not curling. I don't know. You can mess around with that a little bit the front here. I'm going to for example, S writes that it curls a little bit to the side. But we should also have the classic ones over here, like the noise. We have the early noise, which I'm not going to have too intense, and then we have the late noise over here. But right now, I feel like that is too much because you can see over here, they actually don't have any bending. They are quite strong. So I'm actually going to go ahead and set my noise amount. See, little bit here, I'm going to actually reduce that quite a bit. And I think I'm just going to focus mostly on, like, the braking and everything, not the braking on like the here, like the curling and maybe changing it round a little bit. So I have this now. The only thing that I want is I want to have my length, and I want to randomize my length. This one is actually a bit tricky because we only have one. So even if I would go in here, I am not actually able to randomize the actual length. But because we only have one, it would not be that massive stretch for me to quickly just go in here. And for example, make this length a little bit longer, go in here, make this one like a little bit shorter, and very quickly add some extra variation in this kind of stuff. Like this. So let's say that we have something like this. That's fine. Now what we're going to do is we are going to quickly create a new material, and we will simply call this green and press okay. And in this material, I'm just going to go ahead and set the color to you guessed it, be like a greenish color, set the two sided and simply drag this onto your trunk and replace the branch material. And once we have the color, we just want to kind of see if we can balance it out here, see. So from a distance, you probably won't be able to really notice that it is just like a plain color like that. I kind of want to make my radius a little bit less, but I don't know if it will allow me to 0.0 004. Okay, it does allow me to. That's nice. Now what we're going to do is we are going to basically add our mesh on top of this. You probably guess how to do this. So we go file and we are just going to import a mesh asset, and we are going to import our cattail top. It looks like it already. I don't know if I need to align it with the leaf or in the top. I forgot about that, so let's just see what it does. Right click Assign geometry to select it and do a mesh geometry over here. And we need to create a material, our new rename cattail. Press Okay. This are cattail material. Let's immediately also go ahead and just assign our textures. We have our base color, our normal, and if you want your roughness, and then in here, you just want to go ahead and select your cattail top and we can assign this one down here. Let's do cattail. Then this is the mesh. I guess that is interesting. So it is not properly doing my lock to parent, no radio scale, no it is not behaving the way I want. So what I'm going to do is, first of all, just going to go to my meshes and I'm just going to see if I set my here. There we go. That was the problem. So it was the orientation. Now, I need to set my orientation to Y minus up. Yes, Y minus up. They are. So it's funny when they look this big. And we have this, so I want to turn off my use actual size, but as always, it just kind of like grazes out, but it was not grayed out, but we can set like our we need to set our start at this point over here. So this is a little bit strange that this is grade out because I literally just side not being grade out, and I don't actually know where there should be a size scalar over here, but it ignores it. So that's the annoying thing for this. Don't worry, there is, of course, a way to fix this, but it's a bit annoying because it means that we need to fix it by scaling it inside of Maya. And I never really like doing that because we have a rotate. So our radio scale, I'm going to set to one because I want to keep that as like a default. Yeah, this one, that's fine. So we can just go absolute. Welding, segments, geometry, that's all fine. I don't care about that. Yeah. Oh, hello. Sorry about that. So we need to go ahead and we need to do this inside of Maya, because I don't trust this over here. It's really strange. But okay, it doesn't matter. We just need to go Maya and we just need to go ahead and set the scaling, for example, to 0.1 and then overide it. But I know 100% sure that there is a way to actually do the scaling in here. I just don't understand why I do not get the scale vector over here. So maybe I'm just missing something. This is quite new the measures to this version. Here, see, the scaling does not even it seems to just ignore the scaling. I need to have a quick look because this is unlogical, so let me just quickly have a look and see where the problem lays. Okay, so I could not get the mesh to work. I don't know why. I've done it before. So instead, we are just going to do a little work around, and that is that we are going to use a leaf instead. So we are going to go to geometry to select it and use a leaf. This is basically an older method for, like, the very old versions of Spettre. That's where I always used to use this method. But, of course, it means that we need to do a few more settings to get them to look white. So we add our leaves, and then we art our catail. Like, that's no different because the cattails will simply show over here whatever geometry we have on the leaf. The only thing that we then need to do is we need to go to orientation. And set the align to one. And then we need to go to generate and in here, we can set our size scalar down, and then basically set the first and last boat to one also. And when you've done that, you should be able to now play around a little bit more with our scale. We definitely want to change my texture later on. But yeah, that's pretty much it. We also we can use the sink to maybe sink them into our shape a little bit more, but that is one way to do the cattail and then play around with your scale a bit. And when I see this, I feel like I want to I don't know. Yeah, they are never really sticking out this far. So well, actually, yeah, 50, 50. So I want to also play around with that. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to go in here, set my scale a bit higher. And then I'm going to just go to my branches, and if I go to note just want to carefully, click this one. So let's have this one sticking out, but then let's have this one behind here, like quite low. This one, maybe also like a little bit lower and this one maybe even lower. Here, see that feels like it has a bit more variation. So yeah, okay, I still works. That's the important thing that it works. So this is basically another technique and this way, you can add cats, but you can also add flowers. Whatever you want as a mesh on the top, let's just use this technique from now on to add them. So we got this stuff that's all fine. If you want, you can quickly go to designer and go in here. And if you quickly want to, like, change this color and not go in here to like change it, you can always add an HSL note, which allows you to basically boost up your brightness, mess around with your saturation a little bit. And then if you just go ahead and quickly export it or you can press out Matic exports when outputs change. And what it will do is every time we make a change, it will just export. But then if we go in here, we should be able to go to our cattails. I don't think turning them on and off. Y here, turning them on and off will change that. And now you can see now the preview looks also a little bit nicer. And yeah, we can see the norm map and everything working. So that's pretty good. I feel like they are a little bit too tick. So I'm going to go in here and I'm just going to quickly here, see, scale them in a little bit and then export them again. Now if we go in here, we can just go to meshes, and then we can just press reload. There we go see. Let's see. That is pretty good. What do I think of the scale? I think I'm going to make them like a tiny bit smaller. Like that. Yeah. Okay, so I'm quite happy with that. So having this done now, we should really do a saves because we've still been working the Tarwater grass, nscore with, unscoe cat tail. Actually, let's just do cattail. Tall water grass, doll, cat tail. I don't need to do W. So save. Perfect. And if we go file and we can do, like, a quick export the game. Save, okay. That's our normal. And now if we go in here, we have our cattail. And if we just quickly assign that and turn it off, we can go at and go, file import. Oh, God, so much stuff. I will clean this up later on. Don't worry. With cattail. I'm going to rotate this, go to our outliner. Once again, quickly select this, do an ungroup, delete the old one, paste this, create a new layer. Assign your object to layer and then look at the previous one, and I believe that one was five. Yeah, so I'm also going to go for like five. And just to add a bit of variation, what would be nice is to maybe randomize our leaves a little bit. Now I look at it. So yes, I am actually going to do that. Sorry about that. Let's just redo this a little bit. But let's just simply go into our leaves, then go into. And then if you go to your randomizer, we can simply randomize the generation, there we go. And now I just randomly generated it to something that I like. I can just save, and that will immediately like adds an extra change. And that is also just a nice difference when doing that to just add some very subtle variation, even though it might be very hard to notice, it is still nice nice if you notice it. So let's just very quickly redo this. So import the water grass with cattail. And I'm just going to do this quite quickly at this point over here. And we can just rear this and set the scale to five. And now we can see that if I look at the old one, here, see, they are slightly different. So that's quite nice. And now we do, of course, have our cat tails just sitting in between here. One, two, three, yeah, that's all looking good. Perfect. So we can just go ahead and we can save our scene, and we can export this to unreal with the same name. And all we need to do in Unreal is we need to quickly re import or import our cat tail texture over here. And in our materials, if we go to our solid master, so let's go to solid Master, create material instances and call this cat tail because these do not have a mask. We can quickly Oh, hey, we are not using a roughness map for this. That's interesting. Um, let's go ahead and let's go into our salt master and make a small change. So what you want to do with your roughness map for this is over here we have a roughness. Let's do a static switch perimeter. And what you can do is has roughness. And then if it is false, it will use my roughness, and if it is true, it will use a texture. So we can go to our cattail, use this one as like a placeholder. Convert perimeter roughness. Yeah, said is true. And by default, we just leave it to false. But if we do this, now if we save our scene, what will happen is as soon as we command, save, here, as soon as we has roughness is turned on, it will use our roughness map, basically. And then there you can see your roughness map. And then the actual roughness over here, it does not do anything anymore. But that's all good. So we can go into our assets, and I know that we are way over time because we are at 31 minutes already, and I like to keep everything always below the 30 minutes at the very least. But let's just go ahead and import this. And quickly set it up, and then you know the drill. So we go in here, materials, and we want to basically use our tall water grass. Swamp grass green material we need to do separately. So we have a cat tail over here, and then for our green material, what we want to do is we basically want to go ahead and just create a very simple material, right click material, call it green. Actually, let's call it plain underscore master. And all you need to do for this is if you go in here, I add a constant three vector, and just go ahead and convert this to Beremter and call this color and make it like Let's make it white by default. And add a click scale parameter that you call roughness and make this 0.8. That's it. That's literally all we need. We can just go ahead and save this. And then what we need to do is we just need to go ahead and right click material Instance green and then apply this to our texture. Or to our mesh. At which point I'm first going to drag in my mesh over here. Oh, we have a selection buck going on. There we go. Here we go. So see, that's looking pretty good. So we have like our cat tails. And then if you go in our material, green all we need to do is just quickly match up our green color with something that looks here and you can even do like a color picker. So you can literally pick on the color to match it up. And there we go. Now you won't really notice that. But there are cattails. We might want to make the norm map a little bit stronger and everything, but we can just do that by going in here and setting this norm map, let's do this one that at this to two. And that's set this norm map to 0.15. So now you can see that it is quite strong. So that's one thing that we want to do, and for the rest, I'm quite happy with the color. How about the roughness? I want to make my roughness bit duller. So let's go ahead and go in here and set our height range here a little bit stronger and then set up position to be a little bit duller like this. And now if we just re export all of this stuff, we can go in here and we can simply select all of these and just right click reimport. And there we go. So now we have a stronger norm map as you can see, which makes it look a little bit fuzzy and our roughness is also fixed. So that's perfect. So we now got this one, and now you would just be able to use it however you want. So again, like a selection bug that happens a lot all of a sudden. But the nice thing is that if you would like place these pieces in between here, you will just occasionally see a nice cattail sticking out, and it's like small details like that. Of course, right now, my shadows are a little bit strong. But if I just look at this, here, see, they do really fit in there and they do nicely stand out. So you are able to art a bunch of cattails and just paint them in. So that's pretty much it for these pieces. Now, in our next chapter, what we will do is we will focus a little bit more on water plants which are going to be the lilies and like that and little lily flowers and stuff like that. So let's go ahead and continue with this in our next chapter. 17. 16 Creating Our Lilys Part1: Okay, so we are starting to get a pretty solid collection already. We've got some grass here, some longer grass kettles, and everything, ivy, so that's quite nice. Now, what we're going to do is we are going to just create some lily beds and also some lily beds with, like, the flowers and everything. I think that will be quite interesting. After that, we are going to create some bushes or scrubs or whatever you want to call them. And then we can start with our actual leaf textures and our tree materials. However, I need to have a look because it's winter, so I hope that I can even find a leaf. But anyway, lily beds, yes. Let's go ahead, and I think that we will just, like, place them on the ground here. But of course, if you have water, they will be floating on the water. So, this is probably the first time that we actually need to go 100% in Maya for this. So let's turn off our water grass and let's create a new layer and just call this Lily cluster underscore zero, one, for example, something like that. So the cluster is just that it's going to be a collection of a few of them. But this is all super easy to do. So pretty much all that we need to do is we need to go ahead and we need to create a plane over here. And if we just go ahead and zoom in, turn off our segments to get started. There we go. And now all we need to do is we need to right click Assign favorite material, Lambert. So just like add a new material to it, maybe move it up bit. And then we should already have the texture here. So what did we text that? Yeah, here in text that can we find them. There we go. And if we just go into color, file, open it up, and we are going to grab Abdo over here for this one. But then what we can do is we can also go ahead and we can click again on our plane. And in the transparency, we can also load this one, and we should be able to simply load our Alpha over here, and it should work totally fine. Sometimes it does not, but often, yeah, in this case, it does. Okay, perfect. Now, I assume that this is like the bottom side of our lilies. So what we want to do is we probably just want to go ahead and go over here. And we want to I'm just using my loop cut and slide or split edge rings so that I can add a bunch of edge rings. And what I'm going to do is I'm basically going to split these pieces up like this. And now, if you go into your tool settings, you can grab an edge and if you turn off or turn on preserve your Vs, you are able to carefully move this edge over here. And now it is pretty much just a matter of selecting a phase, Shift click and press extract faces to basically make it its own object. And you want to do that with all of these. Extract faces, extract as. And X ray traces. The nice thing is because these are going to be flat on the water, they also do not need any extra geometry or height renting. The only thing I like to do for this is I like to just nicely place it as close together as possible without breaking our shape because even though this is empty space, the engine will still need to render this empty space, even though it is Alpha. So it's always nice to just optimize it and not leave a very large plane. So this is technically more optimized. It is very, very minimal in the optimization, but I think it also just it looks cleaner if we do it this way. I'm not going to go as far as to actually add some geometry in here. That would be a little bit of overkill, most likely. So we have this one. But yeah, I'm not exactly sure how much expense it is to render Alphas an unreal engine, because normally I'm used to having like a technical artist tell me that. So I would not know specifically right now. But anyway, just like this, we have our lilies done, which is pretty easy. And then it's just going to be placing them around. I think the biggest one would be when we create the actual flower. So having this stuff, if we just have a look, oh, that's very large. Here we go. Let's make smaller. Okay, so you can see over here that yes, they do have a little bit of curving. However, for scene, they are going to be so small that even if we are those curves in our geometry, you probably would not actually see it. So it looks like that it has a little bit of overlapping often. Yeah, here. It looks like there's a little bit of overlapping. There are roots down here and it is up to you to see if you want those or not. If I have a very quick look because I do need to know before starting in my tunnel scene. This water over here, it is very dark and it is only very shallow. I have a feeling that even if I add those roots, it would not be useful. I would not be able to actually see them. I'm just going to avoid them for now. So knowing that also, let's go back to our preview map over here. We can go into Maya and now we know how to place this. All we need to do scrab all of them, turn off preserve UVs and just reset your pivot so that they are in the center. You basically just want to create a small cluster and then we can also do a large cluster. What I mean with that is let's say that I have, for example, this actually, you know what? Let's do this. Let's make them all. But a tiny slightly different heights. If we go over here, here, 0.00 20.003, 0.001 and 0.004. Now, the reason I do that is this is such a slight difference that you won't really be able to notice it. However, for me, when placing it, it makes sure that I do not start clipping into my other meshes, so I can just have them sitting on top of each other or below each other. So I'm able to bridge much to this. So I can go in here and I can basically just move and rotate stuff around. And sometimes I just like to have a lily just sitting on top of it like this. Then I can just go ahead and hold shift, and I can basically keep doing this until I get a nice and interesting looking cluster. Now, I don't want to have them like too many or too many of them. So I'm going to get started with like a nice small cluster, maybe like one over here and maybe another one probably like over here or something like that. Here, here, something like that. It's a very small cluster, but it will work totally fine. So we got this cluster over here. Now, what you want to do is you do want to make sure that if you, for example, go to your front view, that they are just above the surface, like a little bit above because this is where a pivot will be. And this way, it will always be floating on top of the water. Let's say that we have a small cluster over here, that's totally fine. We can go ahead and we can save our scene, and we can already export this. So we can go ahead and call this lily cluster on the score 01. And then we will make a bigger cluster, and then also one with a flower because these lilies are one of the few things that we cannot actually paint using our foliage to because they are sitting on top of water, but because it is water, it doesn't register as collision. So it will not properly work. And also, yeah, you just want to have free range in terms of placement. So I can go in here. I can go to my textures, New folder, Lily, import our texts over here. And then if we also go ahead and go to our assets, and for some reason, Oh, God. I didn't mean to do that. I press the wrong button. If you accidentally press the button, you need to go to compression settings I said to be a norm map over here. So I accidentally press revert. But anyway, I'm going to import my lilies. Let me just find it. Here we go. Import. I don't know about the size, this size, I did not I expected. It did not really keep track of the size. So what I can do is I can just go ahead and go in here. If you scale this, what will happen is it will try to scale all of them individually. Go ahead and click on Manip over here and then scale them and then they will scale them as a cluster. At which point we can just reexport this. Yeah, it can be actually a bit bigger because yes, here they are small, but they can actually become quite large. So let's just go ahead and scale is even larger. Because once we have this scale done, we can just make sure that everything is going around the scale, also. There we go. Does that look correct? If that is the lily, yeah, you know what that feels correct. Maybe tiny bit smaller, but for the rest, it seems pretty much correct. So, a little bit smaller. Last one, because I'm a little bit picky. And then we can re import, and there we go. Okay, perfect. So now that we have these, all we need do is go into our materials. You can probably just grab like a grass materials like a default, duplicate it and call this lily. Then the other one will be like a lily flower. So we can go in here lilies. Select these pieces over here, subsurface scattering. Let's set this to 0.5. Roughness, it is on the water. So let's set this to like 0.2 to make it it maybe like 0.3. Let's to 0.25 to make it quite shiny. Desaturation, I'm going to set to zero by default for now, and I'm just going to save this. Then open up a model and you guessed it, simply apply your material which is hidden below here. Tara, there we go. Okay, so that's pretty good. I'm going to go ahead and I'm going to set my subsurface to 0.3. I'm going to set my base color a little bit down over here. And then maybe by desaturation to 0.2. 0.50 0.3. Okay, it looks like we had to go for 0.3 after all. Just play around with it a little bit until you get something that looks correct. Like this. Okay. The non map is being a little bit weak, but it can be because these come from texts that come. So they are probably open GL or not. Yeah, I think they are open GL, so we probably just want to flip the normal around. Yeah, here, see that already looks a little bit better. So now, just like that, you just have a few simple lily pads. And then what you can do is we can also create a larger cluster. And then we want to just go ahead and create one that has also like the flower. So the larger cluster is very easy. So what I tend to do is I just do a shift D and then assign these to a new layer, Galdes lily cluster under score 02. Of course, later on, we do need to check this inside of our actual scene to make sure that everything works correctly. So there will be some balancing happening later on. Um Oh, it looks like that. These ones are supposed to be in Lily cluster zero and one. Okay, now it works. And then for these, I tend to just duplicate it. Oh, duplicate it? Yes. Like this, and maybe duplicate it again. And after you've done that, you praise too much. Just want to go ahead and well, first of all, reset all of your pivot points and just do some general movement to make sure that they change up a little bit and do some general rotation. If you want, you can even select all of these, go to rotate. And if you set the rotate to object, they should rotate all individually like this, see. So you can instantly change all of the rotations to make them feel different from the previous one. But then I can go ahead and go here, and sometimes it might be nice to have one lily that is quite far away and just quickly move some stuff around. Here, let's have some overlapping. Like this, you can very quickly create some variations. And once you are happy with it, like this, what you can do is you can go ahead and go in here, and then we can go file export selection, and we can simply export this as Lily cluster 02. Yeah. And one thing I probably want to do is if we go to Lily cluster 01. Oh, no, let's do Lily cluster 02, actually. I want to go ahead and I want to press another Shift D and add these again to their own layer and call this Lily cluster 03. And this is just talking from experience that it is often nice to also have one that has way less lilies so that you can, have some more flexibility in moving them. So here like this, for example. And then if you want, we can do like a minip. We can, like, move this round that they change a little bit. Like this. There we go. And then immediately we also have a lily cluster so 03. So we can export this. Lilly cluster underscore 03 and save. Perfect. So that's an easy one. These are always very easy to do because they are just planes and displacements. Doing the flower, however, is a little bit more annoying, especially because we need to change the texture a bit, but it should still not be too difficult. So we can go ahead and assign our correct material to these. These also do not need an LOD because they are already at their lowest. And then what we can do is we can simply and this is why we want, not that one. This is why we want to always have them slightly above the surface because else else, they would look like, we can't really replicate it good enough, but they would be flickering a little bit. So we got this one, and then we also have this cluster over here. So you can see that whenever we have a really dense patch, we can add these, and then if we want to, for example, fade them out just like we are doing with the grass, we can simply add some of these and then they will kind of fade out like that. So that's pretty much like the idea for stuff like this. You'll see, so you can have some cluster. And then, of course, if you combine this cluster with maybe some extra grass foliage and stuff like that, like we have over here, or you would, for example, combine it with a bunch of these bits, you can see that that blends in really nicely. Here you'll see, so we have these. Then over here, we can, again, like grab a bunch of this stuff. Yeah, like this. Seeing then in here, imagine now also having some flowers and everything, and it will just all look quite nice. We have one overlapping. That's what I mean. So it's because these two are exactly the same. So it is something that I always get really bothered by. So I do want to go in here, and it looks like it is this one over here. So let me just move this up a little bit. There we go. Export cluster two. So yeah, basically fixing any box that we can see, which for these pieces is very often almost nothing. So we just re import this. Okay, perfect. So now you can see now we have our lily clusters over here, and just imagine this being water, basically. So let's go ahead and save Asin. And now the next step is, and I will do this in the next chapter, we will go ahead and create a flower. And once we've done that, yeah, I really like the texture over here, but we simply do not need complicated texts like that because this is an easy foliage tutorial. This is the kind of stuff that you would want to make it look exactly like this for advanced foliage tutorials, but like the cracking and everything. But then I can spend literally 2 hours on just lilies, and that's not what I'm going to do for this. But okay, perfect. That's already starting to look really nice. Let's save sin and let's continue on to the next chapter. 18. 17 Creating Our Lilys Part2: Okay, so now what we're going to do is we're going to work on these flowers over here, and it's sort of like the same basic concept. Only we need to do, a little bit more moving around. If we go to lily cluster 01, for example, you can order the flowers individual, but that would be a little bit overkill. What I like to do is I like to just duplicate my first lily cluster, then go over here and assign the selected objects and then call this lily cluster. Flower, for example, something like that. And since we are creating an entire new lily cluster, we can just as well, reset my pivot, move some stuff around because yeah, that will just add more variation if we need to have this anyway. We can just as well do that. So let me just do something like this. And let's see. I think I will have the flower sitting like probably like one flower like somewhere in here and maybe like another flower. Yeah, let's do something like this. So let's have, one flower here and one flower that is sitting more like in this direction over here. I think that will look nice if we do something like that. So let me just quickly move some stuff around a little bit Yeah, that looks fine. Okay, perfect. So save scene. Now, remember, we have these if we go to, I believe they were mega scans. Oh, God. Oh not. Yes, yes, they must be mega scans. Grass, scrub, swamp, tall grass, butterflower. There we go. And these are the ones that we can basically use for this. So I'm going to go ahead and I'm going to create a new plane. And we basically just need to get a few of these bats. I think I'm going to go for one or two different ones. Yeah, let's do one or two different ones. So let's set this to zero. Let's make this a little bit bigger over here. Assign a new favorite material that's just Lambert. And then we are just going to assign just like we've done before. But this time, we are going to assign the flower texture. So this is the albedo that we want. And then we also want to go to the transparency file open and for that one, we want to get the opste over here. So now we get something like this. So we basically want to use, let's say that we use these two pads over here. On the way, this is the back side. And let's do these two over here. Just to give it a little bit of variation. But honestly, this will be so small that you probably won't ever be able to see much of the variation. But let's just go ahead and cut these out simply by adding some edges over here. And then also at the top and at the bottom, like this, extract the faces and extract the faces. There we go. I'm going to just reset my pivot and what I want to do with this. I do want to make a few changes to this. We are going to change the color later on inside of the engine, so we don't have to worry about that. For this one, let's go ahead and let's turn on preserve vs. Let's make the cube as small as possible. This will make it easier for us to move Now, it's pushed it out a little bit too far. Same over here. Move this down. Come on. This one in. This one down. Okay, there we go. So that's looking good. Next thing, what I'm going to do is I'm going to just go ahead and press Add a pivot, and I want to place my pivot at the point over here, just like you would do inside of speed tree. So we place a pivot here at the point. And actually, you know what? For this one, I just want to move it down, even though the point is not exactly in the same level. Next, what I want to do is I just want to go ahead and I want to add a few segments here. So let's add like I just needs to be very little because we just need to bend it out and in. So let's say, oh, that's interesting. Um Yeah, we probably do need a little bit more geometry for that than I expected. But let's try and see if we can manage with having three edges here and having only one edge over here. That should be enough, I think, but I have to see. So let's do three edges here, and that's like this and one edge along here so that you get this type of grid. And now for these, it is quite easy. So we're basically going to get started with, like, the outside, and then we basically just keep duplicating and then keep moving things around. First of all, what we need to do is we need to prepare the actual leaves. And we can do that in a few ways. So because we only have one edge, in this case, it is easier for us to just do it this. Oh, sorry, make sure to turn off preserve UVs when we are doing this. So we basically move, say, both of these out. So that will give me a little bit of, like, a bend. And yes, you might feel the urge to add more geometry to make it look more logical, but don't forget that we are looking at it from this distance or even further away. So we got these ones. And next stop, we would want to probably do some bending on this. So I'm going to go. And unfortunately, this is a lot easier to do inside of t max, but I'll just do it in here just a little bit more time consuming. Let's go to deform non linear and te bend. And this is why it is a little bit more annoying. First of all, you need to set the curvature. Let's set this to like 20 degrees, and then I need to like do a over here like a snap rotation and rotate it up. And then I need to turn off my low bound to zero. Oh, sorry, it looks like that that is my high bound, over here and then move this down. Now we can see that we have a little bit of bi bending. Let's set this to like a bend of ten degrees. That should be fine. Now, over here, we need to do the same again. So the form non linear bend ten degrees, low bound minus two, high bound, zero. In. Snap, rotate, move back. See, so we are giving it a nice little bit of a bend over here. Now, we should be able to just keep these bands. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to get started by just selecting both of these and duplicating them so that if needed, I can still change my bends around. At this point, you basically want to start working from the center over here. And for the center, yeah, I think we can just lead this into one point. Let's say that I just grab, for example, this point over here. We are going to do something like this. We are going to place these lily pads over here. And let's move one here, and let's do another one here, and I don't know if we need four or if we need more. You can just kind of move this out. So you basically have this lily pad, yeah, I think four is enough, and then you can see that they are basically every other one. So we grab these four. We would then, for example, duplicate them, move them like this, move them up a little bit, and now this probably won't work, but let's see if we can just move it by object. No. Oh, that's nice. It does work. So if we move it by object and find the right axis, we are able to then set a flower like this, and we should be able to just keep doing this. So the only thing is that we might at one point, want to scale down our leaves a little bit, but I'm not sure. They look quite an even scale. So we can have. So then we set our rotate to default. We give it like a normal rotation again. We move this up, and then we set our rotate to object and we just find the right angle and move this up again. At this point, also in Maya, because we have so many overlaying transsparent objects, you can see that Maya's little bit of trouble to just render these out, so that can happen. I'm going to select the bottom ones, and I'm going to just go ahead and I'm going to scale these out a little bit over here. But anyway, so let's select these rotate default. Oh, my rotation is now getting messed up. Let's set the orientation to world over here. Rotate it again, move it up. And now if we set our rotate to object, we need to set our X orientation back to object also. Here we go, so we now find this. And now we are getting really close to having it in, like, the cent so there is a point that I probably do I want to bend? No, yeah, there is, like, a flower inside of here. A, how am I'm going to try and see if I can find a flower on mega scans probably just to make it a little bit nicer. But let's first of all, focus on the actual leaves. So I want to probably just export this once I've done my flower, just to see how it looks. Let's go ahead and just duplicate it again, rotate it. And then in our scaling, sorry, not in our scaling. In our rotation, we can go object, object again. And I think this is probably as far as we want to go. So it looks. It's really difficult to see what it looks like. I'm going to probably move this over here in the point where we are going to plan where we are planning to place it. And then I think I might need to do some random scaling. For example, I can sometimes do some scaling by world and maybe like here move it down or scale it in or something like that, but let's just have a look at it. So we got these pieces over here. We can call this file export selection, lily cluster, underscore flower and export. And then if we're going into unreel we can do the preview. So first of all, let's go ahead in textius lily underscore flour. Import your abido normal and opste and yeah, Abido normal and a paste. We don't need a translucency for this one, I believe, because the translucency would be green, but we are going to make this pink. So we are going to go ahead and first of all, go in assets. And I'm just importing my lily cluster flower over here. Yeah, import. That's totally fine. Drag it in here. Here you can see, like the flower. I'm going to already assign the correct material for this one. And then for the flower, let's just duplicate our lily and just call this lily un score flower. Open this up. And now, what I want to do is I want to go into my lily flower and to change the color. A quick little trick is that we can go down here and set our saturation to zero so that it becomes a gray scale. And then if I assign this to my lily flower, so we have our mask and our normal, and then our subsurface scattering, I'm just going to set to zero so that we do not get affected by that. Then if I go into my lily cluster to make it easier to see, I'm going to art my lily flower over here. And now what I basically want to do is I want to go ahead and first of all, set the roughness to 0.5 or something, and I want to set my color to become like this color that we can see. So if I have a look at this, it looks like it's like a little red color. I think what I need to do is I need to go to my lily flower and set the brightness up. So let's set the brightness up to, like, three. So we basically have full control over that. So just trying to, like, match the color. The colors will not be exactly the same because over here you can see that it goes from pinkish to whitish. And yes, it can be a little bit tricky. So you kind of like need to decide. Right now, the normal map. I don't be honest, I don't really like the look of this. But then again, from a distance, it does look not that bad, I would say, because we just need to remember that we are previewing this, like, from a long distance. But up close, it's not perfect. I don't really like it too much. I think what I'm going to do is I'm first of all, going to just move them down. So if we go to our scene over here, I think what I'm going to I'm just going to select all of these and then deselect the bottom four. Move it down a little bit, then try and deselect another row. But it's really difficult, of course, to see what I'm deselecting at this point. We could turn off our translucency or transparency. But let's say that we have something like this. Okay, so we got that stuff. Now export it. File export selection. This is going to be lily cluster flower. Let's go in here. And let's re import this. But yeah, I don't think I think the general shape is fine, but the flowers are not soft enough right now. Also, let me just quickly play around with my subsurface, even though no, I want to turn it off because then I would need to create another one. I'm going to have a quick look on mega scans to see if I can find a better flower that is a lot softer compared to this one. I think I found one. If we go into text.com and type in flower, we have over here these magnolia flowers which are already pink and they also have the gradient. I think that these would probably work a lot better. So, I need to login. Here we go. And the cool thing is that A, actually, this is a free one. So you can just go for, like, full resolution if you want. So I'm just going to go for nice high resolution of 1024. I know it is way too much, but doesn't really matter. I just want to quickly get this, and we have our Alpha. And the nice thing is that we then also have a pink translucency. So that should work a lot better. Now, you might think, Oh, no, do we need to, like, remake our entire flour, but not necessarily. So if we go ahead and just quickly press H to height, everything but our flour. Now, if we go in here and we just need to quickly, open up our Lambert five, and then we just need to basically replace the color. And now you can find this one in text.com, lily flower, and then we have our bido we need to go ahead and also, of course, replace the translucency, text.com, waterli sorry, lily flower, Alpha over here. Then if you just select all of them and go into your UV editor, you need to select them again, you should be able to get over here as you can see, still our UV, we should be able to simply grab one of these because they are pretty much the same scale or the same shape, we should be able to just nicely place these into a good position so that they are still covering the entire lily. Sometimes it's fine to do a very slight bit of scaling. It's not a perfect way, but it's the quickest way for us to quickly, as you can see, turn this into a nice little flower. Now, unfortunately, this lily over here, it does not actually have a yellow flower. So if we go ahead and maybe go down here, we can try to find a yellow flower or something like that. And we might be able to find something that can go into the center. It's like a pollen thing, but that one is definitely a little bit more tricky. So yeah, here, like this kind of stuff. But maybe let's see if we can maybe go to like tree scanned atlas, and then we should be able to have, like, plants and flowers over here. And we can have extra. If I cannot find something directly, Um, you know what? No. Oh, hey, look at this. We can probably, see this stuff we can probably use. I'm going to go ahead and I kind of want to have a test like one bit. So I might be using this one. We can also use this one, but as you can see, we would need to, like, prop it up. So yeah, let's use this one over here. I'm going to go ahead and call this one Lily underscore Center underscore flower, and I'm just making a folder on the other screen. So let's go ahead and use this one. And honestly, yeah, we can just download, but we really only need probably the Alpha and the normal, but I will download the rest just so that I don't need to change my material. And if we try that out, so that's pretty good. I'm glad that I found that. Let's go ahead and go to plane remove segments, assign material, apply color, and I'm going to show you which one I want to use for this. So I want to use, one of the side views over here. And honestly, just one is enough. I don't need to have multiple variations. That was just for the actual leaves. So here's the Alpha. So I'm going to go ahead and I'm just going to use this one over here. I probably also don't need any extra geometry, so let's just go ahead and extract pass because my plan is to change my pivot to the central rear. It's really small right now, but basically do this. I'm going to move it like this, and then I'm going to set my axis orientation to world. And then I'm just going to go ahead and hold Shift, do this, do this, and do this. You know what? Let's make this a little bit bigger and then hold Shift and then make another one that is smaller that we can push like down here, and that should be more than enough. I'm going to go ahead and I'm going to combine these pieces that they become basically one model, and then I'm going to nicely just place this into the center, and I will make this look extra good inside of unreal, just making it like, really, really bright yellow and stuff like that. Right now it is also very difficult to even see where we are placing this, to be honest. Because it is trying to overlap on top of each other like many, many different times. Let's see. Can I maybe go here? If I go to turn off textitFew, I can sort of see what I'm doing. So that might be a little bit easier. But we are now really pushing our transparency like this. I'm going to now go ahead and I'm just going to show everything, and I'm going to export this again. Water lily class of flour. So this is still taking spicy and long to just make it a little flower, but in the end, hopefully it will look very nice. So we got this stuff over here. Just press done. Next, if we go to our textures, we have our lily flower. And what I'm going to do is I'm going to create a follic called center, and I will, first of all, import my center. And I just need to quickly go into my norm map, and I need to flip the green channel for this. And now we have our lily flower. Which I will also import, and as soon as I replace it, I will remove the old ones. So we can go in here, lily flower, flip green channel, go to our materials. And if we just open up our lily flower over here, we have our lily, our flower, and I'm also going to have another duplicate that I call lily underscore center. Throw that in here. So now all we need to do is we just need to replace these. So first of all, let's make this color white again. Let's go into our lily flower, and let's just replace these with the correct ones. Translucent C to like 0.5. And then what we can do is we can go into a color and we can make them even here. I think something like this is quite a nice color. And now we can go into the lily center. Base color of normal translucency. And this one we can make a really bright yellow. So there we go. That does definitely look a lot better. And then, of course, from a distance, this is what you will see. So that is starting to look better. I'm going to go ahead and now inside of Maya, let's just quickly hide these again. I'm going to do a combine. Well, first of all, let's do a duplicate so that we have a backup, and then I'm going to just combine everything like this and maybe also remove my history. And now I'm going to make them a little bit big. So we are going to have, if I look at it from a distance, like one, and we want to have them just kind of like sitting in between them. So if we go in here, let's go back to my taxit el because ls I cannot see. So here, sitting in between, and then another one probably sitting like over here. Maybe this one we can go ahead and make a little bit smaller. Maybe we can give it a little bit of a rotation. There we go. That should do the trick definitely for something that is actually going to be a very small detail. But now you also know how to create pretty basic flowers. Later on, as a bonus material, I will also go ahead and go over how to create some ferns, if I say that correctly. And what you can do with that, it's pretty much the same thing as with the flower. But for now, let's go ahead and go in here. And re import era. So now we have our lilies. And now you can imagine that if I go ahead and, like, remove some of these and throw some lilies back in here, here and then maybe also try to make it so that it kind of fits in between here like this and stuff like that. You can see that we can very quickly get quite a nice and interesting look. Awesome. So those are now also done. This means that in the next chapter, we will go ahead and just create some scrubs or some bushes that we will place like above the ridge later on and also just in general because what we're going to do is like a bonus material, since this tutorial is going quite well, and I want to show you a few more things that I did not really expect that I wanted to show, and that is that we will also create a very small forest scene where we will basically be using all of these plants and everything, but we will be using them outdoor. So that's why I just want to go ahead and also make sure that all of those other pieces are looking correct. So let's go ahead and continue with this in our next chapter. 19. 18 Creating Our Shrubs Part1: Okay, so what we're going to focus on now is we are going to make a few different types of bushes or shrubs. So for this, we are going to go back into Spetree and we want to just go ahead and create a new file and just create a blank scene over here. Now. So far shrubs, I'm going to go ahead and do the same thing as that we've done before. I will make one that is very dense and one that is, like, less dense so that we can have a fade out effect. And also just in general that it does not look too strong. So you can see, for example, over here, these, they are really not dense. They are just like some small little bits and everything. Now, we will make them a little bit more than this. But yeah, so I just kind of like want to get, like, a nice balance between the two. And I also want to go ahead and also be able to use these for a forest scene. So let's have a look. We have over here two textures. This one and This one. Okay. Do we need both of them? I wonder. I wonder if we need both of them. I'm going to go ahead and I'm just going to see. So let's go into our materials. New and two materials. And we will just call this Shub on score 01. And this one. Swap on score 02. Okay, that's press okay. I'm going to get started by just adding the first one in here. Normal opacity. Yeah, that should be fine. Make sure to make it two sided. Okay, so that is that one. I just I sometimes like to press Edit so that I can, like, look at them up close. So we probably can already get away with just one, but let's just see how it looks if we like two of them. So here's number two. So we can just go ahead and add those also. 12 and three. Then if we just quickly press Edit so that I can look upwards Ah, that was the case. That was the case. So we had two different ones, and I was going to decide which one I was going to use or to maybe use both of them. To be honest, I actually like this one more. So I think I will actually start with focusing on this one. So same basic concepts. We have this piece over here. We just go on and go ahead and we are going to see one, two, two, three, four, five. Let's do five or six versions. So art one, two, three, four, five. Now, let's do one more like this. And for these ones, they should be quite easy. So let me just press Edit on the first one. Let's say that is this one over here, and you just want to kind of fit this in here. But you do want to give it like a few more segments like this so that they fit a little bit nicer and that they are not just like a plain. So something like this, and then just add a little bit of testlation. I'm going to go for something like this. So we are actually going to have a lot of those, so we definitely need LDs for this. I'm going to make the first version will hipoly and then the later versions we are just going to go ahead and nuke out a lot of geometry using LODs. But basically, for now, the focus will just be on nicely fitting this in. RtmxorGeometry. That's a little bit too much. Here we go. So that we can do some bending and everything because yeah, in order to really fill this up, we need to place a lot of these. So we have one Th one. This is quite interesting. So we can always just change the angle quite drastically like that. And let's see. I'm going to make this one fit here. This one over here and this one. Let's do this. That should be fine. Let's move out a little bit more. There we go. A little bit of geometry. And after this, we are pretty much going to make it the same as it is in real life in the beginning, and then we will optimize the bit. So we got this one. I'm going to do this one, which, although this one is really dense, I think I'm not going to do that one, just because if I do this, it will stand out too much, I feel like. So let's just go ahead and instead, go for something like this. Here we go. That's late. And now we are just going to use some smaller ones also. Just make it look extra nice. So let's grab this one over here, and then let's also grab like this one. Oh, it looks like my pivot point is already in the right direction, so that's nice. Here we go. And finally, this one. Here we go. Okay. So those are now all done, so that should be fine for now. Okay, making this, it's almost actually the same as a tree, you could say. But instead of the trunk, we are going to have, like, a bunch of trunks and then branches to that and then we place our leaves on this. And those branches we will later on just simply turn into actual jom tree. Now for the branches, there is one thing that is a little bit tricky. Let's have a think about that. What I'm thinking about is I'm worried that the branches will be too hipoly even when we turn them into planes. However, what you can do is you can if you want, often, let me just quickly go to textures.com. There are often also textures over here and they are literally called branch, and you should be able to find them in here they are empty branches, but I'm not sure if I can find them in here. They look like this, but then they are empty. And you can often use those here like this one. So they are empty, and basically what you can do with that is you can use it as like a placeholder, but it will not look as good. So this is great for trees if you want to make very optimized trees. But I think in this case, we will just see how it looks in geometry first. So we get started by adding a trunk like this, and we are just again, going to really make them a lot smaller. So let's first of all, set the radius, like quite a bit thinner. And then let's go into spine and that's set the length to be like three or something like that. Or maybe like four to make it a little bit bigger over here. Okay. So we got that. Let's go back into our radius. And it's tone this down. I'm also going to not make it as like tone down over here. So we got this one. Now, we need to mess this up big time. Like we cannot have these ones to look straight because we want to have the bush to be quite irregular and it just bit all over the place. So if we go in and probably in our spling we need to go here in our noise. Oh, I think we need actually a few more segments in this. We can later also once again, replace this with just planes if we want to. Let's go to segments, and let's give the length over here. A few more segments. You can see it happening over here. So I'm just giving the length a few more segments. And then if I go in here, I just want to kind of mess around with a bunch of stuff. So we also have a parent curl. Let's see here. Oh, that actually works quite well if we do like a random parents girl like this, and then we just want to go down. So we have our early noise, which I'm going to set my threshold quite low so that the early noise kind happens ever. And then we have also our late noise over here. And then we can all set like the turbulent. So basically, it looks really stupid right now, but trust me, it will work later on. The only thing I'm going to do is I'm probably going to go in my generate, and I'm going to set a size a little bit smaller over here. And now, this is where it comes in. So when we set a bunch of numbers like this and we then push them out a little bit over here, what we can do is actually know we want to keep them quite close, but we are going to do like an angling. So let's see if we go to a Mm. Let's go to A because I cannot find it because I forgot again where it was. So we want to have our angles. So we have our length, yes, radio, but these are our segments here, length. Yes, orientation. I want to see if I can make my orientation stick out quite a bit like this. And if you want, you can also do a little bit of rolling. Now, we are sticking this out a little bit more. Then what I want to do is I want to go ahead and I should also have my radius near. I'm going to make my radius quite a bit smaller like this. And then if we go to generate, I'm going to probably push my last a little bit closer to 0.01, probably. So we got something that looks really silly like this. But the goal is to add more branches to this so that we have a support for our leaves. So if we now right click geometry to select it and we go ahead and we grab, I think we can just do normal leaves. Yeah, the scattered leaves, they basically have already some settings, so that might be nice. So scattered leaves just have a bunch of settings already applied. But oh, what am I doing? I don't mean leaves. I mean branches. So we want to go like, for branches like twigs, maybe. Yeah, I don't know. Let's just do it manually. So these are almost like presets, but we can also just go in here, and here we have some branches. So we got these branches over here. I'm going to get started by setting the number up quite a bit. I want to definitely go ahead and set the first to go down to zero, and then the last. Yeah, the last can probably be like one because we want to have this Bush gar cover everywhere. We don't want to have a lot of branches sticking out. Next, you probably guessed it. We just need to go at them. We need to lower down the length quite a bit over here so that we get, something like this. And honestly, at this point, we kind of need to add our leaves so that we can actually see if it is working the way that we want to or if we need to make any specific changes because I still don't have completely in my mind yet how I wanted to look, so I just want something that fills space. That's what I know. So I'm going to go ahead and I can go in here. And now we can try it out. We can try to go to leaves because I never really used this, but it is quite nice. So we're going to go scattered. And here you can see that it basically just scatters around our leaves. The numbers might be a little bit intense, so let's go ahead and tone it down. And let's just apply our material. So here you can see that it looks not very nice, but we will work on that right now because right now it is just like a massive clump of foliage, which I do not really like. But having this, what we can do is, first of all, let's go to our skin and how many one, two, three, four, five, six, one, two, three, four, five, six. We can go in here and just set all of our meshes, one, two, three, 45 and six over here. So we set our meshes. That's fine. Now what I'm going to do is I want to make them definitely, like a lot smaller. So let's play around with our size a little bit. Let's have a look and see how it works. So I also want to have everything more condensed. So I think what I'm going to do is I'm going or play around with the length. Or like others so first of all, let's go ahead and do this and change the scale to something you want. I think I'm going to go for 0.8. Then in the orientation, I'm going to go ahead and let's see. Do I want to fold? No, I don't mind the folding. A line. I do think I quite like Yeah, here they are single leaves. So, of course, we cannot really do single leaves like this because we have multiple leaves. And maybe that's prom maybe I should not go for multiple leaves. That can very well be true, but that it would become very expensive in terms of geometry if we go for single ones. So they are kind of like sticking outwards a little bit. So we do want to set the align to always stick outwards a bit. Next, what we can do is we can add some folding, some curling. Yeah, I think I want to curl them down always like a little bit. You can do, a little bit of twisting. And now what I'm going to is I'm going to just condense this way down. So because right now it just looks silly with branches like this. Let's get started by going into your trunk. Let's set the line of a trunk a little bit less, most likely, which we can find in spine, start angle. There we go. So we are setting this quite a bit less over here. Next, I'm going to go ahead and I'm probably going to set my noise down a little bit. So here we have our early noise. Let's see our late noise over here. Let's set our late noise down a little bit. Okay, so we got that stuff done. Next stop is going to be to go into our branches. And in here, I just want to play around a little bit more with my length to keep it a little bit more condensed over here. Um, and I'm going to actually set my length lower at the very tips, probably. Another thing that I'm going to do is I'm going to go into generate and I'm going to set my last down probably a little bit. So I want to have this a little bit more condensed so that we have a bush like this, and, the first, we cannot really go below zero, that's fine. So I'm having this more condensed. And then, of course, I do have my branches over here, which I do not like that they are sticking out. But what we might be able to do is if we go to our trunk, you can often go up here to break, where are you Uh, let's see, Spine, I think it is in spine. Ig ag pun noise junk brake. There we go. And we can set, like the chance to 100%. And then we can here, see. So we can basically minimize and break a bunch of these branches off like this. And then you can also just play around with your seat until you get something favorable like over here. So we are basically reducing the amount of branches that we have. And because we set the chance to one, they will most definitely break, except for maybe one of them, like you can see over here, but that should not be too big of a deal because you can always, if you want, click on Node Hello. Why doesn't it allow me to select? Come on. For some reason, it does not allow me to select it. It doesn't matter, I will fix that later on. So, we now have this bush over here. So this is like, quite a dense one. Let's go ahead and go into our leaves and first of all, tone down the number of leaves that we have so that we can kind of see what we are doing. So right now, we are we are going a little bit too high, and it's not going out enough. So if I go ahead and just assign my leaves again, and I think two or yeah, maybe three, maybe three, then let's go into our trunk, go to generate, and let's set our last here, let's stick it out a little bit more like that, and then let's go into our spine. And it's tone down our length a little bit because I want to have this to be more of like a smaller push over here. Okay. So that is looking I really like a little bit better. But then, again, we still have a lot of leaves in the center, which I'm not the biggest fan of. You can see over here and also like the scale. I am not really like a big fan of the scale. So let's go into our skin. Let's see if we can tone down the scale a little bit more. Toe down the scale, even if it means that you'd like me to add some more leaves. So I'm going to tone down my scale like this. And sometimes also look at it from the side so that you can kind of see what you're doing. Okay, so now I'm going to go into my orientation over here, and I just want to play around a little bit more like my align two folding, maybe a little bit of vertex folding down here. And maybe also unlike the Y axis, let's give it a bit of some randomness, like this. And it also reminds me that it can also go to the size scalar and at the very top bits and the bottom bits, I can probably make the size a little bit smaller here, top and bottom bits. Sorry, I mean at the tips. So I'm doing this one, actually. This one, I don't want to. Like at the tips, I want to make everything like a little bit smaller and play around with that a bit more. Next, let's go and play around with our number a little bit more until we get something that looks a bit better. Okay, so we now got the numbers, right? Now we need to again go back into the trunk and see if we can maybe, push this in a little bit more over here. And what I'm also going to do just to kind of hide everything is I'm going to add a new bark material. So let's rename this and call this bark. And then we can just add the bark that you already have for now. So mega scans, bark and just drag this one in. Over here. And throw this onto your trunk, replace branch material also. There we go. Okay, so we have this stuff now. An easy one that I can see is that the radius is too much. So I can go to my skin. And this one does take it simply takes a little while to get this white. So the radius is looking good now. So I'm happy with that. I am going to go ahead and I'm going to set my let's see if this is a bush over here right now, I don't really like the look of it yet. Let's go ahead and let's go into my length, let's first of all, give it some randomness in our length over here. And also definitely like at the outer sides, try to make it a little bit smaller. There we go. So we got some randomness in our length. Next, we had not our orientation, but we had, like, our curling over here. This one was fine. I think it was the right one that is, like, really intense, so I want to probably, like, play around with that a little bit. And I really do not like what we have over here, like our length. So I think instead, what I'm going to do is I'm going to tone my length down quite a bit over here in our actual trunk and then go to the branches and then reset the last two ones that it is sitting at the top and tone down the length a little bit more. So this is just a bunch of balancing. It just takes a while because it is speed tree. There's a lot of settings. It takes a little while to get everything exactly the way that you want to. And sometimes it's also good to actually preview this inside of speed tree. So for now, what we can do is we can go ahead and go in here. And let's set let's see our start angle. Yeah, I don't really mind my start angle. I think we now have too many leaves again. Yeah, let's do something like this. Okay, so that's looking fine. Honestly, I kind of like need to see what it looks like inside of Unreal at this point because it might look really bad here. I think I still want to get my leaves to three. It might look really or not really bad, but it might look off here, but this might not be the case inside of Unreal. Also, one thing that you can actually do if you ever want to, is you can always, if you're not completely happy with it, just simply overhear press generation and just randomize it to see if you can get a push that you like. So if I go ahead and do this, here, this one, for example, I quite like this one. So that's also an easy way to just work with this. So, let's say that we now have this. Let's go ahead and first of all, do a save us because we spent a surprising amount of time on this already. And then swap underscore 01, is going to call it like that. And what I'm going to do is I'm just quickly going to export this, and then we are just going to basically try it out. We'll see how it looks. If it looks really bad, then of course, we will just in next chapter, we will revise this and else we will continue in next chapter to add variations. It all just depends. Let's go ahead and quickly add all of this to our flower cluster. And now let's go through the process of importing our swab 01 over here. A J rotated. It's going to outliner, copy name, ungroup, paste name, add it to a layer, give the layer name. And now let's see, height, height. I probably want to get it roughly the same height as that one. So if we just quickly turn it on, I can see that my height needs to be around five again, maybe even six. Yeah, let's do six. There we go. So six. And now we can just go ahead and export this. And I know that we still have our branches and everything. Don't worry about that. We will optimize this later on. But for now, I just first of all, want to actually see what I'm doing. And it will look very different inside of unreal probably. So let's go ahead and go in here and let's say that we have sitting again with the grass and everything. First of all, textures. I'm going to call this one swap underscore 02 because that's the one that I called it before. Import. Quickly grab your. I think we want to have probably our IV for this. Let's duplicate our IV. Swap underscore 02. Drag in the usual set the color back to white, save assets and import over here. There we go, let's import all. Let's open it up. And then in our materials, we want to have our swap 02, and we want to have our simple ivy bar when our ivy bar probably is not the right one. Yeah, we probably like a non bag. But for now, let's just throw on the Ivy bag. We can change that later on. I just want to quickly see. So here we go if we place this here, see. So that already does look quite a bit different if you would place it in the corner, for example, like this. Now, first thing I see is yes, so it is really dense in my gumtre. You can often go in here and there is a setting that sometimes fixes it, and where is this setting? You can find it in, I believe general settings, generate mesh distance field for this mesh. Is that the one? Generate mesh distance field? No, I thought this was like a different one. Like, we can turn this on, but I can't remember. Maybe it wasn't like our import settings. There is, like, a setting over here or maybe it was generate. It has to do with, like, fixing the density of your distance fields over here. But I guess maybe in build settings. Oh, yeah, here, build settings, two sided field distance field generation. That was the one. If we apply that, that should also give us a better result. And now if we simply go ahead and go into our swap, we can get started by setting the subsurface to one. And I'm just going to press G, and I want to increase definitely like the color. So, let's grab this color, set the brightness to like two or maybe even three. And then go back in here, set the desaturation to 0.4. Like this. Okay. So in the next chapter, we do need to do quite a bit of balancing, but you can see that it does work. A few things that I want to do. I want to avoid this ugly look where it feels like they are not properly assigned to our branches and everything. That's something I want to fix the density of our branches. Right now, I cannot look through it at all, which I do want to keep in some areas, but like form a distance in general, it does work pretty decently. So let's go ahead and go over this in our next chapter. 20. 19 Creating Our Shrubs Part2: Okay, so let's continue with our swabs or bushes over here. And yeah, this one is definitely less straightforward than, for example, grass or this kind of stuff or even ivy, because, yeah, you kind of need to play around with it. So if I have a look at this, I don't really mind these bits too much, although I want to pinch off the sides. So we are now basically going to go back and forth. Non stop. So we basically go in here and we just keep fixing stuff. So the first thing I want to fix is I want to go into my trunk, and I want to then go, Oh, get rid of this. Let's go into my scale. And I'm then going to go ahead and in the graph of my scale, I'm just going to Oh, hello. Maybe maybe I need to do it in my radius. I think that might be better. Let's go into our skin radius. Here, we do it a little bit already. Let's add a point here and then have this like in the side. Yes, like that. And I'm going to go ahead and let's see yeah, that should work. I still don't really like having these pieces over here, but I get that I might not be able to do much about that, except for, of course, clicking on it and then going into Node, which still gives me a strange bug. Maybe the bug is when I hide my branches that it works better. Here, then it works. So I don't know why, but you should be able normally to is down, but it seems like on a way, it's because we are back in generator boat. There we go. Here you see? I don't know what this is. It might be like, just a small problem or anything like that, because you can see that it does allow us to move the trunk. So I guess that the trunk maybe has less settings, although I cannot remember that because there's no scale settings anymore. So I'm just going to avoid it. Sorry about that. I don't know exactly why it is doing that, but, yeah, we just need to work with what we got. Okay, I'm going to go in my leaves, and I'm going to make my branches quite a bit less. I'm going to go for like two. And then if we just go and have a look. So if I look at it from this side, Yeah, I'm You know what I'm going to do? I'm going to do it. Probably a bit different. If I look at this, I can never see the large ones, so it might actually be beneficial for us to simply hide them. Ooh, actually, no, that will not go over well down at the bottom, does it? That's unfortunate. Then we can always if we want, we can cut them off inside of Maya. That would probably be the east thing. Also, these branches, they don't go down very far down here. So let's see if we go to generate on a branch. Oh, no, I just set to the first. So maybe if I just push this down to get, like a more favorable position like this. And then the last, yeah, we also just want to push this up a little bit. There we go. Okay. I don't like this too much. This is a really tricky one to get right. So let's say that we stay with this for now and I will just throw on the generate later on. The next thing that I want to do is I probably do not want to do the same as with our IV where we need to go on like a collision unless that maybe looks good. So let's try it. Collision and then leave and let's say this to 200. Here see? I think even if I go like 500, it would not be able to pop it does look nice in a way, but I'm not sure if it is able to properly catch every little bit. But it does look nice because it looks more organized like this. Another thing that I want twice, whatever I just add my leaves to my branches over here, because technically, these are also branches. So I just wanted to see. It does mean that it gets extended out less, so maybe in the end, it might not be as nice compared to this. No. Okay, so let's have a look. I quite like the collision in a way. I'm going to go ahead and I'm going to so my Oh, that is really annoying that we are not able to probably change that stuff. I'm going to basically, I want to push my last down a little bit so that they are not sticking out too far. So let's say that we have something like this. It might seem like there's a lot of gaps in here, but if you look at it in real, you can already see that it is really hard to look through it because of the shadow. So I hope that the same will happen right now. So let's do this one as a prototype. Let's do a yeah, okay, let's just do a safe. If if this does not work well, then I would probably end up recording this or re recording this. So then you guys will not even see what I'm telling you right now. But if you do see this, it worked out. So just know that. Let's go ahead and that's now going to Maya, so six. Let's keep that in mind that we set this to six, and I'm just going to do this for import or very fast. So we have this one. Six, copy ungroup, deletes based Uh, excuse me. Oh, it's because the scaling went wrong for some reason. Six, I said. Thank you. Let's try it again. In group based, rotate, assign, expos, so it goes quite quickly. Now I cannot see those branches anymore. That's interesting. I wonder I wonder where they are because I did not hide them, but we'll see. So let's go ahead and go in here. And we basically just go to ascarp and I'm going to press G to basically turn off my selection, and I just want to re input and see what it does. Let's just press Done. Okay, so that does look a little bit better. So as you can see here, it's a little bit more organized, and these branches do actually look like they are kind of stretching out like this. Now, I just want to see if I even need do I need the branches? Let's hide. Yeah, I do need the branches because else it will be too obvious that we do not have those. The sticking out is looking good, so I'm happy with that. So from a distance, also, how does this read? Pretty good. And if I just very quickly, also try it out with our painting because that looks often a little bit better. So if we go in here and set the scaling to like 0.7 and 1.3, and the density, I'm just going to set to like 300 for now. Let's go ahead and go to paint. You see? So this is what I mean because the distance field shadows work differently. Okay, so that is looking pretty good. So when we cluster it, it does look quite nice. As a stand alone, it does not look as nice. You really want to like clusters, but we are going to have another version of this. So the only thing I would say when having this is I'm going to move them a little bit closer together. And I think we are then ready for this one. So I'm going to go in here, go to my trunk, and I'm going to set the last a little bit closer together. Oh, God, that is way too close. Let's do like 0.2. Maybe like 0.3. And then maybe set the branches to like 12. Maybe if we add a few more and then it's computing all of the collisions. That's why it is taking song. Okay, I think that does the trick. Down here, we do have a few leaves that are sticking out. Now, you can always, of course, try to go in here and set the first back to zero. But the thing is that it then often does not Oh, here, this time it is even worse. I push this up a bit, but it doesn't really matter. We can remove these inside of Maya if it is needed. So okay, so we got this one. I'm going to make one last thing. I'm going to set the number of branches to 17, probably, just to fill it up a little bit more. Hopefully, at least. Let's do 25, actually. Let's fill it up quite a bit more. Give the second over here. Okay, see? So now it becomes a little bit difficult to see through them. So we got this stuff. Now, definitely, if you can see over here, we have 1.4 million. So our leaves right now are 1.4 million, which is an insane number. Oh, no, wait. It seems like an insane number, I mean, because of the collision. So our branches are good. So what we are going to do now is I'm probably going to leave these as geometry because they are quite clearly visible still, and I think they are quite an important part. However, for these other branches, we can use the ivy stuff. So we have a bark over here. That's fine. We are just going to go ahead and create a new material, and we will call this one branch. And in our branch material, we are going to just add the same as our ivy material. So let me just navigate to it. So here we have our ivy bark and our ivy. Come on, normal over here. So that is fine and two sided. And then if we go ahead and go into our meshes, we want to go probably add it on this mesh or not. Just go in here and we have our branch cut out. That's this one, right? Yes, branch cutout. So that's the correct one. Let's just go ahead and navigate to it. Yes, I want to go Ivy. Thin branch. I think that's the one. Yes, that's the one I need. No, I do not need to find LLD meshes. Let's go ahead and set this to what is it? C U C minus up left handed. That looks like to be the one. And once we've done that, we can go ahead and go in here, and I'm just going to hide this because it is bugging out a little bit. So we can go into our branch. We can go ahead and go into our skin and set this to be spine only or spine spine spine only. And then I'm going to right click geometry and then like a mesh. And the mesh is going to be a branch branch cut out. Okay, so that does this one. And then if we just like add some small changes, first of all, set the radius to be quite a bit thinner. And then what I want to do is I also want to go ahead and go in here and just pinch down the ends quite a bit. Let's see. So we have those spines ready. The ghost now they are only on five tris or 5,000 instead of 21,000. Is there anything else I need to do? Yeah, so apparently, these pieces over here, they do not actually work with these specific bunches. So let's just see if we now have also our leaves on Come on, compute. Thank you. Yeah, here, see. So the branch are still there. So if you go up close, you are still able to see them, but they will not take an insane amount of geometry. So we got that stuff done. Over here, these ones, yeah, they're low poly enough. If you want, you can always go to segments and set, for example, the radial segments to be a little bit less, if I set these, for example, to like two. They should give me a lesser amount, but it becomes a little bit difficult to see? So they should give me a lesser radial amount over here. But anyway, we will be working with our LODs inside of Unreal for this. So I'm going to save my scene, and let's just call this one done. So I'm going to go ahead and export this again one last time. Yes, I want to replace it. Going here. So six, keep that in mind. Import. This one, I'm going to go ahead and I'm going to scale this to be six. There we go. Rotate it up. Copy name, ungroup. It's quite annoying that it always groups but, okay? I guess it can also be handy in some cases, and then we are just going to quickly repot this over here. Save scene, go into unreal. In real, what I will do is, Yeah, we have these ones over here. Let me just paint in, like, a few more because it will simply update as soon as we paint in. So if we now go ahead and go down here, we can right click reimport, and it should also update that. And then the branch material, we just want to press done, here, see? So it's updated. And now it's harder to see through, but also as a stand alone, it is working quite nicely, see? So that's kind of like what I was after. So we need to do is we just need to grab our ivy bark and just throw this into our branch material so that even up close, it still shows all of these little branches and all of this fidelity while not having a huge amount of geometry. I don't know how much we have over here around 8,008 to 9,000 triangles. Then once we do, of course, LODs that will be reduced quite a bit. That's looking pretty good. We got that one, and if you want, you can now also create one that has way less stuff. We still have time left, let's do that. That is less dense. That's really like a fade out. We're going to make it smaller, less dense and stuff like that. Save this one and then as soon as we've done that, do a saves as a scrub 02. Pretty much at that point, all we need to do is temporarily just hide the leaves because they are too expensive. Then if we go to our trunk, we can go to generate. I'm going to set this probably to seven Hello. It's there we go. Seven, bit of difficulty. Let's go spine that set the absolute to maybe 0.8. Okay, 0.9 because we can always do a little bit of scaling. Then I probably also want to set my radius to compensate for this to 0.008, seven. And now if I quickly unhide my leaves and let it generate It doesn't generate Cam on. There we go. Okay, see here. So we have quite a thinner one, that's fine. I'm going to probably move my leaves down a little bit for this one. Let's do 0.7 again, just to push them down a bit more. It is almost the same as sinking them, only sinking them. We are not moving along the spine, but we are actually just pushing inside of the spine. But, okay, so that seems like quite a bit less dense. And lastly, I'm going to go to my trunk, and I'm probably just going to go ahead and do like one quick randomizer in a generation. Oh, God, I should have turned off my leaves for this because it's way too slow with the leaves. Let's press height. Trunk, and let's til it again. Let's see. This one. This one. Let's do this one, but let's push it maybe, like, a little bit closer. So let's set the last 20.02. And now let's unhide our leaves again and let's see how that looks. Yeah, here, see. So it's really like one of those bushes that are just started to grow. So they just started to grow. They start to get their leaves. And speaking about just starting to grow, if you want, you can set the size scalar of your leaves to like 0.7, for example, to make them a little bit smaller to really again, put emphasis, maybe even 0.6, that it is quite a young plant, something like this. And this is scrub number two, so we can save. We can go at and we can export this. And then we also have this completed. So yeah, 02, that's fine. Okay. Now, if we go in here, I just want to go Oh, no, one, one, one program. This one. We can go ahead and we can import number two. Once again, we can still just set this to six in terms of scale. Rotate this nine degrees. And then all we need to do is copy name. Paste the name and assign it to a layer once again with the same name. There we go. So that is that one, and you can see difference between the two. So it's quite a big difference, but that's what I wanted. And now we can just export it. And because all of our materials are already set up, that's always nice, so that all we need to do is just do some assigning and then we are ready to go. So I'm going to go in here. I'm going to go exports to a real swap 02 import drag it in here. Open it up. I can see that I have again a selection bag, but that's already fixed. So 02. Where Oh, wait. I just used my IV bar for this one, didn't I? I think I just used the IV bar for both of them. Let me just double check. I don't know if it matters. We can see if it matters or not. You see, so I use both of them. So let's just see if that actually matters or because it looked totally fine, because it is so dark. That's probably it because you cannot really see it because it is so dark inside of it, that it seems to be totally fine, see? Even though it does not look very good up close. But honestly, I'm just going to leave it. If it saves an entire texture, so it saves an entire base color, normal and roughness, then I'm happy with that. And here you can see this one. So that's also looking pretty good. And also with, like, occlusion, it is not as intense, so I quite like that. And this would be, for example, used. If we, for example, have a large amount of bushes, we can go in and we can, for example, duplicate these and, like, fade them out and maybe have, like, just like some smaller ones like this. Maybe actually make this one, a little bit bigger. So that's how you would use these ones. And also, they are just in general, they are here for variation. They can add to this variation over here so that if I go in here, what you can always do is you can always add the second one also and set this one also to like 0.7 by 1.3 and density 300. Because whatever we have activated, it will paint. So right now we have both of these activated. So if I go ahead and I just quickly unpaint this just to show you, if I now start painting, it will use both of these. So if I now paint, you see, it is going to and that's maybe like a bit too dense, but it is going to use both of them at the same time, which once again gives you a bunch of variation in here. You see, This like the thinner ones. And here's a thick one and then stuff like that. So that's all looking pretty good. You can imagine having this along with, like, trees and everything, and then it will blend in quite nicely. Okay, perfect. So we have that stuff now also done in the next chapter. What we'll do is we will take a quick detour and we will create some ferns, which is just like a quick plant. I want to do that. After that, we will actually do another pass where we start by implanting everything that we've made so far into our tunnel project. And once that is done, we will continue on to the more bigger foliage pieces like trees and also how to create foliage materials. So that's the plan for now, so let's go ahead and continue with this in our next chapter. 21. 20 Creating Our Fern Part1: Okay, so in this chapter, I want to go over on how to create a fern plant. And this is quite a classic one. It's these ones over here. So it's a really classic plant to make in tri because it's probably a very easy one. And because it is an easy one, I'm going to mix it up a little bit just for the sake of this citoil and I'm going to combine both Maya and Spetree for this. So what we're going to do is we are basically going to download a texture over here from mega scans. Then inside of Maya, we are going to create our leaf meshes. And then what I want to try and do is inside of spit tree, I want to, of course, not ty, we will do, place the leaves, and then we will also place different levels of the leaves with different angles, which basically allows us to very quickly generate and randomize fern plants. So that's a lot quicker. You can also, of course, do it completely in Maya just using bend modifiers and some twist modifiers and just moving it around. But if you then want to make a change, of course, it will not be as quick. So let's go ahead and go in here, and let's see. So yeah, I quite like the classic ones that go into, like, a point, which seem to be like these ones over here. So let's just have a look and see which ones I like most. I think this one looks pretty good. But let's just always have a quick look. Like, this kind of stuff looks also quite interesting, but let's go for a more classic one. Mm, Oh, this one. Maybe or this one. Wow, MgSkes has a lot of these. These ones are actually also pretty good, but you can see, there are apparently a lot of different types of ferns in the world, which, of course, makes sense. So I'm kind of deciding between this one over here or we can go with this one over here. I think I'm going to go for this one. Where are you? No, I lost it again. Am I so blind? Alright, here. I am blind, yes. So here we go. I do not think eight K resolution two K is more than enough for plant. So let's go ahead and just do a download on this. Hello? Okay, let me pass the video because it does not want to download. I got it. Now it's working. So let's just go ahead and let's grab albedo, normal pasty. We still did not use the roughness, did we? Or did? Maybe. I forgot. But let's just go ahead and just add these pieces. That is all totally fine. And now, what I want to do is I want to go ahead and go into Maya, and we can do the same thing as before. And the reason I like to make the leaves inside of Maya in this case is because what we can do is we can make the jom tree very clean and also quite optimized. So that's why I just want to do it in here. Because inside of Spettry, of course, you have less control over the actual segments and the line flow of your geometry. So let's grab a classic plane over here. Let's make it a little bit bigger. I said let's do zero. But after this, it should be quite easy. We are going to use a few different leaf modifiers, but you'll see what I mean with that. I'm going to assign a material. Let's open up the color, file, and I'm going to go to my fern albedo. And if I also go to my transparency over here and grab my opacite there we go. Easy, does it? Now, I think I want to use do I want to use all four or all six of them. I think I'm going to use these five of them, else it will be a bit like quite a bit of work. Of course, it's no Pom if it is a bit of work, but in the tutorial, I'm trying to avoid it. But I would recommend, if you are doing this, of course, on your own time for portfolio project or something like that, it is much easier if you simply spent a little bit of extra time to make sure that you get enough variation out of things. So for this one, I'm going to just simply use my CAT tool. To do that. It does not really matter for now. We are going to clean up, but I need to select this and I need to extract the faces and do the same for all of these. Strike faces over here. Now, what I like to do with these kind of lens is I do like to fit my plane a little bit closer. So I like to, like, cut pieces off so that it fits a little bit closer to the shape. This will often make your geometry a little bit cleaner and also more optimized because still this rendering that we have all this empty space rendering is more expensive than actually doing the extra additional geometry. I don't know why all of these are all of a sudden in Jesus, look at this. I don't know how they managed to do that, but they're all in different groups, which is a bit strange. Let me just quickly clean this up because I don't like the look of that. There we go. Okay, so basically, what I mean is I'm going to go at select everything, quickly reset my pivot. Then I want to basically move my planes to the very point as far as they can go like that. And I'll just do that like every single one. And then what we're going to do is we are going to basically use a cau to slice off different pieces. And after that, by the way, for this one, we can probably just do like a target welt like this, see? And then move this. After we've done the target weld, we will slice them up, and then we will clean up the jom tree. And once that is done, we can just prepare them for export to speed tree. Yeah, so I just need to warm up with my talking again because this morning time of recording this. So I just woke up. That's the power of editing for you guys, it might seem like one continuous strain, but for me, this is day four, I think, Day four or five of recording. Yeah. So we got these pieces done, and now if we just go ahead and go to your cut tool we can simply press a cut like that. Press a cut like this. Be a little bit careful that I don't cut off any nice little bits. Another one like this, another one like this. And then you can basically just delete this kind of stuff over here. And now the way that we would make this kind of yum tree, so it needs to be able to bend and curl and everything. What I tend to do is, first of all, I tend to actually connect any loose vertices like this. And then I just use my cut tool to basically add some fairly clean, even looking cut. Now, depending on the leaf, so this leaf is a little bit because of the way that it flows because it goes from white to again. It is not as clean as when you have, for example, a normal leaf. On a normal leaf, you can literally just use your connect and you can do, super clean stuff. But for this one doesn't matter. We just want to do that. And then every other one, something like this, so we don't need to do this too often. We just want to go ahead and we want to Give it like an extra segment. Let's do this over here. So that'll be basically now we have more than enough space to basically move around and everything like that. Jump tree is not as clean as I expected, but I was hoping for, but that's okay. So it will still be cleaner than having random triangles inside of speed tree. Let me just see, let's move this out over here. Let's do this one. And we can select this. Once again, try to keep everything fairly even, and let's add a connect here, here, one in the center. And so this one will be like four for the curling and everything because as you can see over here, they bend or they curl quite nicely. And then the rest will be mostly for the twisting, everything. So we don't need to have as many pieces Uh, no, wait. I don't like doing it this way. Let's have one in the center because the center one is always quite important. Let's have one here. I also don't care for that one because it is not adding a lot of value. Yeah, okay, maybe done here. There we go. So that's that one. Let's go on to the next one, only three to go. Like that. And once again, quickly add your geometry. Let's have one in the center. And definitely around here because this is where a lot of bending will happen, so I'm just going to make this a little bit Denser like this. Here we go. And maybe on the little tip, also a little bit extra. Then once again, like one, at least in the very center. And then maybe like one on the outside over here, maybe like one on this outside also. Yeah, that should be more than enough. Over here, I probably even did way too many. See if I look at this. I think these two can go, pretty much. Maybe only this one. No. Now I'm going to get rid of both of them. We can always add more later on if needed. So the next one is going to be this one. So we basically cut it over here. Oh, I think this one I do need to clean up a little bit more, but let's first of all, finish the cutting. Like this, and let's move this out a little bit. And let's see. So these two, I'm going to merge to the center. This one I'm going to move down. Yeah, that should do the twick. Here we go. And then also near the top like that. One of them at least somewhat in the center, and then another one we're going to have probably like over here and another one, probably like over here. Yeah, that should be able to bend nicely. And then find the last one. So this kind of stuff, the reason I now showing it because, of course, this is quite an easy example, but you can also do this with very complicated measures or like the cattails and everything, like I already showed you. So you can just create custom leaves inside for speed tree. That is no problem. If it does not work the way you want inside of speed tree, then you can always just create custom leaves like this and um you can just fully do all of the jum try yourself to full control. And then all you need to do is just get it to speed tree as a leaf, apply it, and it will be able to get manipulated just as like a normal plane or a normal leaf food inside a speed tree. So that's the really nice thing about it. And that's also why I prefer if possible, using speed tree over Maya, because I can very quickly all the bending and all the twisting and everything. For all of the leaves at the same time and randomizing, yeah, that is just something that you cannot really do as easily in Maya. Unless you have maybe custom tools and stuff like that. Actually, this one, I'm going to give a few more segments. But anyway, so we now have these pieces done. You guessed it. Now we just need to go to add a pivot, place the pivot on the tip over here. So this is where our leaf will start all of the manipulations and start the spounding and stuff like that. So that's looking pretty good. Now, the only thing is that with these leaves inside speedr they pretty much only count as one at a time. So we need to export this to five different files. In terms of our let's do this. I think it is easier if we go here. And if I just click on the leaf and then go up here to name and call the zero New name has no what? 01 should be fine, right? L score 01. Okay, fine. L on score 02. L on score 03. So I'm just preparing it for export right now, L on score 04, but I need to give it naming because else I forgot 05. Else, I forgot which one I just created. So we got this stuff. We can apply this new new layer and call this fern score leaves. And now pretty much select one. Turn on your snapping, and this is pretty much what I'm going to do. I'm going to basically snap it to the center because of PIV points, export my selection, and I'm going to export To Speed tree, which means I'm going to probably create new folder and call to underscore Speed tre. Later on, I cannot. I cannot change these because if I move these over here, what will happen is that when you guys download the source files, you will be missing the location. So I'm just going to do it here to Speedte Firm underscore leave underscore 01 and export. And then I'm just going to move this out of the way, grab number two. File export selection, firm leave 02. Number three, file Export Selection. Number three. And then after this, I will set them up in Speed tree, and that's where I will end this chapter. This one is number five, so I've accidentally selected in the wrong way. Selection Number four. Okay, so that is now all exported correctly just like this. Fine. Let's go ahead and save our Maya scene and our inside Spettr just to set it up already. Let's create a new scene, and it can just be a blank over here. Here we go. And I'm going to go ahead and just grab or create a new material, a new fern, and that's pretty much all that we need. And I'm going to input my color, opacity, normal, turn on two sided. And now what I'm going to do is I'm going to go ahead and I'm going to go file, and I'm just going to import all of the mesh sets to speed and you can only import them one at a time, but that's okay. So input mesh set, one, two, three. Four and five, and looks like that we are lucky that they are already in the right rotation, see? So that's really nice. So now that we have these, we can just go to our cutout meshes, one, two, three, four, five, and I can just go ahead and go leave one, leave two, leave three, leave four, and leave five. There we go. So now we have those all assigned. So that should be totally fine now. And in the next chapter, what we will do is we will get started by actually creating our fern. So let's just do a quick save fern on the score 01, and let's continue on to next chapter. 22. 21 Creating Our Fern Part2: Okay, so now that we actually have all of our fern leaves set up and everything and created, we are now going to go ahead and create the plant. Now, over here, it might be a little bit difficult to see because these are multiple plants. So we are just going to mess around with it until we get something that we like when we place it into, like, place with other ones that it kind of gives this vibe as what you see over here. So what I'm going to do is we are going to get started by adding a geometry, and we are just going to add a leaf right away this. The first beginning is pretty much like the crass. So we add a leaf. We then gohe and we decide on the number, and I assume, like, I think like four is often like a default. So let's say one, two, three, four, like this. Yeah, four should be fine because these are going to be quite well, we are going to go from small to larger leaves to smaller leaves again, because that's how it grows. Like the smaller ones at the bottom, they basically die off, and that's how they become small or they just never got chance to grow because there isn't a lot of sun and energy. Then the bigger leaves, they will just fan out. And then in the center, there will be smaller leaves again. And the reason they are there is because that's where the growing actually starts. It's a bit hard to see over here because there is a point, I believe with many ferns where it will just stay at the same size. But don't quote me on that. Like, I know how to make foliage. I'm not an expert at the knowledge of foliage. Anyway, let's set our boundaries 0-0 so that they are actually here in the center, and then we can just wide away at our ferns like this. Now, the first thing I'm going to do is I'm just going to go ahead and set my size scaler a little bit. Up. Yeah, let's make a big one first or like the center one so that I can kind of see how everything works. Next, let's go to orientation, and we need to set another up or out, I guess, or right. Yeah. Okay, so right, let's set this to 0.5 to do the classic flip. Next, go to a line, and this is the important one. So over here with this, we can basically control how we are going to do all of our lease, but I'm sure that you know about that by now. And now if we use our fault, it looks like they are folded out a little bit. So set our fault to be a little bit like this. Our curl is a very important one. Now you can see that now that we have done our geometry, it is really nice and soft the way that it curls down. So that's really good. So we got this one, and then in our curl, what I'm going to do is let's also just do some variation. Let's add a few points like this. Let's just mess around with the points a little bit over here, just to give it a little bit of some randomization. A little bit of twisting. Yeah, I'm fine with that. Vertex, maybe if we set a noise very small that we can do something like the vertex or sorry, large, I mean, very large because I know, I don't want to have it too large, because you can see in real life that it is still quite a soft plant. So let's do something like this, or maybe a little bit less. So something like the 0.03 in the mount and around tree in the noise. Let's do the Y scale. Let's also, once again, give it some randomness. So the Y scale is just like the length here, see. And if we set it's close enough, we can actually change the individual leaves. I just kind of depends where your point is set here, see. So you can kind of, like, now control that kind of stuff so that they are not all the exact same size. So we got that one done. Yeah, I think that's pretty much all we need to do, right. Let's go over here to Fern, and we have one, two, three, four, five. Zero, one, fern, 02, fern 03, fern 04, and number 05. So that will right away, give us a little bit of variation. It should. They all kind of look the same. Let's see, that Oh, no, wait. Are they the same? They look the same, pretty much. I do not trust that. Yeah, I do not trust that here, see? These are the exact same ones. So let's go into a mesh because this should be totally fine. We have to leave zero, one, 02, 03. Okay, so we got those. That should be fine. Um, really curious about why I know, but if I do this, I think it is a weight, yeah, I think it is a weight problem, maybe. Here we go for 02 here and these ones are zero, one, I think what we want to do is we just want to randomize the weight because right now we are setting all of them at one, which might cause problems. So if I do something like this, now they should be different. So let's see. We have this one or am I just, blind? No. This one is different. This one, these three are not different. That is really strange. What might be happening is that it does not properly randomize because the leaves they are just like single leaves over here. That might be the case for this. At which case, we need to be very careful and just play around with your weight randomly until it sometimes changes a leaf. Here, see. And when we do that, we can kind of still control it. So let's just say that we have these four over here. Now, if you go to generate, you can use the sink to push things in and out because right now it is trying to sink into the center. I always tries to do that. So we can push it out a little bit, and pretty much at this point, we can right click and we can just duplicate or contro D. And what I'm going to do with this is I'm going to, yes, duplicate it and place it on top of my tree again. And now if I go to my si scaler, I can tone this down to make them like the smaller versions. I can then go to rotation over here, give them a bit of a different rotation. And if we go into orientation, I should be able to mess around with the align a little bit so that we get these smaller leaves sitting below it. And maybe let's say that we make the curling less and then push it down a little bit more. And I don't know, maybe, like, set the size a little bit smaller. There we go, S and now we have some of these lower leaves. Next stop is we are going to once again, like contra D grab this leaf over here. And for these ones, I'm going to go ahead and set the size a little bit bigger, but not too much, little bit bigger. Maybe you can even go in here and, like, do some randomization on the size. A nice thing is because we are copying this, we can simply keep yeah, it simply whenever we copy it, it will just apply the settings to the rest. So, that's what I mean. Now, let's go orientation. Let's go into align. Then let's go ahead and go into our rotation over here. And now at this point, right now they are all aligned at the same time, which I don't really like. So I'm going to go into my align, and I'm going to start by messing around with the different align modes. I cannot do it too much because if we do too much, they will start clipping too badly into the rest. But now I can just set my align over here and you can see, we have the fern like this. And if I now go ahead and just play around a little bit more with my rotation over here, here, see, so that looks pretty cool. And now the last thing that we need is we need to have a fern in the center. Let's set my sink over here to zero to push this in. So we got these ferns over here. Now I just need to have one or two that are sitting really high up into the center. So if we do one last contra D, I'm going for this one, I'm going to set this to maybe two. Oh, and by the way, you know what I want to do is I want to set these smaller ones, maybe to like three. As if there are more at the bottom. So we have these two. I'm then going to go ahead and I'm going to just give it like a ran rotation. But basically, all I care about is to set my line really high for this. And for these ones, I'm tempted to just go to my notes and just click on these. Over here? No, not that one. This one over here. And then give it some custom rotation. And maybe what we can do is now if we go back to the generator, we can go to the folding. Oh, sorry, not the folding. Let's do the curling. Like this. And maybe let's go back into notes. Let's see if I can rotate this and maybe let's go to W. Move this a little bit just so that you cannot really look into the center and it just looks like a nice little fern. So that is looking pretty good. I feel like maybe one more. Maybe one more like this. And it will most likely have then moved some stuff around. So let me just quickly change this around again because I do not like it if it's clipping too much, but we have to do something. So there will always be a little bit of clipping. Unfortunately, it will be very difficult to literally deform the vertice so that they are sitting against the leaves and all of those kind of things. But yeah, it doesn't really matter, because as you can see over here, this is looking pretty good. So we now got this one. Let's actually try it out inside of unreal, because this is pretty solid. After this, you can literally go to every single leaf and you can just randomize the generation, and then you will instantly have, another one. But honestly, I think one is enough for a tutorial. So let's save my scene. Let's export this to game from Speed tree Fern 01. Okay. That's just a classic stuff. Just go in here. You know what? I'm going to, I'm just call this fern like this. And now let's go ahead and just import Fern 01, copy name, remove the parent, paste the name, assigned to our layer. And there you go. See? Very clean geometry, nice plant. So that's looking pretty good. And that's also how you would end up with the same result inside of Maya if you pretty much did this in Maya or Max or Blender or whatever. So we are going to export this to unreal, fern 01, and that's doing export. And our inside of Unreal engine, which for some reason is on the Wong screen. Here we go. We can go ahead and you guessed it. Import. Here we go. Let's tag it in here. I'm going to make it 2.5 or three times as big. 2.5. Over here. Let's try that. So I'm pretty much eyeboning it. That's the thing with also foliage. Yes, there is an average size, but often the size is very flexible with foliage because it literally grows. But yeah, this is looking like quite a nice size compared to all of the other foliage. And if we just go textures, new fern. Let me just quickly import our mega scans, fern textures over here. Throw you in here. Materials. Let's use the swab duplicate fern and I wonder if Fern or Fern. Hm, I don't know. You should really not come to me when it comes to pronunciations, especially because I'm Dutch, so it's English is not even my first language, which I'm guessing most of you already noticed. Let's set desaturation to zero. Subsurface scattering to maybe like 0.5, because it's quite a tick plant. And now what we can do is we can just go ahead and assign our material. Here we go. Not too bad. Not too bad. It's looking pretty cool. Yeah, so we got, like, some ferns. And I don't know. These ones are for our forocene which is going to be like the bonus scene that I'm going to create. And I have the idea of after the tunnel because the tunnel is, of course, an urban scene. Is the creating nature scene, which will just be like a very small forest scene with like a little lake so that we can, have these plants and then have some trees surrounding it. But those because it this bonus, it will be a time lapse creation, and unfortunately it will once again not be included into this chapter or into the source files, but it's just to showcase. And of course, to create a cool looking thumbnail. So let's go ahead and let's go to foliage and let's just see how it looks in there. So assets, fern, let's turn these off so that only that one is turned on. Let's go zero point. These ones can grow quite a bit. So 0.3 by 1.4 over here. Distance let's do probably like 1,000 something in that direction. You can also by the way, do like random pitching. If you do like 0.5, I believe, it's going to paint. Okay, 0.5 does not do a lot, so let's go ahead and do like ten. Maybe it needs to be higher. You see, you can do random rotations, which is pretty cool. Let's set the density to 500. So let's say that we have over here. You see? We get, just some nice little ferns that can once again fill up our space. So that's looking pretty cool. We got that stuff also done, and the only thing that I'm going to do is I'm just going to go ahead and probably set the desaturation up a little bit. So let's go over here. Desaturation maybe like 0.2. Just give it a little bit of a tone down and maybe set the color a little bit down and maybe give it a little bit of yellowish color. See, yellowish color, a little bit down. Yeah, and then set the desaturation, maybe 0.3. There we go, because ferns do often look quite bit down. Of course, this one looks really, really green, but then it would stand out. So I kind of like wanted to see if I can, like, here, see nicely blend it along with, for example, a grass and everything like that. So that is looking pretty good. Also over here, see it nicely blends. So I am quite happy with that. And what we're going to do in the next chapter. So the next chapter, we are going to quickly start by doing some level art in our tunnel scene. So we are going to grab the foliage that we have so far and place it in there. And after that is done, we are going to focus quickly on our tree and on our custom leaf and branch material. So we do have like one tree in our tunnel scene, but the trees are mostly focused towards the forest scene. But this is looking really good. If you look at how many pieces of foliage we have created in only, like, I think, like seven or 8 hours, and that's with talking with all of the explanations, I think we are doing really good. We are making really good time. So let's go ahead and continue with the next chapter. 23. 22 Placing Our Foliage In Our Scene Part1: Okay, so let's go ahead and continue by actually designing our level a little bit. So you can once again see this as like a bonus because it does not really have anything to do with foliage, but it's also important to know how you can place your foliage and everything inside of unreal. So having this in the scene, let's have a look over here. So you can see mostly like the foliage is mostly focused towards these areas. And the reason I did that because, of course, made the scene also in the beginning is because this is where the light often hits. Even if the sun rotates around, these are often the areas where the lights will hit, but here it will be very difficult for the lights to hit. So I still for visual interest, I added a little bit of foliage, but not too much. So knowing all of that, we are basically just going to go ahead and just mess around with things a little bit and just see what we can get. So in here, I'm going to have a look. So the ivy is pretty much fine. I have a main camera angle over here. What I will do is to put more of an emphasis on the foliage, I will make this camera angle probably like a little bit closer like this. There we go, so that they can really focus on all the foliage. Yeah, we have our ivy over here. That is fine. I don't think I need any more. Maybe it might be nice to just have, like, a little bit of ivy hanging. Oh, and let me just turn off my goodws because whenever I have those, they are the first thing that will be selected because they are really large objects. But I just want to see if I do something like this, how it will look. Okay, so that will look a little bit dark, but it does have something. I guess, if I place it a little bit towards this area over here, why am I running so slow? Oh, my screpsense is only 150. I'll set it back to 100. I probably just, like, need to close something here. Let me just close Spree. That might be it. There we go. Now we are going a little bit faster. Sometimes Unreal Engine five still has the tendency to have a random drop in FBS even though it does not really make any sense. But anyway, I'm having this. So this is quite nice that I just have a little bit here in the top corner. So now let's have a look. This water over here, you will not be able to actually see it. So if you want, you can temporarily turn it off. So this is the Algae plane, which is basically some algae I placed on top. But then you also have the water plane over here. And if you turn that off, you can see that this is pretty much how it looks. I'm going to go ahead and I'm going to get started. Let's go from big to small. Let's get started by going in our foliage painting because I think it is easiest if I do it here. And let's get started by just having our water grass. And yeah, let's just do our water grass for now. Let's import these. And I just want to basically see how this works. So it's going to paint. We have both of these. I'm going to set the skeleton maybe like 0.6 by 1.2. I want to quickly paint it in just to see how it looks. Yeah, okay, so that's not too strong, so that's fine. Maybe I'm going to do 0.7 and 1.5 to make it a little bit bigger. Density, let's set this to like around 300 over here. And let's say that we have like this sne over here. So I would be able to paint like that. That's fine. Now let's go ahead and these are the final settings. I did it quickly in like the other piece, but right now, I'm really going to just go in and do like proper settings. So aligned to normal should be fine. What the aligned to normal does is whenever we paint on here, it will just basically go in the direction of whatever direction we are painting on. I do want to do the random pitch. Let's say ten? No, too much. Five. Yeah, here we go. So five is looking pretty good. Okay, so we now got this kind of stuff, and now I'm basically going to just use this as a cheat because in this scene, I already spent a lot of time, looking at things and planning and everything. So I can kind of, like, use it to my advantage. And what I'm going to do is I'm going to go ahead and I'm going to have another window viewport, and I'm going to have a second viewport. And the reason I want to do this is that if I set my camera angle here, and let's just press G in here to get it, I can basically see what I'm doing. And I can immediately see that well, actually, I will have another cameraangle. I will also have, let's see, this camera angle over here. So I'm going to use this one for now. But I'm having this on my screen, and this is just that I can easily see where I'm actually placing stuff. 1 second. Let me just quickly set this angle a little bit lower. There we go. So now that we've done that, I can go ahead and I can go in here and I can start, for example, like painting in. Sometimes it might be nice if you just go to unlit mode, just make things a little bit easier. And I'm basically just filling up this space over here. And let's see. I want to kind of, like, have it go down here and I keep looking at my other ang and my other screen, and I'm just randomly adding a bit of stuff mostly around this area. So I kind of like to have this in almost like clusters. So it will be just like random clusters where we will have these plants and also, of course, stick to the water a little bit. Over here, it's sometimes a little bit annoying to align by normal. So sometimes you want to turn off a line by normal so that when you paint in here, it will still just move up like this. I'm going to make this a little bit less over here because it's a little bit too intense. Yeah, let's actually let's reduce these amounts. And instead of having it really strongly in here, what I want to do is I kind of want to just move this along these areas. I know that there is no water here, but you will not really be able to see that very clearly. So I can just, like, kind of fill this up over here. And then I'm going to just nicely fade this out. A little bit like this. So we are kind of like fading it out. And this does require a bit of playing around. Like what I'm placing now, I might end up later on just removing it again and just adding more, but I first of all, just want to get a base in Set as sketching. You are, first of all, sketching in like a base to make sure that everything looks pretty decent. And then after that, you are just going to go in and do some proper work. So over here, I want to have a little bit like this. I actually want to probably keep this open so that I can properly see through it so that I can kind of see the rest. But over here, just around these areas, I'm going to go ahead and I'm going to just grow these pieces. I don't know why my PC is so slow. It is really slow, all of a sudden. And you should not do that because this scene should easily run on 60 FBS, so I don't know exactly why. So there will be no water plants here, but maybe if we just go ahead and see if I go here, I don't really like the look of it, because these are like, really straight pieces, so Maybe, do something like this. Yeah, that's quite nice. So here you can see, right now I'm having my resolution set to only 50. And the reason I'm doing that is just so that my scene runs a little bit faster. But I quite like that. So that's looking pretty cool. I'm going to also have, like, a little bit more down here in the corner and maybe, like, reduce the amounts over here. So down here, that's looking pretty nice. Let's just quickly like, remove the amount or the large amount and then set my maximum size to one and then add it back in so that we get a little bit of like a more nicer fate that this is a little bit small. And then you can see that over here, you get like this effect. So over here, we have some ti plans that's fine. Down here, I don't really like, Well, definitely, I don't like this one that's just sitting here. I'm going to probably, like, reduce this amount and then maybe, like, paint it in, like, a few smaller ones over here. Yeah, maybe like painting a little bit like this. And I don't know. Maybe also Oh, actually, for those ones, I want to go back to 1.5. And maybe do some erratic. You will barely be able to see these, so I just want to kind of have some filler objects in here. That should be fine. Yeah, we can go also around here and then around the bus, just like some filler objects like this. So these are definitely like the largest objects. And then around here, I kind of want to avoid having them. So maybe like a little bit, but I kind of want to reduce the amount because you would think that the light would have trouble hitting in these areas. So maybe over here like a little bit, and now you can see that we already get quite an interesting look down there. So having that one done, I'm now going to turn these off, and now I'm going to go ahead and move on to so the lily clusters we will do with hand placement. Let's do our grass complex over here. Let's do that one. One let's do 0.8 to 1.4 with a random pitch of five again and a slightly bigger brush size, maybe like 50. And let's see if I paint this, Okay, I need to have a lot more. So first of all, I need to set my scaling more. So let's set the scaling 1-1 0.4, and let's set our density to 500. It's because of the water. So the water is making it sink down, so that's why I want to scale it up. So let's do 1.5 to two because else we cannot really see it anymore in the water. Okay, so we got these pieces over here. That's pretty good. I'm now just going to go ahead and I'm going to also around here, enhance my scene by adding a bunch of grass. And then around here because this is so close to the camera, I'm just going to wait with that, and I'm going to do that very precisely. But basically over here, what we can do is we can have, just some grass growing in between just to enhance our scene even more. And then around here, you can also have this grass kind of like just scattered around these areas like this. And that will look pretty decent, I think. So I'm scattering around the grass here. At this point, it will be so far away from the camera that I'm not too worried. I'm going to, let's sometimes I like to, like, bleed out the grass like this that it is kind of almost like trying to connect to each other through the growth, but it's not completely connecting like this. So that's looking pretty decent. And now you can see over here also that, let me make this bit smaller. Come on. Here you see? So you can see, we can see these little bits of grass bits over here and there. So now I'm going to go a little bit more preciser in with my work. So over here, because now we are getting closer to the camera. So for this piece, I just want to go ahead and I want to, like, let's get rid of this. Still have some grass here. And now if I set my brush size, maybe to like 20, let's have a look. Let's go in here. Maybe, like around here, have some grass. Don't forget that on the solid pieces, we will have the other type of grass also. So because I decide that this one works really well to go along with these plants, and then we have the normal grass. The normal grass will be sitting on the ground over here, but it will also be kind of like sinking in here. But I still want to get some of this grass in like random areas. And then once I'm done with like a pretty solid base over here, then I'm just going to basically look at every single camera angle that I want, and they basically just going to art foliage or chip away on foliage to get it to look even better. But this is looking pretty good. So we got this. I want to have something extending out. So let's just maybe have something like over here. And it's okay if I go a little bit overboard. I still need to do my optimization pass, actually, so I will probably do that also after this chapter because I forgot about it. But this is looking pretty decent as a start. So we got some grass here. So this probably the extent to which you can see it. And now that we have done this one, the bushes and everything we will have on here, so we will do that later. We will probably do maybe some custom placement. Although I am using different these ones are way thinner, so they are not exactly the same. But I'm just trying to change things up a bit. Let's go ahead and get started with probably our basic grass. Over here we have our basic and our large Ah. Let's there should not really be a difference between the two, shout? No. And especially on like a low resolution knot. 1 second, let me Come on. Whenever you have the foliage thing on, you cannot select it. So let me just quickly turn it off. And let's go back into foliage. I'm going to probably go for just like the basic one because in terms of polygon count, it does not really matter. Let's do 1.5 to two with a random pitch of maybe five again and a density of once again, 500. Set a brush I so around 50. Oh, no, wait, that's too much. Let's do 30. And I just want to see how this works. So if I go in here, I want to see if this is too much or too little. I want to set my density to maybe like 1,000. Let's see. I feel like it is too large. So let's just go ahead and get rid of this and set the size maybe to like to 1.5. Yeah, so I'm going to start with some really large clums and then I'm going to just fade this out. But let's get started with just doing some random grass and also in between here and stuff like that. So that should be fine. Maybe at this point, I'm also going to turn off the align to normal, actually. And I want to also go in and probably at this point, temporarily change my camera angle so I can see where I am placing the grass over here. So we want to have something there, and then let's say that over here. We also just want to have the grass growing, and the grass kind of, like, extends to the rubble because it likes to be in those kind of places where water can collect compared to where water kind of, like fades out. Be careful that we do not sink too much through the side over here. And then over here, we can just fill it up because this will be just like the corner, so you can just kind of, like, add a bunch of stuff in here. Let's see. So we got like some grad then we just go to kind of flow the grass over over here. And maybe just have it kind of like going towards these different locations. Maybe I'm going to temporarily set my density to 2000, go in here and just add a bit more. Okay, 2000 might be a little bit too much. So 1,000 again. So it will have some bits of grass here and there, mostly around the corners over here, so that's pretty good if we do that. So it will be around these corners. Also, maybe in these areas over here, we will have some grass growing. And then what I will do is on the stones, I will probably I will do, like, a few bushes that shrubs that I will have very small, and then I will add some ferns and everything and think that will work quite nicely. But anyway, so over here, so we have this. And now, once we get to this point, honestly, you probably won't be able to really see it anymore because of the thinness of the grass. So here, so we can see the grass sitting here. So that's pretty good. We have some nice bits of grass. I'm going to make the grass a little bit denser in these areas. Over here, I'm fine with it fading out. And I will see if we can maybe do, like, a tiny bit of grass over here, but it will probably yeah, here. So by this distance, even if you do it on here, you probably won't be able to see it. Now, you see almost nothing. And it just has to do with this fact. Of course, right now, if we go to like 200, you are able to see it a little bit long, but even from that distance, it cannot hold up because it's simply too thin of an Alpha. So let's go back to 100. However, over here, I am going to go ahead and I'm going to set my density to 2000 I'm going to push the amount of grass that is in here, as if it is, like, W just like a lot of grass is growing here and stuff like that. And for my car, I kind of just need to play around with this a little bit later on. To see if I can remove it a bit more. And also, with these plants over here later on, I will just clean it up, so that's no problem. Maybe like a little bit more grass in these areas, especially because it's really dark in these areas, so you cannot really see it. So then it would be nice to maybe, increase it. So let's do something like this. Let's set my density now back to 1,000, and now I'm going to turn on my align to normal. And I probably just want to, like, in some of these cavities. I want to push in a little bit of grass because it would make sense that it grows in these areas. This is a little bit annoying over here. As you can see, it is trying to grow on top of these metal bits. So you kind of need to just be careful and see if it looks good or if it looks really bad whenever we grow it like that. This point over here, you probably cannot even see the grass anymore, but I'm just going to, you know, like some of these hotspots. I want to just grow a little bit of grass. Here another one. And whenever we cannot really do it because of these bits down here, I can thy to set it below, see? But if we really cannot do it, then we can always do some manual placement. Here, you can see that over there, it's a little bit difficult. But then later we can just do some manual placement and stuff like that. Let's see. At this point, you cannot really see it anymore because it's outside of the camera angle. Over here, it would be nice if we just have growing up a little bit. So we're just trying to make this feel like it like nature is really taking over all of these pieces over here. I don't know if over here, it might look nice. Yeah, it looks pretty decent. But I'm not sure. We'll see how good that it really looks when we fill one resolution turned on. Because over here on the out ends, I don't really like it. But okay, let's say that we have something like this over here. I'm actually going to remove this part. But it's a base. We are going to, of course, work on this more later on. So what I'm going to do now is I'm just going to go ahead and I'm 1,000 already. Wow. I'm going to set my maximum size a little bit smaller to like 0.8 to one. And then I'm just going to go in here. Oh, turn off the normal. And I just want to give it a small fate in some areas. Maybe set my brush size like 20 and then set my density to 1,500. But I just want to give it some smaller grass bits here and there. I don't know why. Come on. For some reason, it does not want to paint in this area. That's strange. But okay, it doesn't really matter because it's probably outside of the camerang There we go. So just give it a little bit of, like, a fade here and there. And that should do the trick. Okay, so we got those done. Now, what we will do in the next chapter is we will get started on focusing over here these pieces and also, of course, add some water lilies. So let's see what we have so far. Save sin. I'm going to temporarily close my other view. Make this one a bit bigger. Camera angle, it 200. And let's have a look. So if I see this, this is looking pretty good. Like you can see, it's nice and dense over here also. I want to change my materials a little bit. I don't really like the grass on here, so we might want to, like, change that around. We also have this angle here, see? So you can see some nice dense foliage going on. And over here, we can also like see it growing. So I'm really like I'm on purpose, adding way more foliage than I did in the original because the original is really tone down. And of course, in the original, I spent like two or 3 hours on the foliage painting to make sure that it is absolutely perfect. So, of course, doing it in 20 minutes, yeah, you cannot get the exact same results. But that's looking pretty nice. It's the only thing that I find too bad that the cat tails maybe because they are too dark, so I kind of want to increase those. But anyway, let's save scene, and let's continue with this in our next chapter. 24. 23 Placing Our Foliage In Our Scene Part2: Okay, so let's go ahead and continue. Now, what I'm going to do first is I first of all, just want to finish off the water over here and I'm going to go into unlit mode. Now, I have an alti plane here, which means that usually if I drag this on, ah, that's too bad. So we don't have a collision right now because of the water level. What you can do just to make it very easy is to quickly just go to create and grab like a shape and like a plane over here. Here we go. And just use this as like a temporary collision. It will just make the placement a lot faster. So I can go up here, place it. Very quickly scale it out like a lot like this. And now, if I go in, I can just very easily drag this in. So looking at this, that looks really small, actually. I think I'm going to actually make the size a little bit bigger. Yeah, because this is simply way too small. So let's just go ahead and go in here and we are just going to go down, set the size probably to, like, I think a seven. Let's press reimport. Same for all of these. Seven, reimport. Seven reimport. And finally, seven and reimport. Okay, perfect. So now this should have increased, which it does. So now we are able to kind of place these a little bit better. And what we can do is we can do some smaller and larger clusters. So I'm just going to place a few, and then I'm going to basically double check to make sure that this is the right size and not that it is still not looking good. So here, we got something like this. If I temporarily just allow me to hide the plane over here, Yeah. I I just hide the plane and just go to my camera angles, I just want to double check. So here I can see it. Yeah, see, that is pretty decent size. So now that we have these bits, let's turn on our plane again. Now we can just go ahead and mess around to things. Near the out ends over here, and by the way, we once again have a selection bug. There we go. Now that is fixed. On the out ends I want to do is I just want to fade it out at that point. And now over here, I just want to steal a bunch of flowers. Maybe over here, we can play around with it and rotate this and maybe like one small cluster over here that is a little bit denser. And maybe like a few more flowers over here. There we go. Should do the trick. And then over here, the same thing. So we can just go ahead and just add a few clusters. Like this, and maybe have them once again, spilling out a little bit because I still want to have some kind of something in here that will make it look a bit more interesting. So maybe I will end up just placing a little bit more grass, but it is also good if we just like a few of these random bits and pieces like this. Don't forget sometimes, rotate them a little bit. So that from a distance, at least we can see like, Okay, coincidentally, the car is in front of it, so we cannot actually see much going on over here, but we can definitely place like a few here also. Although for these ones, I probably won't have a lot of flowers because there's almost no light, so you would most likely just have a few of these sitting here. Like this. And let's see. So we got these ones. Now, here there is going to become Oh, here, there will be more light again. So maybe then over here, we can really make it look like a plant, and we are just adding more and more of these pieces and then also start adding some flowers in between. But for the rest, we are really going to, like, make this look very dense in terms of the amount of foliage that is sitting in here. Then maybe like in these areas because it feels like they might have been disrupted by the concrete you never know or just have some storytelling like this. And just in case you can somehow manage to see it. Let's add a few flowers in between here. And let's also like some flowers in here and maybe in here. And then we are basically going to fade this out. And I'm going to fade it out probably towards this direction. So I'm going to paint stuff in over here. U and add another extra cluster here, another one here. So let's see. So how does this look from a distance? Okay, so we can kind of see it fading out over there. That's fine. And now if I also just add a little bit over here, I think then oh, and a little bit over here. I think then it will look quite nice. So over here, let's add like a flower. Let's add a few dense patches. And let's then add some fading patches over here. So let's also have some of these bits. There we go, and we then fade it out. And I don't know. Maybe we even want to, like, try and almost connect the two bits. So we got those. And then over here, let's just do a very simple. It's like some cluster patches, maybe like the occasional flower here and there. And then it just kind of like fades out into the end. Something like oops. I moved it wrong way. Here we go. Something like this seems to be fine. Let's have a one more look in the first camera angle. Okay, so we can see a bit here if I just scroll down and just turn off my plane. So I can see a little bit here and there, that's fine. So we don't need to do much more. And then we have this one, and here we can also see the clusters over here. So that's looking pretty good. Although I don't know what it is. Maybe it's the color. They look a little bit plain from a distance. Yeah, I think we just want to, like, mess around to the color a little bit more, but we will do that at like the very end. So this is looking pretty good. We now got some interest. So we have some water over here, and you can see that wherever there's not a lot of light, you can see a lot less plant life. And then as soon as there is light, you can see that the plant just kind of, like, get attracted to that and also over here. So that's really cool. I really like this area. This area, I also like quite a bit over here. Maybe I want to Oh, no, wait, I am continuing this on over here. So I guess it is just a truck that is kind of like hiding things. I definitely want to, like, add some more interesting stuff over here. So now we will go a little bit more into the manual placement. So let's get started by just, let's place, like, a little shrub over here and then maybe, like, fade it out like this. Let's see. Does that kind of stuff look nice? We go unlit mode. Yeah, here, Cesar, that looks quite nice. So let's see. At what point do we want to have some really large shrubs? So I want to have a few over here. I want to have a few here at the back. I want to have a few maybe like here at the back. And maybe like, Yeah, actually, no, I'm going to leave that, and the rest I will probably like place here at the bottom. So we have a few over here. Let's go back into unlit mode because it makes it a bit easier to see. I then want to have a few sitting here in the back. Let's rotated. Like this. And I want to probably have a few also sitting over here. So look. Okay, so we have a few over there over there. That's fine. Maybe I also actually have, like, a few of them. We can just sink them into the ground that's no problem. You won't really be able to notice. So we have a few over here. It's looking nice and here. So here, we can a see a little bits of plants popping up. Also here around the top later on are also going to focus some more plants. And now we want to just go ahead and add a few more somewhere in these directions over here. Let's say that we place like a few around here maybe have fading out like this. Okay. Okay, so we got, something like that. And let's also maybe do like one that is growing into the corner over here. Now what I also like to do is, I like to see how far we can push the ferns with this one to see if we need to use more of the shrubs or if we can just rely on the ferns to basically apply a bit more. So first of all, make sure that everything is turned off, except for this one. Scaling one to 1.5. I'll see if this is good enough. Random pitch of five. Let's go to our paint and probably set the density to like 500. What's that scaling? Yeah, that looks like a descaling. I'm just going to get started by just over here. Randomly painting in a few of them. Oh, God, that's actually way too dense. So let's set the density to like 300 so that I can pretty much just click once, and then it will automatically place a few. So we got some over there. Let's say that I want to also then continue this on over here and then maybe, have it fade out. I still want to see some of the concrete, of course, because the concrete does look nice. So I kind of just need to. Let's go into unlit mode. Oh, that does look quite nice. It looks very Data vasi or like enchardd style. So, okay, over here, so you cannot see it too much over here, but that's totally fine. It is just like something in the background. So well, actually, here you can see it like a little bit. So that's actually looking really nice. I like that. Let's have like one or two, just like sitting over here. Here, this looks really nice in the lighting, actually. Cool. Okay, so we have a few there, and now comes the big one. Where I likely to see if I can maybe fade is out and just have it sitting around here. And then maybe also, see if we can maybe, like, continue this on down here. You can go wrong really quickly with like, adding too much foliage, even though in real life, it would be totally logical to have the foliage is kind of like growing on here. You can risk it looking like noise inside of TD. So I often just want to go ahead and go to my main camera and if I have a look at this. So what I can see is I want to have like a little bit of foliage over here. I want to remove this one and maybe have it more towards the side. Let's go into unlit mode that I can kind of see what I'm doing. I don't know if they are too big for this area. Let's see. I think I'm going to go to a size of 1.3 maximum and maybe like 0.8 minimum. Okay, so we got that kind of stuff, so over here. Yeah, you cannot see like it's in those areas. So I'm going to probably let's try and reduce the amounts over here. Let's increase the amounts towards the back. And then carefully, maybe, like, place the occasional bits here and there. Let's see how does that look? Okay, so that does look quite interesting. But I feel like it's almost like catching the sun too much in some of these areas, but I'm not going to change lighting of this. So I can play around a little bit more with my materials. But if I see this, I feel like that there might be a bit too much going on in this area over here, and that we kind need to go like this and then maybe, I don't know, maybe let's see if I can like art like a few plants over here. So that it does have a fate going on. We got that stuff, we got some over here. I'm going to remove this one over here and I'm going to maybe art and see where am I going to art this one? Maybe here at the font. Yeah, that might actually look a bit quite interesting. And then maybe also have a few just sitting over here. And maybe one here at the waterfront, something like that, and maybe one just sitting in between there. So we got a few here. We got a few over here, maybe another one here in the site. I don't know if I want to also have a few. In my version, I'm covering this up with ivy, but it might be handy if you just cover it up with even more foliage like that. Though there might be a little bit overkill around the front. So now it is just like mostly wy picky stuff to make sure that it does look exactly the way I want. Okay, so we got something like this. Now, the last thing is that over here, this area, I don't really like, but if I set this to 200, I might like it more. I do not. I'm going to go to my normal grass and I'm going to just hold shift, and I'm going to basically try and get rid of that a little bit, just from a distance and painting it out that I can clearly see what I'm doing. Okay, let's now go back in here. Okay, so I'm painting that one out. And then if I go ahead and go back to my ferns, I'm going to probably place like a single one like over here. Yeah, here. So even one single one already does a really good job. Okay, so we got this. That is quite cool. Let's also go in here and just like place a few across these borders over here, just like fill things up a little bit. We don't really need to go further away than this. So we just have a few ferns here and there. And if we then combine those with a few bushes, and then later on also with some trees in the background, I think that will look quite nice. So if we go for something like this and then have a few of these larger plans just sitting here, maybe, like, replace this one, oh, I just saw what I did. I have a selection bug somewhere here, see? I almost accidentally duplicated that entire thing. That's not something I want. So that's why you need to be kind of careful with the selection. You see, now the selection is fixed. So, okay, so we have this one and this one. The only reason I noticed it is because all of a sudden, the copying took too long. And if we then go to, like, our side view, so we can see like this one, I'm just going to move back a little bit, and I'm going to duplicate it and maybe, like, have another one that's a little bit back here. This one, I'm going to move down. And maybe then also push this out a little bit and don't forget to rotate it a bit more. You'll see. So we got a little bit of scrubs over here. And if we combine this with a few trees, that will look quite nice. Over here, we have lots of ferns and everything. That's also fine and maybe combine it a little bit with shrub number two, which is like this really low one. And what we can do with these ones is we can go ahead and scroll down and turn off effect or receive decals like this. And we can move this down over here. And also maybe place like another one here. So it's all just about your storytelling. So the reason I like to have some of those in here is because then it will not just look like I place the same plant over and over and over again, which I technically did. But okay, so let's say that we now have this view. This is looking quite cool. Like, it looks very natury. It looks, it just looks nice. So I'm quite happy with this. One last thing that I'm going to do is around here we go into our lit mode. I feel like the sides of these are too even. So I think what I want to do is I want to turn these off. Turn these ones over here on, select them, set the size 0.4 by one. Then if we go into our paint mode, I just want to basically reduce these and then I just want to give them a bit more of a size variation from a distance over here, here, see, you can see that there's a little bit of size variation on here. Let's see if there's any other ones where I really feel like that. Maybe over here. Like over here, it's again, like I just want to reduce a few and then add a bit of size variation over here, just to make it feel more organic, maybe also over here, like in the back, sometimes it's fine to just have all of a sudden like an area where they go where they are less dense and also lower so that when you look at it from your camera, you see, you can see that there's, like, quite a big difference between everything. So we got that done. Now I'm just going to go ahead and I'm going to maybe also over here, like, do a little bit. Oh, and at this point, it will be very difficult to see, but still here, let's do something like this. Here, see. So that is like some small variations, and I quite like that. Okay, perfect. Now, at this point, I'm probably going to call this one done over here. So, of course, what we want to do is we do want to go ahead or I want to go ahead and later on I'm just do a little bit of balancing. But if I have a look at this, what I first want to do is I just want to go into my materials, and just whenever I see something that I feel like needs some balancing out, like for example, here, the subs over here, we can go ahead and we can go in here. We can set the subsurface, maybe to like 0.5, and maybe set the color a little bit darker, here, see so that the blends in a little bit better. I don't know. Maybe we want to set the color to more like an orange color or like a green color. Now, you know what? I think I'm going to keep the color like this. That's quite a nice one. Next the ferns, I want to go ahead and also go in here and maybe tone down the color a little bit. Maybe set the subsurface to 0.3, and maybe set the desaturation to 0.4. Now let's do 0.35. Let's Let's set the subsurface maybe to be let's see. Let's make it it's a little bit more like a reddish subsurface. I think for some reason, I kind of like that look. If we go zero, yeah, 0.3 is fine. And see, play around a little bit more like my color. Let's make it a little bit darker just so that it fits in a little bit better. Okay? So we got those. Next, we have our cat tails and I wanted to go in here, and let's just grab our cattail base color over here, open that one up, and let's just set the brightness to like two. Oh, yeah, it's definitely here only at five, I can really see them. But if I set them to five, it will mean that up close. Oh, no, yeah, up close, they are still pretty decent. So this way, I can still see them. So from this camrangle, I can just see them over here. And from this camrangle, I can see them a little bit better. So that's quite nice. And the last one would be like our water lilies over here. I'm just going to go ahead and let's set our roughness to 0.3, probably, and let's set our color down a little bit. Okay, that does not do a lot. Our subsurface, I'm going to set to 0.2. Let's see. Yeah, let's set the two around here, like the centers. That over here, they are not standing out too much. One, 02. Yeah, I don't really mind about the subsurface. So those are also not standing out too much. You can still see them like a little bit, which, of course, fine, because that's kind of useful if we can do that. But now you can see that here. Our foliage, we are definitely adding a lot to this. So this is our version. This was the original version, so you can see how quickly we still, and we also, of course, just made it our own, which is really nice. And yeah, that is looking pretty good. So what I will be doing now is I will have one more chapter after this that it will just set up all of our LODs and once we've done that, then we can go ahead and we can continue on the final trees that we can have like around here. But our main plants and foliage and stuff like that, they are pretty much done. So let's go ahead and continue with this in the next chapter. 25. 24 Optimizing Our Foliage: Okay, so in this chapter, we are just going to go over and do some LODs. You probably don't even need to see this because I already showed you how to do it. But just in case we will just go ahead and go over the process. So over here, we have a fence. As set, I already showed you the LODs. But again, you can just go to the LLD settings over here, these are like presets, and I like to use foliage for foliage and then just press Okay. And then you do need to set like the number of LLD. So I said to you can also by the way, use Small Prop. Small Prob also works well. Going to set the number of LDs to probably, let's say that we do like three per piece. Honestly, it's a tutorial. I don't really have to do this, but now we can see that we have this one, and then I like to just cycle through. So this LD here, you can see that it is half, but it almost does not change. Here, you can see it like tiny bit of changes. And then over here, this one, it starts to change. And you can always just go into the Y ram so you can see difference between LD, zero and LLD two over here. So that's really great. So most of these, we can just pretty much do this. Here, let me just save this. We can pretty much just open it up, set our LD and close it again. So let me just quickly and this is the one time that I want them at the top, and now they don't go. So let's just go ahead and do the grass. Also our ivy over here. Lily clusters we can ignore because they are already at the lowest they can go. Yeah, maybe the one with the flower, but I'm not going to risk it and I water grass over here. Okay, perfect. So let's go ahead and start with this type of grass over here. These ones should be quite basic. So it's just like foliage with three LDs and press apply, and then just check one, two, three. And the distances I already discussed in a previous chapter that I am fine with the default distances that we have. But you can always go ahead and turn off this button out to compute and then over here, you can go to, like, for example, your LD zero or LD one, and you can set your screen size over here. So it looks like this one, we already did, so I can close it. This one we did not yet do, so we can just go foliage, yes, three apply, and I just need to double check to make sure that I'm not losing hoops too much detail, zero, one, and two here, see. Only at two, you really start to notice it, but that's totally fine. And this is basically how we will do our optimization because right now these are still 6,000 triangles, which for a modern AA game is not that much, but you definitely would need optimization for it to be logical. If it would not have optimization, then it would be far too much. But if I just said this to three, we can have 6,000 over here to 3,000, and we are immediately losing the branches, but that should be fine from that distance to 2000. So if I go to LD out of for this one, I just want to double check if I go to distance or over here, here C over here on the way at X already quite early. Yeah, here, it's already over here. I already hits. So this is probably one of the few ones that I want to go ahead and I want to set my LOD one to be still a screen size of zero point maybe like 0.5, and then LOD two. I want to do, 0.3. So that now, you'll see it stays out and it's only over here, just starts to arrive, which should be fine. And else we can always just balance it out a little bit more. So let's go ahead and do this one. Foliage, yes. Three versions apply and turn over out of compute so that I can go to LD one at like 0.5. And then LLD two at 0.3 or something like that. Save. Next one. Oh, this is like a big one. 28,000 polis. Yes, that's definitely like a big one. So foliage, yes. Let's do four versions for this one, just in case. And let's see. So LD zero, LD one still looking good, LD two. Okay, then we are starting to lose it. So let's go ahead and turn off auto compute distances, and I just want to LD zero is fine. LD one goes at 0.8. I want to have this at 0.6. Then I want to switch at 0.4 yes. And then I want to switch at 0.2. Over here, that seems fine. So let's save our swaps, which are also around 9,000, so they are also quite high. Three LLDs apply. Let's see, zero, one, there's almost no difference 0-1 and two. Now a cool thing if there is really almost no difference, what you can do is you can always go ahead and you can go over here and let's see if we go LOD Auto, you should be able to set a minimum LOD over here to one. And what it will do is it will automatically switch to one here, see? So it will just ignore LD zero, which is our default. So this way, you immediately have some optimization, and it will just start at LOD one, always, and then you can just go down lower, if you want. So we can do that, for example, with this one. I don't really mind that. This one, once again, where are you? There you are. I don't actually this. I wish I would have placed this down, but it's okay. It's not that big of a deal. It's just like these leaves are a little bit high and they are standing out a bit too much. But okay, yes, three LLDs we apply. I want to just double check, zero, one, and two, so there's almost no difference again. So I can go up here and set the minimum LOD to one and save. And now we have a tall water grass, which is a surprising amount of polis at 10,000 polis. We can go to foliage. And this time, I'm going to set them to four over here, zero, one, you see almost no difference. Two, you start to see a bit of difference, and three, you start to see a lot. And that's totally fine. Yeah, so I'm happy with this, so I'm going to save this. And then with the cattails, the final one, foliage, yes, also do four and save. Perfect. And now you can see that this one, zero, one, two. So here, quick optimizations. So having this stuff done, I now go ahead and go back to my scene, and if I see something very obvious, which I do not, everything seems pretty much the same. Let's set my screen percents to 200 again. Everything seems pretty much the same. I also need to remember that I'm watching in ten ATP right now because of recording, while normally I'm watching at this at four K, and if I then set my screen resolution to 200, it goes even higher. But now, if we go from IT to level of detail coloration, see? So now you can see everything that's LD zero over here, and then it go, Was red? Yeah, red is LD zero, and then it goes to LD one, and then it goes to LD two, I believe, because we only did like three. Yes, so that is correct. But yeah, basically, as you can see, you can see that our folage works. You can also see that I literally did not throw any LDs on the entire scene except for maybe the foliage, but that is good. So we got that done. It is all working totally fine. Our scene is running at 30 FPS at 200 s percent and at 100, we are sitting at QISPx around six PS. So if I would optimize this actual scene even more with LDs, I would probably easily hit like 100. So that was it for the optimizations. Now that we have done this, this was a nice little bonus and like an extra break. Now what we will do is we will go ahead and continue on with the actual parts of the soil, and we are going to get started by scanning a actual leaf texture and then converting it into a branch texture. So that will be quite interesting, and let's go ahead and continue with this in our next chapter. 26. 25 Creating Our Custom Leaf Texture Part1: In this chapter, we will go over on how to create our custom leaf texture. We will do this using a technique called multi angle photogrammetry. This chapter will come in two parts. In the first part, I will showcase you how to capture leaves in real life. Then in the second part, I will showcase how to actually process the images that we have captured and I will also give you a bunch of extra information. For this method, you will need the following equipment. You will need a camera. I personally am using a DSLR camera, but you can also use your mobile camera if you don't have anything higher. You will need a tripod or anything that can keep your camera as steady as possible while pointing downwards. It is key that it is absolutely completely steady. You will also need a blank sheet of paper for the background. You will need a white light. Now, you can once again just use the light from your mobile phone or you can use a portable light like I have, and you will need full control over the lighting in your hom. Giving you the ability to make the room dark or light. And, of course, let's not forget that you will need the actual leaves, but that one is quite obvious. Because I am recording this in winter, the only leaves that I'm able to use are ivy leaves. It does not matter what type of leaves that you want to use because this technique will work on all of them. I will explain more about how we are going to use these leaves later on. What you want to do is you want to try and replicate the setup that I use. This means you want to be in a room where you can control the lighting, making it light or dark when needed, point your camera downwards and place your leaf on a white background in the center of your camera. Next to this, you also want to set the correct settings of your camera. I personally like to always shoot in raw format, but this is one of the few times that I'm also okay with shooting in JBAG format. This is because our final leaves will only be 512 by 512, at which point you will often not see those JBAG artifacts. You want to keep your ISO low and I try to stay at 100 myself. Then you want to keep your temperature quite high for the best sharpness. I often try to go around ten. Now, for the shutter time, it does not really matter because you are using a tripod, so all you have to do is just wait. As for the lens, I am using a 17 to 70 millimeter lens. However, it does not matter which lens you use as long as you are able to nicely frame the leaf and have it quite large on your screen. Of course, better lenses do give you better results. When you have this done, we are ready to shoot. So keep the light with you, and let's have a look at the video of the capture process. Okay, so let's get started with the video. Now, as you can see, I'm using my setup, and what you first want to do is you first want to create one single image with the lights on. This image will be used so that you can generate a mask later on from your leaf. Then you want to turn off your lights and you want to set your white light at the very top. After that is done, what you want to do is you want to go counterclockwise in degrease of either 45 degrees or 90 degrees. I'm doing 45, which means that I will have around six points, one, two, three, four, five, six or eight points over here. However, if you do it at 90 degrees, that you only have four points, the quality will still be good, but it will be slightly less. It just depends how much time you have. I want to go for quite high quality, so I'm going to go ahead and go for eight points and simply follow my lead. You simply set your light here. You take a picture. And then clockwise, you set your light by 45 degrees. Roughly, it doesn't need to be perfect. So here you can see me just nicely setting my light just like that. And then every single time I've done that, I take another picture, so that at the end, we end up with eight different or sorry, nine different pictures. And once that is done, I will show you how that we are actually going to use these pictures to convert them using substance designer into nice textures. So as you can see, I'm pretty much done now, and I just finish off. 27. 26 Creating Our Custom Leaf Texture Part2: Okay, so we are back again at our usual program. So we now have our images. So as you can see over here, I just converted the images from a to JBC because as I said, I'm not too worried about that. And you can see the images over here. So if I open them up like this, you can see that we created that first image, which was just with the lights on top down. And this image we will use mostly just to create a mask. And after that, you have the strong images over here, which you can see with our light has every single point like that. So, yeah, that's pretty much it. So it is quite straightforward. And once you've done this, now what we will go over is we will go over on how to actually convert this into proper textures. Now one thing to keep in mind, as I said, because I'm recording this in winter, literally, it's freezing outside right now. So I simply do not have any other leaves except for this ivy leaf. This means that because I was planning to actually make this for a tree, once I've showed you this process, I will simply grab a leaf texture form, for example, text.com, and I will use that to show you how to create the branches. Don't worry. It is literally the exact same process. The only difference is that I'm using a slightly different texture. So having these textures, I actually end up and I created four different leaves over here so that I also can show you how to actually turn this into an atlas because I think that is quite nice to also see. The first thing that you want to do is when you end up with your JPEG images and you are ready to start editing them is to go ahead and create a new document and make it 512 by 512. That's more than enough that we need for a leaves. Like something like this, we don't need a lot of resolution. You then go ahead and you can press Create, and then we have over here this window. I do not know why my layers. There we go. Okay, next thing that you want to do is you want to drag in all of your textures at the same time. So you drag them in and you just press Okay. Might take a second to load them all in because I'm shooting at six K, and I'm now going to go back to 512 or 512. But anyway, so we now have these textures. The next thing that I want to do is I just want to make sure that my numbering is correct. So here you can see that this bottom one needs to be here at the top. So we have 035556, 5758, 5960, 61, Okay, so that's all correct. Next thing that you need to do is you need to select all of them. Actually, you can get rid of your background, select all of them. Right click, free transform. And then if you go ahead and you want to hold Alt, you can go in and you basically want to just nicely center this leaf so that it is quite large. And it is just filling the space. So we still want to use our resolution, just like that over here. Okay, then we can press Okay, and here we go. If you want, if you want to make your document run a bit slower, you need to do this anyway a little bit later on, is you want to go up here to selection, select your document, and then simply go to image, crop and this way, it will be copped. So all of that outside junk that is still stored in the memory, it will go away. And we need to do this because of how we are going to input this into substance. So now that we have this one, what I want to do is I want to just go ahead and go down until we have this one over here, which is our front side. Now, as you can see, we do have a few shadows, but that is not really a problem. You want to make sure that over here, as I said before, you do not want to move your leaves or your camera, and this is why because we are going to now create a mask and that mask needs to match up with our leaves. So we can go down here and we can grab our quick selection tool. If you do not have it, you just want to click and hold, and then you can find it here. You basically just want to go ahead and click on the outside over here. And just select basically everything except for the leaf. And don't worry about those really small cavities, because what I like to do is I like to just do some custom selection on those. So I go in here like this. Sometimes I do like to go in and just, like, play around with it, but this should be pretty much fine. Yes. So now what I like to do is, I like to go up here to my polygon select tool, which is the one above it. I want to hold Alt or Shift. Let's see, yeah, yeah, yeah. I want to hold alt, so we are subtracting it from the selection. So I want to hold alt. And just like these pieces, although it might be difficult to see with all the pixels. You simply want to mask out stuff that is not your leaf like this. Oh, this time it did not. Do I need to hold shift? Oh, yeah, because this time I'm on the outside, so I need to hold shift so that I'm actually adding it to the selection. So something like that. So, that's great. So now that we have this, all we need to do is we need to go down here, add a solid color, and you can make this color white. I tend to just make my leaf black so here, if I do another solid color over here, now it is black, black and white. And this is because of the way that the blending mode is turned on. We can always invert it into substance if needed. So we have these two over here. If you want, just merge the layers. And once that is done, yeah, you can leave in this leaf if you want, or you can just remove it. Let's just leave it in just in case. Now that this is done, all you need to do is you need to go ahead and I'm going to go in custom leaf raw images, and let's do two substance like this. Oops. And let's open up this folder. And then what we want to do is if we go file and do a saves over here. We just want to go ahead and we want to save in the two substance folder, and you want to save it as a PSD. This is really important. So save it as a PSD. Call it 01 over here, and that is pretty much now done. So I need to just go ahead and I need to do this for all four of the leaves. So I will just go ahead and time lapse this, but it will not have any narration. So let's go ahead and kick in the time labs. Okay, so we now have our leaves done over here, as you can see, so we got these four. Now, one thing that you might not have noticed in the Taps that I still want to show you is that when you import these layers, they are smart objects. So before you do the cropping, you just want to select them. Press right click and press storize layers. And after that, you want to do the cropping. If you do not do that, then when you select something, all of this information on the outside would still stay, even if you crop. So just keep that in mind. But as you can see, we have saved them as PSDs. And now if we go ahead and go to substance Ziner, we are going to go over on how to actually turn these into textures and then on how to turn them into an atlas. So let's get started with a substance graph, and we are going to just call it custom Underscore leaves, and you want to go ahead and just go for 1024. The reason we want to do 1024 is because as I said, we are going to turn it into an atlas and we have four leaf textures. So that means by 12 by 512 by 512. So we press Okay. And now we can start let's get rid of the tree view. I don't need it. Now we go ahead and get started. So you want to go ahead and grab your PSD and let's just do the first one. Import it. Now, you can do link resource. This one is a little bit quicker to import. However, it has the tendency to break your links whenever you want to share this file with someone else, which is why I'm going to go ahead and go for my simple Import resources. As you can see, these images are supposed to be square. If they are not square, you did not rest rice your layers before cropping. So just keep that in mind. All you need to do is just go ahead and turn off the first one over here, honestly, I'm also going to turn off the last one because we don't really need that one. I'm then just going to press Okay and then it should import. Give the second, of course. But there we go. Okay. So we have all of these images over here. That's totally fine. I'm going to go ahead and I'm going to select my Bitmap over here, and I'm just going to turn this to gray scale because it is a black and white image. And now what we can do is we can now go ahead and we can start by properly, setting these up. So the first thing I need to do is I need to order them, and I want to go ahead and always work with the top, which is this one over here. So 0358. And then it looks like 0357. Oh, no, so that's not the top. Yeah, you can see down here, 03, five, six. Okay, so 678. So is this working correctly, anyway? 8960, 61 62. Okay, so it did properly import. Sometimes it likes to shuffle them. That's no problem. So if we go this direction, it means that when you go up, we will go clockwise. So this is important because the ones that we need is if you go into your library, you want to go down here to scan processing. And then you have these two. You have multi angle albedo, I believe it is called. Yeah, multi angle to Albedo, and multi angle to normal. Let's go ahead and get started with the multi angle to albedo. What you want to do is you want to set your samples mount up and with this one, you can basically convert these images into an Albedo map. Because the lighting comes from different directions, what this map is able to do is actually remove all of the lighting because it can see all of the overlapping lighting and then by removing it, it will give us a base color. We basically want to go ahead and go to the first one. Honestly, for this one, it does not matter which order you go in, but I like to still stick with my order. You basically go here, and then you can see that slowly the lighting gets removed more and more and more until we have our base color over here. So that's very easy. Now, after you've done that, what you want to do is you do want to go ahead and now properly mask out all of these shadows that we have on the background. And this is why we created this mask over here. So we now have our multi angle tel veto. We then press space and ter blend mode, and we want to basically blend this with a uniform color. The uniform color that you want to pick is if you double click on your blend, click once on your uniform color and then grab the picker, and you want to grab a color similar to your leaf. So that now if you plug in your bitmap, which is your mask, you can see that over here, it is masking out this leaf. At this point, in terms of cleanup, what you want to do is you want to click on your bitmap. I want to add a quick blur high quality gray scale and just give it like a very small bit of blur like this. And then you can either use a hist grum scan or you can use a level. Let's do a hist gram scan over here. And then if you go into your position, you can see that you can basically grow or shrink your mask based upon the blurring. This is nice because what it allows us to do, as you can see over here, is it allows us to basically cut off those really thin white edges that we sometimes get. And there we go. So now we have this texture. At this point, if you want, you can add an HSL note, which allows you to basically, play around with your saturation and your lightness, if you want to go for a bit more orangy or yellowish colors or something like that. And of course, if you want to make it lighter or darker or anything like that. I'm going to go and set my lightness to probably 0.52, and then my saturation, I'm going to set down to around 0.42, something like that. Oh, that shows some really strong. That is strange. Oh, the reason that it does that is because these pieces are a little bit lighter because there are always still a few small reflections or incorrections, and it just happens because of the lighting. This not a perfect method, but it is a good method to quickly capture some leaves. Some of them will look better than this. I think this time, probably because the leaf is a little bit bent, it just captured the lighting a little bit too strongly. But honestly, this is totally fine. You will not really notice this. So anyway, you now have this one, and this can be considered a final base color for now. And then, of course, you also have your mask for it. And this is pretty much it. So if we now want to go ahead and create a norm map, we can do the same thing. We can grab the multi angle to normal. This one is a little bit more specific. You need to set the samples amount. The norm map format, which we will use OpenGL. I like to always set my intensity to one, and then down here, you need to set the next sample light angle to clockwise. And the first sample we made from the top, so we need to set this to 90. So we are basically setting in almost the same settings as that we used in real life. We are setting in here. And then it is just a matter of going in here, three, four, five, six, seven and eight. And as you can see, this will generate a nice norm map for us, just like that. So the norm map is able to see all of the veins, and yeah, it looks quite nice. Although sometimes I do have the tendency that direct X is the correct one in this case. I don't know if it's maybe going clockwise. No, that's not the one. So sometimes I feel like the urge to invert it because if I look at the leaves, it feels like these are actually denting in. But this is something you can test out later on. It's a simple invert. Next, you want to just blend this, grab your mask again and you want to blend this using a node that is simply called normal color, which is just like a plain norm map node. There we go. This is now the norm map for our leaves, we also have this one done. Finally, you guessed it our roughness. Our roughness, if we press space and add a grayscale conversion over here, we can plug in basically our leaf like this. And then this is quite easy. You don't need anything special. Let's use a histogram range, most likely, so that we can play around with the range and the position. Like this, or you can use a histogram scan. That sometimes also looks quite nice, or even just like a levels. No, I don't like those. Let's go for a levels. I think the levels gives me a little bit more control in this specific case. So the darker it is, the more stronger or the more shiny it is. So I don't want to have it too shiny. So I'm just going to play with my levels until I get, something like this over here, see? So it's not too shiny, but it is still looking nice. And that is it. Our first leaf is now completely done, and now all we need to do is we need to replicate this. I'm going to go ahead and first of all, save my scene. Over here in our custom leaf textures, let's just go ahead and press Save. Now that our setup is completed, we can pretty much just repeat. We basically go ahead and we grab all of these bits over here except for our mask and we can simply press Control C Contra V. And then you just want to import number 02, turn off the bottom one and this one and just press Okay. And give the second to import. And then I did forget that I was going to do this stuff over here. So, let's go ahead and grab these ones. Oh, hey, I'm missing something. Yeah, here, I'm missing this entire one over here. Let's just do that. Okay. So now what we can do is we can go ahead and we can grab our mask to get started. So turn this into a gray scale. So it's really slow to select your actual maps. I don't know why. But turn this into gray scale, and then we can throw this into our blur. And that often is already the correct setting. And all I need to do now is I just need to replace looks like this one and this one over here. And now for these ones, they should be fine. I like to double check 0.65, 0.6, no, 0.65. 0.67, uh, S? Is this the one, 0.60. Let's do 73, 72, 71, 70, 69, 68, six, seven, Yeah, then Oh, yeah here, 6765. So there seems to be a mismatch, but that might just be that I created a blurry picture and that I had to remove it. So that's most likely the case in these type of instances, because it would be stranger if we just missed one, especially because we have enough. So I'm just going to go ahead and I'm just going to once again set these up the same way. Like this. And again, for the second one. So start at the top. Oops. And then just move it down. And you should end up with eight of them. And if you don't, then something went wrong. So now we can see over here. You'll see how quickly it is to just generate these pieces now because we already have all of the base setting set up. So now we also have this one done, so we can just go ahead and we can grab all of this. Let's just do a duplicate, and let's just get rid of this one map because that one is not needed. And then we can go ahead and just import 03. So let me just move this down a little bit more. See, it does become quite a large graph quite quickly, but that's about it. For the rest, it should be quite easy. So let's turn off the last one, and let's press okay. Oh, wait, that might be the case. No, wait, no, I was thinking like maybe because the one that we turn off, but I'm not sure. Anyway, so let's select the bottom mask one. If it allows me to come on. For some reason, it does not allow me to select it, which is a bit strange. Okay, there we go. Now it allowed me to select it. Okay, so we set this to a gray scale over here. And now we pretty much just very quickly do a double check. 84, 85, eight, seven here. See, we always miss one for some reason. 89, but for rest, it seems all fine. 90? Yeah, here. So for rest, it seems all fine. So I guess as long one, two, three, four, yeah. As long as we have all of the maps, then it should be fine. So it might have to do with that one image that we keep removing that is confusing me in the numbering because I did not give these numbers. I just left them for my camera. But, so that one is now done. And now we can do the same over here. Just like that. Okay, let's have a look and see how this one came out. See, nice and flat, almost no lighting, a little bit of reflection here and there, but for the rest, it is looking pretty good. And, of course, the setup that I do is I did it very quickly. So you can improve the lighting even more by placing your light slightly up. So like moving it slightly upwards instead of moving it down. I was not able to move it down because then I cannot control my camera. But if you have someone to help you or you have some way to control your camera with like a clicker or something, then I would recommend always having your light come from a slight higher angle. But this one is now also done. All we need to do now is one, last one, and then I will show you how we are creating our atlases. So we have the last one over here, 04, import, turn off these last two and press aka. At this point, I'm not too worried about the order because it has not disappointed so far. So let's grab a mask and throw it down here, and then simply grab all of these textures, and we can nicely plug them in like this. Here we go. And after we have created the atlas, I will show you how to actually create branch textures using speed tree and using these custom leaves. Now, I will not be using these specific ones because these are ivy and I need to create one for a tree, but it is the exact same concept. It's just a different leaf texture. So we got this stuff done. Let's have a look. Yeah. I'm happy with that. Awesome. Okay. So now all of these are done over here. Now what we're going to do is we are going to convert this into an actual atlas so that it is usable. So let's save sin. And now I'm just going to do this the old school way because there are only three maps. So basically, all you need to do is you need to add a transform or well, four of them. Yes, you need to add four transforms over here, one, two, three, four. And we can basically use the system for every single one. So I will start with the base color. So let's start with just plugging in your base color over here. One base call up transform like this. And then all you need to do is you need to go into your transform, and I'm going to set my width over here to 50 by 50%. Or I don't even need to do that. I can just do this minus one. Oh, don't forget to set your tiling mode down here to absolute and no tiling. And I forgot to do that on all of them before copying, so that's my bad. So tiling mode needs to be set to no tiling. Because, else, it will try to just keep tiling, and I definitely do not want that for an atlas. Here we go. So basically, you scale it by minus two. We can do it for all of them, minus two, because we are working in 1024, and we are going to go ahead or we are working in yeah 1024, but these are all going to be 512. So we basically are going to push them into the corner, and then we are going to convert them to 1024. So you have these ones over here, and now all you need to do is you need to set your offset. Y and the X offset for this one, 0.5, 0.5. This one, you need to go -0.5, 0.5, and you just want to basically order it like this. For this one, 0.5 -0.5, and for this one -0.5 -0.5. So now they are all in one corner. After that, it is a simple matter of adding a blend, and you basically want to just go ahead and blend these maps and then add another blend and another one. And you're basically going to blend these maps together over here like this. So now, these are all 512 or 512, and then all we need to do is, I believe, at probably at this point, you want to start forcing the 1024, and you can do that by going up here and setting the width to plus two, and then it should become 1020 for all of them. And that's it. So now you just have created a very quick atlas which, as you can see, looks quite similar to the leaves that we have here. Of course, these ones they remove the background because they already use their mask. But you can see that just like they've done over here, you can just end up with, like, a bunch of different type of leaves. Of course, it would take quite a while to do this many in our case. But this is what we basically will be doing. We will be probably grabbing like one of these or like one of these, and then we will go ahead and do the same thing. But here you cannot see here. You can see, like the little reflections and everything. So this is pretty much the way to do it. Yeah, well, there are many ways to do it, but this is the way that I use to do it. I basically now have this stuff, and all I need to do is I just need to once again duplicate this three times for every map. And then it's just a matter of going in here and using this one for my norm map. Let me just make this a lot smaller over here. And then finally, I can use this one For my roughness and it will automatically convert to gray scale by the time that all of them are done. So let's just double check our work as always. So over here, we have our roughness, which does not seem to work probably because it adds Ds. No, that should not be the case. Even though well, you can just go ahead and set the mode to art. I don't know why this time it decide to ignore it, but not last time. Probably because it is a gray scale. Yeah, that's it. Because it is a gray scale, it automatically turns it into black and then it cannot see that. Then you want to set these pieces to art to basically art them to it. These ones should still work totally fine. Because these are using color and color can read empty backgrounds like this. This is now all done. They're all in the same locations, so now you can just go ahead and go in here and you can set these as an output, and then you would be able to use them however you want. So congratulations. You now have all of your textures, or you created some leaf textures. If you want, you can always add a normal strength or normal intensity, which allows you to basically increase the intensity of your normals a little bit, if you like. I want to just set it a little bit stronger. But this is pretty much it. This is also the point where I will leave this. So as you can see, it might seem a little bit overwhelming the first time you open it, but it's just a lot of copy pasting, and you end with this nice little atlas that you can see over here. Awesome. Now what we will be doing in the next chapter is we will go ahead and we will get a simple leaf over here, just like an atlas. And then I will show you how to actually go into SpettreT turn this into, like, a branch you can somewhat see over here, like these type of branches a little bit. One thing I did forget is that you also want to do this with your mask, by the way. So you probably want to just go ahead and duplicate this once more. And then you want to go in here and you want to grab your mask for every single one. Here, this one, so that you also have the mask because you will need that one. So just to close this chapter off properly, let me just grab these masks over here and over here. And for this one, I tend to just press invert gray scale because this time we want to mask them being white, and then you can just go ahead and you can press space, art and output. And call the output identifier mask and then copy the identifier and paste it into your label. There you go, see. So now you also have your mask ready to go. Then, of course, if you want to export, you can go to Custom leaves. Export outputs as Bitmap, and press Export. And now they should arrive in here. Tada. So yeah, let's go ahead and continue to next chapter. 28. 27 Creating Our Custom Branch Texture: Okay, so now that I went over on how to actually create an atlas texture, what I want to do now is I just want to go to text.com, and I'm going to download these cherry tree leaves over here, which you can find down here under your treed scan atlas. Now, once again, I explained this in last chapter. The reason I'm going to use these ones is because I'm going to generate a branch that we can use on a tree. However, because it is winter, I was only able to find ivy leaves, which actually stay alive during winter. To scan. So the techniques are all exactly the same. The only thing is that I'm going to download these ones, and I will, of course, just supply these because I am allowed to supply them with text.com. So I'm downloading those. And then what you want to do is you want to go into Speed tree, and just go ahead and if you go create a new tree, you actually want to go down here and you want to use a cluster over here, so it is a template that you can use. So this one's really nice. As you can see, it pretty much already sort of shows what we are going to create. So it shows like over here are branches. Now, by default, it has this plane. You do not want to move this. If you want to go ahead and move around your camera, you can always go down here and go to perspective, and then you are able to move it around and you can see how this works. So as you can see, it pretty much does the same as the IV. It has this trunk over here, and then it basically just uses one single branch. And then what it has, it has multiple different branches on top of this. Now, this one single branch, honestly, I do not really like over here. It's like broken off, but it looks way too specific. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to go ahead. I'm going to delete this. And let's see. If I just grab this one on here, no, so we definitely need to, like, that's a bug. Okay, let me just that's a bug. That should never happen when I try to undo it. So let me just try it again. So over here, let's go into perspective. So I want to just see if I can maybe change these branches around a little bit. So I guess maybe the easiest way is actually, if we hide the branch also so that we only have this one left over here. Then if you go down here and click on perspective and go back to your X and Y plane, was it the X and Z plane? No. No, X and Y plane. I don't know why my camera is so high, but basically, what we can do is we can basically move this down, and this will give us a bit of a better branch. And now we can just basically go in here and we can mess around with things. So we have our default branch over here. Now, you do not want to really play around with like threshold renting. Let's just leave those things for what they are. What I do want to do is I probably want to go ahead and go to spine, and over here, I can control my length, which should be fine. I think. Let's see. The thickness, I probably want to go into my skin, and I'm going to set my thickness a little bit thinner over here. And I mostly then want to go into spine. And if we scroll down, I just want to basically play around with my noise a little bit. So we get some noise. If you can also do some early noise, but it does not really matter. So we basically just have a basic branch. If we just quickly hide our leaf matches so that we can actually see what we're doing. Over here, we have now these branches like this. I don't really like these. So what I'm actually going to do is I'm going to go ahead and I'm going to delete these, and I'm just going to use a normal art geometry and normal branches like this. And then I should be able if I go to generate, and maybe let's set here. So this was the original one, proportional over here, and then I can play around with the numbers. The reason we are seeing this is because if we go to show, we want to turn off our normals. So okay, so now we see this I can see that I just need to go into my spine and actually set my length, a little bit larger over here. Then over here, we can now go ahead and we can work on these branches. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to set in my generate. We can set the number. You can rotate it around a little bit, but what I like to do is I like to often. It doesn't always work, but let's have a look if we go to forces and grab a planear force. Okay, you are really far down. Like this, it sometimes allows us to basically flatten out our branches. So if we just go to our branches and go to forces and turn on planar, here see. It allows us to sort of flatten out our branches. And this will require a little bit of custom work, this type of workflow. So if we now go back to our XN Y plane, move this back into location, see. So they are now a little bit more flat. Here, let me just move this down. And now if I just go into my branches, I can go to generate and let's set our first a little bit lower over here. And our last, our last is fine. I'm going to go into my spine, and I'm going to set my length over here quite a bit smaller near the bottom. And see. So yeah, for the rest, you can maybe move them around a little bit just to give them, some randomness. But that's looking pretty good. So we got some branch over here. Once you have these branches, you can go ahead and go to Node Editor. And if you have, one that you don't like, you can always go ahead and delete it. And just like that, we are able to also, for example, mess around with things. Now, for some reason, I'm not there we go. I was not able to select them. I know. Maybe I want to just do some randomization. Let's just go to generate let's just see until I get something that I like. So I try to get quite a bit of evenness. Like, something like this looks actually quite good. So let's try it again. Let's go now into note and carefully select it. And now you can kind of, like, move this around the way that you wanted to. Now, this is nature, so we don't want to go too uneven. Let's go ahead and see your start angle. I don't think you will be able to do some proper rotation. No. Oh, yeah, wait, here we go. Now we are able to do some proper rotation. It's a little bit tricky to get it white, but it does work. It's just because we are working from this angle. And what I'm going to do is I'm going to actually delete one of these. Move this one down over here. And let's just get started with something like this. And let's just actually add our leaves so that we can see if this is what we bunt. So we now have our branches. Let's also do a quick saves because this one is quite buggy and we are going to call this branch underscore material. So for your leaves, your leaves are pretty much the same. You just want to add geometry, and you can try to go to leaves and do like a scattered leaves, but I'm just going to go ahead and I'm going to go up here and just do like a basic normal one. So we got some leaves over here. Now, let's go into forces and turn on planar and maybe we can, like, set the planar a little bit to make our leaves a bit more interesting. Next, I want to have my leaves kind of sticking outwards. So we want to go probably to our orientation and mess around a little bit more with, like, our line also mess around with a little bit more like our folding over here and our facing here see so that until we get a pretty decent look, let's go into generate and let's set this to. I just like proportional. It's one that I'm comfortable with. So let's go for proportional steps. Yeah, honestly, I'm fine with the generate settings. I think at this point, we can start by doing our actual textures because for the defamation, we need to have our actual textures and everything. So I think, yeah, this is probably the correct one for now. So if we go ahead and go up here, we can add a new material and call this leaves. And then I'm just going to import, so make sure to set them to two sided, and I'm just going to import our Where are you? Tree leaves over here. So color, opacity, and normal. Oh, no, wait. For this one, we also want to actually have our roughness and our subsurface over here. Maybe set the subsurface to Oh, no, I think I actually want to have that in here. There we go. Okay, so we got this stuff that is fine. Now what I'm going to do is I'm going to go to my cut out and I'm just going to go for like four different leaves. So maybe like five, you can choose yourself. But it feels a bit unfair if I use more than four because we only created four for our custom atlas. So you basically want to go in here. And these leaves you can go full on geometry because they are going to be a texture. So you can really push geometry. So I can go in here and I can just like a bunch of tesselation like this, and then I can add them. And we just want to do that with four of them. Let's do this one. Um, and a bunch of tesselation. So that we can just nicely bend them around and stuff like that. So that will be nice. And if you want, you can also show the backside of the leaves, but those are always a little bit risky because they might not always look good, so I tend to just avoid that. And finally, let's do poll like this one over here. Seems pretty fine. H Okay. Bunch of tesselation. There we go. Okay, so those are our leaves. We can now go ahead and we can just drag this onto our actual leaf meshes. And now you can see that we mmediately have some leaves. So you can imagine that if we bake this down later on, we will be baking down all of these leaves. So I'm just going to go into my skin. One, two, three, four, set all of them to the leaves material and then set the mesh to the different meshes that we nicely randomize these. Over here. And now what we can do is we can, first of all, just play around a little bit more we like to generate. Now, I don't want to have too many. You can very quickly add like too many of them, and then it will not look as good. Next is maybe we can try a collision here, like a high quality collision and then play around with a little bit more so that we are at least avoiding having them actively collide. And yes, next, so you can play around with your role a little bit. So in general, you can just play around with a bunch of different settings, maybe like with your first over here to give it a little bit of spacing. And, of course, let's not forget going into orientation. And then we can do some folding over here. So these ones, I want to probably fold probably fold upwards. Give them a little bit of curling here and there, give them a little bit of twisting, play around with your vertex amount, and maybe, like, set the noise a little bit smaller. Here see. So smaller noise, and then a little bit of vertex amount. And then maybe also mess around a little bit more with the Y scale. So you can go in here and you can definitely make the top ones, like, a little bit smaller. And for the rest, you can just in general, play around with things to add some variation. Save generate with your size scaler. You can go ahead and just make the ones at the top, a little bit smaller, and then you can kind of, like, just mess around with all of these settings. Over here so that we have, like, a bunch of different settings. Okay, so now that we have something like this, let's have a look. I'm going to make them probably, like, a little bit bigger in general. So that's looking quite nice. And then what I want to do is I sometimes just want to go back into my branches. And then in our note editors, we can go in here and we can basically play around with, for example, over here, like our rotations and everything and just get something nice out of this. So you have full control over this. You can spend a lot of time making this absolutely perfect if you want. That is no problem. So I'm going to go for something like this. Also, this kind of overlapping you have down here. You want to often twine, like, avoid it. Like, don't have it too strongly because then it will look a little bit strange because we, of course, just from this direction is what we will bake down. So if we see the leaves like over here, then it will be a little bit difficult to make them look nice because they do not really bake as well. So I'm going to go into my orientation. I'm going to let's see Align is pretty good. My align, I'm fine with. My facing, I'm not good, so I think I will need to use forces. These forces are not working as well. Let's go into perspective. Let's see. Maybe if we go, what shall we do? Magnet or direction? Maybe direction will work. So let's just set the direction. Let's move it up. Let's go back into X and Y plane and just see if this does like a better result. So if I go into my leaf direction, yeah, yeah, that does give a better result. And then at the very end, once you think like, Okay, so let's scroll this down. Like I'm going to move this one over here a little bit higher because else, I feel like it will not fit. Yeah, let's move it like this, and I'm going to maybe set this one down a little bit, maybe move this one around a little bit. And these leaves, that's a little bit annoying. Like, let's see. I'm going to move this one in. So sometimes you just need to kind of play around with it. I'm going to delete these two leaves over here. So, okay, so we got this. Now, with these leaves, what you can do is you can rotate them. The only tricky thing about this is when you rotate them, is that the collision might have other ideas. So here, see, I'm rotating them, and sometimes it takes a second to find the correct one you need for rotation. But yeah, here C. So that's the annoying thing. So with the collision, because it is colliding with it, it basically just tries to avoid it. So sometimes just deleting it is often better. Here, these ones I find like this one I don't like, so I can delete it and delete this one until I get a favorable position. Same with these one, C. Once I delete these, I get more favorable positions. And the only thing is that it's a little bit unreliable. That's the only thing I have to say about it. So you kind of want to see whatever works best for you. Over here, it seems like we have two sitting on top of each other, which I don't really like. Once again, like this one, a way that's a scaling. So it's probably I cannot even see which one is the rotate. Let's just delete it. This one is rotate. And this one here, we can move down here. This one I don't like, let's delete it. This one I don't like, so let's delete it see that now looks a bit better. This one I don't like. This one I don't like. This one I don't like. So yeah, basically, it can be a little bit fiddly, but it's a texture. So you kind of just want to spend your time on it, and I'm definitely not spending as much time as I should on this, but that's because I'm just making this like quite quickly. Okay, so we got those. Let's delete this one. And there you go. So after a while, you will get some really nice and favorable positions, and you just get in general, like, quite a nice looking texture if you would look down on this. And that is something that we roughly have right now over here. Yeah, you can even try to move some stuff down here and there. So, perfect. So once you are happy with it, the next thing that we need to do is we just need to download a very quick bark texture for our actual branch. So let's go ahead and go totxdt com, and this time I'm going into Tweedy scans. And then if you go down to Woodbr, I'm going to probably grab like this one seems fine. Like that's more than good enough. Oh, do we all of them? Yeah, of course, that's typical that all of them are not square. Should be fine. Like, it should be able to register in speed tree. So we're just going to have the Albedo, nor map and roughness. And if we go in here and add a another material, call it bark. Can now go ahead and so I didn't mean to do that. Bark, go into settings. And art your textures. And it's simply drag the settings onto your base over here like this, see. So now we also have a bark done, and now you have a texture done. Okay, so at this point, of course, you just want to go ahead and play around with whatever you want. For example, I'm going to probably set my radius to be a little bit thinner, although that might mess up my leaves again if it does that. Yeah, here, so that does mess up my leaves, and I'm not really in the mood for that. So I'm going to Yeah. Let me just make the radius, a little bit thinner, and then I will just pass the video, and I will just play around with the leaves again because else this will take very long. Okay, here we go. So I got something pretty decent, so at this point, I will save my scene. And let's say that I'm now happy with our bark. Oh, sorry, the reason I don't have my bark material yet or again, is because I crashed like seconds after I press par. So let me just very quickly re art my bark material over here. There we go. Okay. Perfect. So we now got these pieces over here, that's all totally fine. So what we can do now is we can render this out to become an actual texture. So the way that you want to do that is you want to go down here and you want to export material like this. And what export material will do is it will keep or it will basically register our viewpod and then it will export the material based upon this viewpoard. You can also do this with, for example, if you want to have distant trees on a plane or something like that. So billboard trees so. So what we can do is we can go ahead and do like a another texture that we'll call branch or actually custom branch texture over here. So let's just use this one. So 248 by 248, yeah, that's more than enough. So I'm not too worried about that. We don't want to have shadows on because then it will try to bake in the shadows. So often most of this stuff is totally fine. It's already by default. Yeah, we want to have an opacity. Definitely, so it will have an Alpha around all of our leaves. We want to have a normal, we want to have a gloss, although we will call it roughness. We do not need an AO map. We do not need subsurface scattering. Those ones I'm not going to have in this instance. So this should be quite easy. So passing normal roughness, and this one should be like the base color. So we probably want just color base color. And once you are done with that, you can press Okay, and then it will ask you, where do you want to save it? So we are going to save it in here. It will ask you the file format, so I like TGA, and then we can press Save and let that run, which will take a second. Once it is done, it will automatically close the window, and now as you can see, you will have these four pieces. So if we go ahead and we go into Photoshop to open them up over here, you can see that now we have a norm map. We have a base column map, we have a roughness map, and we have an opacity map. You can clearly see on the opacity map. The other maps, if, for example, drag in your opacity over here, then what you can do is you can, for example, quickly go in here and this way here, you should be able to kind of see through them. What I can do is, of course, I can just quickly just to showcase you select color range, just select the black pieces, and then I can go ahead and in here or see. So now you can see that everything is working totally fine. I just want to also do a very quick check with my base color. So select color range. Okay. And then I just want to go ahead and just add a solid color. There we go. Okay, that's basically how we can generate branch textures. And of course, you can use your generate functions inside of Speedre to generate multiple different variations. Now, of course, at this point, what you want to do is you might want to play around a little bit more with your colors, like maybe the grayscale colors or anything like that. I will also play around with that, but I always like to first of all, get started with actually having a tree so that I can properly preview it. So what we are going to do in the next few chapters is we are going to create our first tree, and we are going to actually use these branch textures as the main textures on the tree, along with, of course, just like a trunk texture from text.com. But I hope that you can now understand that I would go over on how to quickly generate these type of branch textures if I need to do them myself. The next step would be if you want to do it much more advanced, then everything would be to actually do your tree modeling program like for example, May or Max and then bake it down just like you would bake down the decals that we create, like the root decals. You would basically just bake it down like that, and then you would basically get the same result. But of course, it would take much longer to add some small variations to your leaves and stuff like that. So let's go ahead and continue to our next chapter where we will work on how to create a tree. 29. 28 Creating Our Trees Part1: Okay, so now that we have our custom textures done, what we're going to do in this chapter is we are going to get started with our tree. Now in speed tree, it literally has the name in it, you can go from simple trees all the way to super advanced tree, so we are going to keep it nice and simple. So we want to get started with a blank, and most of the techniques that we will be using here, they actually you will already know them because we've sort of used them, although in different ways with our other foliage. So we start with the tree. Now, the way that the tree will grow very easy, you have a trunk. That trunk will have branches, and then normally those branches will have even smaller branches, and those branches will have, even smaller ones and have leaves. We just need to decide how many levels we go up before we switch out our jom tree branches for our texture branches. So if you want, you can even do that at the very beginning, if you, for example, create more different textures, and then you can get something for example, I think it's like this one. Here, this is like an sample that comes with speed tree. Over here, this is, for example, an extreme example if you want to optimize, where it only has one geometry branch and then it already goes over into texture, see? But I want to go for a little bit higher quality because this does not look super nice. So keep that in mind. Now I'm going to close this and let's just get started with our own. We want the right click and we want to get started with a simple trunk. I'm just going to go over here because this one might be nice. Um tall. Yeah, I want to kind of go for not too tall. So it just going to be quite a basic tree, like having a little bit of empty space at the bottom, and then it just kind of, like, branch out and it just has like a bit of the classic tree shape to get started with. So I just want to have a look and see how these ones look. So we have old split and tall. Splits pretty cool because it like splits off, but let's try tall over here. That's often quite an easy sample. Here, if you do the split one, Ah, let's hide this. Yeah, the split one, I think, what you need to do is we need to have then another branch on top of it. So but we are just going to go for this one. I actually thought that the split one would go on longer, but oh, well, anyway, so we have over here our trunk. That's totally fine, not too special. If you want, you can play around with it. I don't really care, you can see, like, yes, the length. It is very, very large. So I guess what you can do is you can try and set the length over here to, like, only 30. And then maybe, play around a little bit more with your skin by setting it a little bit lower. And if I see this, I feel like that maybe what I want to do. See, let's start with the base. And then if I click on here, I feel like I want to just go ahead and just maybe move this up so that it does not go into a point too quickly. There we go. So yeah, you can also do these kind of curves. You can find them down here here. You can find all types of different curves. So, yeah, that's looking pretty good. Now we are going to get started with our first base of branches. So if we go in here, let's see if we just have like a branches and we could again, like, try this one, and that will give us a pretty solid base. So for these branches, they seem to be quite long already at the base, and then they become smaller. So that's something that I want to do. And it's mostly in the length. So if we go to our length over here, based on parent, I'm going to set the default length a little bit smaller. And then I'm going, oops, and then I'm going to go in here. And yes, I'm going to make geese. Again like a little bit smaller. So that is pretty good. This one is really long, although that might actually be interesting. But what I'm curious about is, Oh, here, this is why it is really long because of this one like this. Now, to get the randomization in here, you can also click on this button next to this. And here you have variance, which will give you a little bit of randomization. I don't know why I did not use that one before. You could have actually also used this on the grass, so I completely forgot to use this on the grass, to be very honest. But it is here. So you are able to, like, add some random variants, and you can also do, like, a distribution. But yeah, I'm quite happy with that, I think. Yeah. So we have this one now. The next thing that maybe it might be nice if we do, like, some breaking we like, go down here and let's just see Wait, let me just move this over here. That's a knockout. Where is my brake? Oh, God. I already forgot Shape, zig zag. Oh, yeah, here's the break. So I just want to see if I have a chance. Oh, actually, you know what? That would, like, cut them away quite quickly. In that case, I'm not going to do that. So I'm going to leave it as this, and I most likely will need to do one more level of branches. By the way, these bunches, right now, everything is quite hypole. So what you do want to do with your tree, like normally with our grass and everything, this is not really problem, but with our tree, I want to always just double check my tris, and then I want to go into my segments, and I tend to often set my accuracy a little bit lower and then set my radio over here, sometimes a little bit lower. Now, I think, actually, this one is fine, but in your big branches, you want to set your radio here a little bit thinner to minimize the geometry amounts. And then I want to go ahead and also see. Yeah, actually, I don't really care too much about the accuracy right now, but I can also go over here and just set the relative, which will basically just reduce the amount of my branches. So that's looking pretty good. Over here, you can see that we have these ends. If you want, you can right click Add selected object and you can add a knot, not a knot, a cap over here. And that will basically just end these ends properly, see? And it will not just be a square. It will just nicely try to, like, move it into a point as if it is still growing. So that's quite nice if you just want to cap it off. And then if we go back to our big branches, we can now right click ArtomtreT selected. And I'm going to go ahead and I'm going to go for um maybe some custom branches or we can go in here and we can go for little branches. Yeah, let's do little branches over here. This one might actually be. I'm just going to quickly go to note, and I'm going to set the length a little bit in. There you go. And then go back to generator. For just one branch, that's not really a problem. Okay, so we got our little branches, and on here, we are going to have a textures. Now, first of all, so yes, I like that we have a lot of space or a lot, a little bit of space down here. I'm going to go to my generator settings, and I'm going to set my first probably down a little bit. Because it looks like over here, these branch happen quite often, like, not too often, so it's still, like, a little bit out. But I want to try and get them quite close to, like, the beginning. Next to this, let's have a look. I'm going to, I think, here at the top, I don't really like them, so they're only sitting at the top right now. Frequency, I don't really mind. I'm just having a t here, because as you can see over here, I don't want to have them as close to the top. So let's set my last little bit down. Then let's go into my spine and let's set my length maybe a little bit up over here just to give them a little bit more space. And I think I now just need to start adding my texture because Este will be very difficult to see what I'm doing. So let's go ahead and just get started by adding our textures. If we go to our materials, we can add two new materials. One we can call Bar the other one we can call branch. Now, for our bar material, what we can do is we can just import the one that we got from text.com. So let me just navigate to it. Click. Oh, God. No, not in our opacity, in our norm map. And if you want in your roughness map. So this one we can just drag onto the trunk and replace the branch material also. So this is like our base bark over here. It's looking totally fine. It seems to work. So, oh, and we want to also probably just drag it onto our cap like that. And now what we can do is we can go ahead and we can go to our branch, turn on two sided. And now if we go, I'm just navigating to it, so that's why it takes me a second. We can grab our base color, opacity, normal roughness, and we have them set to two sided, so that's looking pretty good. As for our cutout messes, let's press dit, and let's have a look. So yes, you can keep it a plane, but I do personally prefer to always just give it a little bit of extra geometry. It is needed anyway, because what we are going to do is we are going to Oops let's move this. We are going to do some tessellations so that we actually do have a little bit of room to move this round. So let's go for something like this. Push up the tesselation a little bit, and then what we will do is we will rely on LODs to push it down quite quickly. So we now have this one over here, which is our leaf. So now we can pretty much just work on that. So we can go to our little right click R geometry. And if we, for example, once again, go to leaves, you can play around with this, and I don't need to alternating. So maybe we can just go for, like, scattered leaves and see how those work. So these leaves, they will have smaller branches to them. So they are actually going to become a little bit bigger. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to go in here, and I will first go. Let's see. Let's first go to skin and set the size of the leaves a bit bigger. Let's go to generate and just set the number, and it is using my favorite, which is proportional. And I just want to go ahead and I want to have them all, sticking a little bit forward. So I want to go to my align over here and do a little bit like this. And now if we add our branch texture, you can see this is now the texture that we created. Which works really nicely because it is the same branch texture as over here. So we just need to go ahead and we need to make it look a lot fuller compared to what we have over here. So that's why I wanted to also have them quite close. If I have a look at this, I'm going to go ahead and I'm going to Hmm. Yes, I can add more little branches over here, although, by the way, I do need to go into my segments, and I need to, like, set my relative quite a bit down, although it looks like it cannot go down much more. Set my optimization over here up. So this will do some general optimization. You see, now we are only at 4,000 triangles, although 4,000 might be a little bit too little. There we go. And I'm going to go into my leaves. And this, it is a little bit fiddly. We just basically want to just go back and forth and just see what works. So over here, I can go, of course, with my size. But if I go too large with my size, you will get this kind of stuff where it's just like you can easily still see gaps in the tree, and it just does not feel really nice in general. So instead, let's go ahead and let's say Okay, so let's first of all, just finish off some stuff over here. So the size over here, I'm fine with that. I'm going to I don't think, yeah, here, we need to have collision turned off in this case, because else it will just look even worse. I'm going to go ahead and go to my orientation. And I'm just basically playing around a little bit with the pieces. Folding is one that I want to play around with curling. Over here, we can also do so that they kind of, like, curl downwards. We can give them some twisting if we want. So random vertex. Deformation is also nice and our scaling over here, you can maybe give a little bit of scale. So let's try out the random stuff. So if we go in here, here, we can say we can give it a little bit of variance like this just to randomize it a little bit. I'm quite embarrassed now that I did not use this one too often for the other pieces. But okay, so we got this. And now I think that we need to do is we need to rely mostly on our branches to fill in the space a little bit better, especially down here. So let's set the frequency over here, a little bit up. You'll see until we are starting to fill in the space, and then we got something like this. Now, next stop. So that is already looking quite a bit better. Of course, I need to play around with my texture, like my actual texture itself. I want to go ahead and I want to just work on the colors. But if I see this, the first thing I think is going to leaf and setting our number down a little bit because it is a little bit overkill. Let's go for something like this, especially because once we have our shadows and everything in here, we can probably here if I go to post and click on AO here, see. Once you get shadows in here, it's already going to become a lot less. So this is pretty good. I'm going to now click on my large branches over here and go to Node, am I able to select this one? This one, I feel like it's sticking out too fast, so I'm just going to push this back in and maybe, play around a little bit more my angle. And I feel this one is sticking out also a little bit too fast. So let's also play round that. Because I still want to, like, have a little bit of Oh, God, didn't mean to do that. A little bit of control over my branches. But as you can see, you can very quickly generate a pretty good looking tree over here. Now, the trees, as I said before, they can become very advanced. You can also, for example, go to your trunk and you can go like, I've not done this a lot, but you can do like knots and over here, I think what I need to do is I first of all, need to add an extra branch to this. Or what I can do is I can add probably like a branch to this. No wait, I'm just messing out with this. So if you want, you can ignore this. But there was a way that you can add a branch. And for this branch, you basically go to generate and you set it to be very, very low like this. And then you set the break all the way up. So here we have one branch. So let's say that we even go to node and we just change the position of it. And after you've changed the position, you can go to spine and you can go down and break it. Which in this case, it does work, but not at the position I want. Come on. There we go. And then over here, you should be able to add like a knot and not just a cap. Oh, no, I guess it was a cap. So, you go to add just like a cap over here. And that will give you, again, like an interesting look, but it's not looking as good as I thought. Probably because the cap material, you would you also want to have a unique material on this. But I just wanted to quickly show you that you can do stuff like this, even though I personally don't find myself doing it too often. But yeah, you can, like, set the spot down, and then you can go ahead and you can just mess around with this, for example, it adds like that nice extra bit of detail as if there used to be a branch here, but it kind of got broken off. So here, that's quite cool to have stuff like that. And yeah, for the rest, I think it is pretty basic. You have your leaves. At this point, you can generate whatever you want. So if I would just, for example, save my scene first. That is not the won but not the correct folder. Let's go in here, saves, let's just call this tree underscore zero, one, because in my time naps of my forest, I will most likely create a few more extra trees. Let's just save this. But those trees will just be generated. So, you can go in here. You can also make use of forces if you want. Now in this one, the first thing I would think of is to, for example, play around a little bit more my noise to give it a little bit of an unevenness. Which I'm actually going to probably leave here. I quite like that. So let's just save scene. And let's say that this is now done. And then if you ever want to change it around, yes, you can do the trunk, but I tend to just go for my big branches, and then I just go to, like, my randomize over here. And the thing is you can also randomize everything. If you randomize everything, it will literally just randomize the entire tree. So if I press that one, you can see that I think if I go one down, see, it randomizes the trunk. It randomizes all the branches. It randomizes everything, basically. And then you can see that you can very quickly create variations of a tree to fill in your forest like that. So we got this one I'm going to quickly saves 301. Yeah, I'm going to quickly, like, reopen this that we No, I don't save that so that we have like old version back. So we got like this version over here. 30. 29 Creating Our Trees Part2: Okay, so sorry for the quick cut. I didn't realize about the time. So now that we have our old version over here, what we can do is we can also just quickly create a younger version. And this one should be quite easy. We can go ahead and first of all, in our old version, I'm just double checking that my, okay, so this is pretty much fine. You can, if you want, like, minimize maybe the segments in here, but I'm going to use LLDs for that, so I'm not too worried. So yeah, let's do a save a and just save this as three number 02 over here. I already had a file like that because I crashed, unfortunately. But okay, so this is now 302. And what we can do in here is, let's get started by just getting rid of this little cap. We have a trunk over here. Let's set the size like 15. Yeah, that this is a lot smaller. And then in our skin, we can set, Hey, let's make this a bit bigger. We can set our absolute down like this. So that's quite good. And for the rest, you can, of course, just, like, play around with a few things. For example, if you want to play around with your noise a bit more, you can also work with that. I'm going to actually, I think I'm actually going to stay with what we have right now. So next stop is that we have, like, our little branch over here, and I kind of need to decide, I feel like our little branches, we would already have Oh, no way taxi. Yes, this is correct. This is correct, having punch in here. I'm going to swi and first of all, maybe do some random generation. So let's go to the big branches, and let's just go up here to why can I never find this? Here we go random seeds. I want to go ahead and just do like a randomized. Oh, I like that. I like that, but I want to have them like less long. So what I'm going to do now is I'm going to go into my spine. I'm going to try and make them a little bit less long over here. Maybe also work a little bit more like the align. Which is that's the start angle. Oh, yeah, line probably does not work with the large branches, so we probably want to set our start angle a little bit up as if the tree is really growing, so it's trying to grow upward. And this will also just condense everything into a small area. Then if we go to my little branches, I might want to just play around with my generate where I think the amount is fine. I think we just want to go ahead and play out a little bit more like our first here to get a few extra branches in the center over here. And once we've done that, we can go into our leaf and the number of leaves maybe tone it down because it is like a new growing branch. So here, let's do tree orientation. Let's once again, align this out a little bit. Okay, so we got that also. Then what I'm going to do is I'm going to probably go back to my big branches and just with the notes I want to carefully do a little bit of manual hand placement. Here, and then you can very quickly also generate a nice smaller version of your tree. Oh, that's always annoying when I want to move it up, but it's deciding that it is going to move down. A, there we go. Now we got it back. Yeah, actually, you know what I quite like that? Maybe like come on, tiny bit less. There we go. So we got that one. Over here, this one feels very empty, to be honest. Yeah, let's just do, like, a tiny bit of scaling so that it creates a few more branches over here. Yeah, and I think like something like this looks quite nice. So there we go. Now, we also have a little tree. And just like that, you can just keep going and going and going. You can also, of course, create different types of trees. For example, if you make the trunk way bigger, you can create oak trees. Of course, you would need the correct leaves. But in general, this is looking pretty good. So I'm going to save this. I'm going to quickly also open up our original tree over here and let's just go ahead and do an export. So we have a tree over here. We already went over the general branch optimization as far as I can see. So I'm not too worried about that. Yeah, because the smaller ones, if I lower them even more, they would just become well, I might be able to lower them just in the underweight, because the radio I already lowered. The reason that the radio is like this here, I might if I said this to zero, and then set the absolute. Then I can control the radio a little bit better. So I'm going to have this, pretty much at once that we only have 12,000 because these bunches are so thin, right now they are just triangles, basically. But from a distance, that should be totally fine. So okay, we have this. Let me do one last save. And now what we can do is we can export. Be material wise, this is actually very basic. It's very simple. The only thing is that we do need to probably do some balancing, maybe even in Photoshop to make it look good inside of unreal. So we are going to export the game Exports. Oh, yeah, from Speed tree. That was correct, actually. 301, save. Yes, I'm fine with all of this, because it is still correct. So we can just go ahead and press export. And let's open up Maya. Here we go. So we are back in Maya. I'm going to turn off my ferns, and I'm going to import my Oops, Bong exports from Speed tree. Oh, I will need to clean this up later on, but we're almost there. The trees are actually the last time that we are actually last two models that we need to create. And after that, it will just be bonus chapter. So you are almost done with this tutorial course. Congrats. So okay, we have a tree over here. Move it up. Yeah, I think for the size, we probably want to end up scaling it more, of course. But let's just start with this size over here. You can see the geometry on these leaves, they are a little bit high, so we probably want to reduce those. Yeah, it might be better if we do that right now because if we do it later on, it becomes a little bit more annoying. So let's just go into your edit. There we go, and just do that. And you will see that that will actually make a very large difference. So now we are only at 16,000 Tris. I believe it was like double before that. So let's just go ahead and do one quick export again. Yeah, I want to replace it. And now in here, you can just quickly delete that one. That's no problem. And then just re input it. There we go. So quickly done that just to make sure that it's optimized. And now let's just copy the name. Let's go ahead and ungroup delete the old one, paste the name, apply it to a layer, give the layer name. It's the same stuff over and over and over again. There we go. So now we have full control over here. And what I'm going to do now is I just like to do a quick check to make sure, sometimes I don't really like stuff like this where I just want to quickly delete it. And and then carefully, also delete that one. So that's also why I like to often have it first into Maya so that I can just very quickly see if I don't like something, and then I can just get rid of it. Like that. So it's just like if you're very picky. But basically, now that we are done with this one and everything should be set up, we can go ahead and we can save scene and we can export this to unreal. And then we will see how it looks. And then later on we will just do the smaller one. So exports to unreal. So I close Maya, so I just need to redo my settings. The underscore zero, one. And we can just do a normal export. Now, one last thing is quickly go to speed three and 302 because I'm worried that I might forget. I'm just going to edit the leaf and just tone down again. There we go. And save. So I was just going to quickly tone it down. And if you want, you can, of course, already just quickly export this. That's no problem. It does not take any extra effort. There we go. So now that we've done this, let's go ahead and go into reel, and let's actually properly set this up. So in here, let's first of all, go to textisT I'll score branch. And I'm also going to go textis Trunk over here. So, trunk, bark. I should call that bark. Right click Rename. There we go. And I'm just going to go import my texts. So first of all, let's do the bark one. That one is very easy. It is this. Open up your norm map, and let's not forget to quickly press the flip green channel because these come from text.com, and then I'm going to go from my tree branch. And let's just navigate. Where are you? Custom branch texture, there we go. So we can go ahead and we can use these four of them. Yes, I think I need all four of them. And once again, just go into your normal flip the green channel around that should be fine. Because I baked in direct X, I believe. Well, we'll notice soon enough. So we got these done. Now let's go ahead and go into assets. Let's import our tree. Here we go. Default setting should still apply. Then the first thing I want to do is I probably want to just drag it in and just see. I think I want to probably scale it up this one quite a bit more. So let's go. Yeah, because then if it's standing here, let's scale it up by 1.5 maybe or 1.5 or two. Let's try 1.5 first. Yeah, you see 1.5 is already more than enough because this is like the big one because we also have a small one. So that's already looking really cool, even as just a gray scale. So we can now go ahead and go to our materials. I believe that we have, like, simple ivy bar, which we can duplicate and we can call this one bark on score zero, one. Open it up. And let's go ahead and go to bark. Wood, normal roughness. Set the color back to normal color, maybe a little bit grayish over here. And then if we go into our tree, we can start by just, you know, I will strike my tree for the first time in here. And then if I go to my materials, let's scrap my bark because it is looking a little bit whitish, so safe. Oh, no, no, it's not as bad. I feel like I want to have control over my norm map in this case. Here, first of all, turn on the has roughness. That will also make a difference. But I think what I'm going to do is let's go into our solid master. And let's see if we can have some control over the norm map by adding a flatten normal node over here, along with the scale parameter that we will call normal intensity. And often we need to go in minus one if we are using OpenGL. So let's just plug this in here and let's have look Come on. You can do it. It's strange how sometimes it just takes a random long amount of time. Okay, so let's go into our bark zero, one. Set a normal strength device, do like minus five. Okay, so I am able to use it. So minus three maybe. I think minus three is pretty good. Now, as for the UVs, you are able to control the UVs in here, but since we are already inside of unreal, it might sometimes as a little cheat, just be easier to add a scale parameter that you will call tiling and set the default value to one. And this only works, of course, for tilable materials, not for the other ones. And then if you add a texture coordinate node, just right click texture coordinate, and a multiply node, you can basically multiply these two, and this will give you control over your UVs because you are adding, you are adding to your taxicorate note, and your tax coordinate node will control your actual UVs. So if you save this, And if we then go ahead and open up our material again, I should really just keep it open. Here, I I set my timing to 0.5, it becomes bigger. Now, normally, you do not really want to go below one because then it can give you arrows. However, in this specific case, if you cannot see anything, when you look at it from afar, then I personally am not too worried about it. So we got over here a tree bark. I would say, maybe let's make it a little bit more like a tiny bit more like brownish color over here, and that should be fine. So I'm happy with that. Let's now go ahead and go on with our actual leaves for which we can use our IV generic. Let's just duplicate this one and just call this tree branch underscore 01. And of course, if you want, you can create multiple different textures for your three branches to again apply variation. However, I'm going to just open this one up. Let's have it over here. Tree branch, and now it is mostly just going to be us balancing a little bit. We have this one, we have a normal, and now for a subsurface, I need to add a little bit more control over here. Let's open up our foliage master. What we can do in here is we can have a static switch parameter that we will call has submap. If it is true, we will use this. However, if it is false, we will use duplicate this. If it is false, we will use this one, which just does not use the map. It just uses a simple color. And by default, I want to just have to default it through because that is the one that we use the most. Next for our roughness, I can do another static switch parameter has roughness map. By default, it is false. However, if we go over here, if it is true, we can simply have and let's convert to perimeter. We will use our roughness map like this. Okay, so we got those pieces. That's also good. I'm going to add one more note, and it is called a Lightness note. Lighting. I forgot I forgot what it was called. Light Brightness? Let me just quickly look it up. Okay, I got it. I got a bit confused. I create a scalar parameter that I call lightness, and I set the scalar parameters, I believe, a default of one, and I just multiply this. So that's why I was thinking of the note, but the lightness note does not exist in real. So if you do this, I just need to double check that one is a default and not zero. So let's see. Zero becomes is it zero or one? That's tricky. If I do this, does it change? No. Okay, so one is the default, so let's keep it to one because we do not want to extend and change all of our other textures. So now we can go ahead and we can save this. So now if we go ahead and go in here, we have our tree branch. Which uses our fange master, but where are my Oh, there there. I just had to scroll. So okay, we have a tree branch over here. It now has roughness, that's fine. Subsurface color, let's go for a little bit more of like a greener color. We have some lightness over here. So this is nice because this allows me to basically because remember how is it like it feels a bit dark. This allows me to just control that. One thing that looks a bit strange is, why is this green. Oh, that's most likely just a subsurface being a little bit too strong. So we probably want to go into our subsurface sets to like 0.2, and we'll just mess around with it. So let's first of all, apply it before we start doing that. Let's go in here. Let's select our tree branch and apply. Okay, so this is what we got right now. Let's have a look here, see? It's really, really dark. So that's something that we definitely need to work on. Let's get started. If we go in here, first of all, let's turn that it has a roughness map. Let's turn off that it has a subsurface Okay, let's set my subsurface to maybe like 0.5. Let's set my lightness to maybe like five. Maybe even ten. Yeah, that's my lightness to like ten, like super high, but then set by desaturation to maybe like 0.7 or something just to tone it down again. So that is looking pretty nice. I do want to have my colors. Yeah, let's go into my color, and let's definitely Oh, wow, I was literally already having my color so dark. So I want to go for maybe a little bit of, like, a yellowish tone like that with my color quite bright, so that's looking pretty good already. So I can just look through it. So yeah, that is actually looking pretty nice. So we got these ones. How do they fit in with the rest? I feel like that my colors might want to go a little bit more in the green area, actually. And let's set my desaturation maybe to like 0.5. I want to mostly look at it from a distance. Let's say 0.6 axon, and my lightness, I don't know, five, ten, 15. Yeah, I think ten is fine. Our roughness is using a roughness map, so it should not really be affected. Our subsurface, I can set to one. It's a bit strong. Let's do 0.7. Now it's starting to look a little bit nicer. Let's go into our bark and let's set my color for my bark a little bit brighter over here also. There might be a little bit too much. Like this. Okay, so we have our bark. Let's see. What else? My normal map is in the right direction. It looks like it. Let's just double check by going into our norm map and just while looking at it, flipping the green channel. I don't know. Is it in the right direction? It's really difficult to see, to be honest. Yeah, I think if we flip the green channel, it is in the correct direction over here. Sometimes it's just quite difficult to see that kind of stuff. But now that's looking pretty good. So that's quite nice. I feel like yeah, you could maybe, increase the size of your actual branches if you want. But let's just say that we have one tree over here, and let's not forget that we are going to have multiple trees. So once you have those and they are overlapping, then it might actually become a little bit too dense. So here, if I do this, then you can see that it is often fine to just have them not as large because it just looks better like this. But okay, so let's say that we have this one over here. Let's do another one that I will place like nicely here, just as like a test. That's quite nice. So that definitely shows how to create trees. So what I'm going to do now is I'm just going to do one final import of our tree 02, and that one should be very quickly because all we need to do is reapply our materials that we know already work. So I'm just going to go ahead and rotate this scaling of 1.5, copy the name, ungroup, paste name, apply to its own little layer. And now we can just go ahead and make an export 302, there we go, see, so that's nice and quick. And then all we need to do is just do one little import. And let's just go ahead and open it up and just assign our materials. So we have our bark 01, and we have our tree branch over here. Perfect. Let's have a look. See? Nice little tree. That's looking cool. So of course, you can just go ahead and create more tree variations. You can create more branch variations, more leaf variations, all of this stuff. Maybe you can have them like some dead leaves and everything in here. So there's so much stuff that you can do with this, and you can do it also very quickly. Once you have a base, it is very quick to work inside of speed tree. But here you can see that if I do something like this, it will very quickly give me something interesting, or if you want to go even more extreme, you can Oh, let's not do that. Let's not change this. You can, of course, go into your foliage. And if we just double check that everything is turned off, yes, we can import our two trees, and we can set aside from 0.7 to 1.4 or something like that with, let's not do a random pitch, but now if we just go ahead and go into our paint mode, you see, you can very quickly create an entire forest. And if you just remember that this is only two different trees with one single branch texture, and it already looks like this, then you can imagine that if you have more variation, it will look very nice. But okay, so that is pretty much it. I'm going to go ahead and get rid of these ones over here just because I don't really need them. And I would say that this is also the end of our real time parts over here. So we now went over on how to create all of our foliage, multiple different variants of from plants to flowers, to water plants, to grass, longer grass, ivy, and also trees. So and bushes, of course, or shrubs. So I think this will give you a very solid overview of everything that you need to know to just create, like, a basic scene with foliage inside of speed tree to use in your levels. Now, the next few chapters, they will be bonus chapters. What I'm planning to do is I'm going to create a little forest scene with a lake to also show you, like an outdoor scene because right now, if we just show the tunnel, it might not look as nice. So there's one last thing that I want to do. I want to open up my tunnel, so let's save my scene. And then what I like to do in here is I always like to just have a tree sitting at the top to kind of break up just how things look. So I can go in here and I can, for example, grab 301, and now you can see here. So if we just have a little tree, and maybe you want to have another 302, like sitting next to it, like a bit further away, you can see that over here, that just looks nice to have a tree sitting in here. And maybe, like, moving it around a little bit. But anyway, that's pretty much it. So here is already one final scene. And now let's go ahead and continue to the bonus. And at the very end, I will do a quick outro, if you want to, like, just have a quick overview of everything we've learned and maybe, like, some additional information. So let's go ahead and continue to our bonus chapters. 31. 30 Cabin Scene Part1 Timelapse: M h. No. No. A Thank The 32. 31 Cabin Scene Part2 Timelapse: Bang Bang Bang Bang Bang Bang Oh.