Learn Professional 3D Modeling in Unreal Engine 5

1. Introduction to 3D modeling in Unreal Engine 5: The wonderful world of Unreal Engine allows us to create video games, virtual production, and cinematic renders. It feels amazing to bring together different assets and dream of a world that you didn't really actually create. Like, how do they even create this stuff? I mean, I want to make my own TreD models, too, but does that mean I have to learn something like blender, a whole new program? I feel your frustration. Luckily, there is a solution. Unreal Engine five offers a vast array of tools to design and create your own TreD models. Simple and you stay in your trust at Unreal Environment. Hey there. I'm Jordan and you might know me from CN Com, but I teach Unreal Engine to millions across the world. I'm super excited to show you everything I know about modeling in Unreal Engine five. Now, it might sound crazy because Unreal Engine is not a modeling software. However, we can find a vast collection of different tools to shape, edit, and even sculpt our own custom models. You'd be very surprised at how much is actually possible. By the end of this class, you'll be able to utilize all these different modeling tools to create anything that you desire, like a small house with a couch and some furniture all created with lots of realistic detail. And the best part is with a little bit of guidance, it is pretty easy. We'll start off with basic shapes and learn some techniques for architectural design. Then we'll get into materials and how to apply them exactly the way you want. We'll use various tools to extrude, offset and manipulate any model to our likings. And finally, we'll get into morphing and sculpting to really get creative and make custom and realistic models. Along the way, I'm going to share dozens of tips on what to do and what not to do. I can't wait to share everything I know with you. So let's get started creating together and jump into the wonderful and very creative world of T D modeling and Unreal Engine five. 2. Create Basic Meshes: Hey, they are so cool to see you in my class. I am super excited to teach you everything I know about modeling inside Unreal Engine. It's going to open up a whole new world for you, especially if you don't have any experience with modeling before. Now, obviously, we are limited. We still got to keep in mind that Unreal engine is not built for modeling, but it has a lot of modeling tools. There are many basic creations and edits anyone would do, like cutting pieces off, existing models, creating walls, or adding a displacement to a surface. And then there are some more advanced things like sculpting a couch from scratch. The pros will tell you it's better to make that in a dedicated program like blender. And they are right. But trying these things and unreal makes you really understand the modeling capabilities, and it is a lot of fun. So, let's get started. In the top left, we're going to change the mode to modeling. This is where most of the stuff happens. I won't show you everything because some of these are very specific or so obvious. Like, if you know how to make a box, well, you can also create a sphere, it's pretty much the same. So let's click on Box, which allows us to place a box in the world. After that, we get a bunch of different straightforward settings. We can change the size, width depth and height. And really, for a box, that's all we need. I mean, you could reposition or rotate it, but once you click on Except to actually create and place the box in the level, well, you can also just do that. Now, what's interesting is that when we go into the details penel, we can see from its properties that the aesthetic mesh is actually a brand new box that we created. I can browse to it and find it back in the generated folder. Everything we create will end up right here. And this is very different from if we were to go to the ad menu, go to shapes, and then take the cube. Now, you might think this is the same, but it is not. The static mesh right here is the cube, and browsing to it, you'll find it's back in the engine content files. So we're using a mesh that comes with the engine files itself. Each time that we add a new box like this, we just import the same box every single time. And if I were to make any edits to it, we'll actually do that on the original box from the engine files. So this is only good to place a temporary box somewhere. But for creating new meshes or models, you always want to create them via the modeling modes. That is very important to understand. All right let's explore the modeling features a bit more. Under the Create tab here, there are a bunch of other things we could create like a stair, and we get some really nice controls to choose the step height, the width, the number of steps, the depth, et cetera. So you can really customize the way the stair needs to look. And from the stairstype, we can even get some different looks like floating or curved or spiral, really fun stuff to play around with, and even the curve can be adjusted with a spiral angle and radius. Let's click on Except. And as we're doing this, you might notice that we don't really need that much to create something house. You know, we can create a simple box with a depth of, let's say, 20, make it like 300 high, which are always in centimeters, by the way. So that's 3 meters high. Now, if you are from the US, I don't know how many feet or elbows that are, but you might need to have, like, a converter open as you do this because all the units are in centimeters in unreal engine. Now, on the bottom left, we can find you in the position better. So if I want my wall to be on the ground, I set the Z position to zero. Alright, let's hit Accept. So obviously, you don't have to create a new mesh all the time. If your walls are going to be exactly the same, just hold down Alt and drag the wall to a different position to make a duplicate. But keep in mind that these are the same meshes. So that's how you can go ahead and create four walls, perhaps a second floor with a staircase that leads to it, and always keep in mind that you can still rotate and scale any model that you make. You don't have to create a new box if you wanted to slant a bit more for the roof, for instance, just take one of your walls and rotate it. There's no right or wrong way to do anything. Just visually create what you want to create. We're gonna deal with materials and stuff like that later, so don't worry too much about any of that. Alright, so what I'd like you to do now is create a simple house with a staircase. It doesn't have to make any sense. It can be a box with a random stair to a second level. You know, just to get familiar with some of these very basic tools, and that'll see you back in the next lesson in which we're going to explore geometries. 3. Working with Geometries: You will come back. I hope you had some fun building that house and thus getting a bit more familiar with creating meshes and placing them in your scene. Now, one of the problems that we run into when creating meshes is that when we create something like a box and hit Accept, all of those properties are baked in. The mesh is created, it has a certain size, and we cannot change that anymore. And that is where geometries come. Geometries are not models or meshes. They're called brushes. So we won't find them in the modeling view. Instead, we're going to go to the at button and look for geometries. We only get a few very basic shapes. So yes, geometries are very limited, but for a lot of simple creations like walls or floors, these will be very amazing. So let's drag a box into the scene, and with it selected, go to the detail spinel and locate the brush settings. Now, we can define the size of the cube right here, again, in centimeters. But interesting is that we can change this all the time. Even if you're not satisfied with the shape itself, you can just change the box to something else like a cylinder, then choose the amount of sights you need to has to make it more round or not. And one of the interesting things that we can also do with geometries is make it hollow. And for that, I will first change it back to cube and perhaps make it a bit bigger like so, and now enable hollow. And if you like, you can change the thickness of the walls, but now we can go inside of the cube, and immediately, we have a room. So this goes much faster than having to stick together a bunch of walls. Now, something very interesting that we can do with geometries are either adding or removing something. I'm going to create a new geometry box and add it to the scene. And I'm going to position it like inside the wall of the large cube. Now, from the details panel, I'm going to change the brush type from additive to subtractive, and that removes a part from the other box. And what's cool about geometries is that we can always change this, either the size of that substractive box, like, make it smaller perhaps or just move it somewhere else. None of this is baked in, and that's what's so great about it. Now, selecting these invisible substractive cubes can be tricky. What you can always do is just click on the edge where it cuts through another object like this. Now, obviously, you can also just select it from the outliner, and you can even see here which layer is additive or substractive by the plus or minus on the icon. But still, when you have hundreds of these layers, selecting an inner edge is easier, to my opinion. Now, if you want to create more holes, I can also just use the t plus drag technique again to duplicate the geometry, and it will take over all of its properties. So this is a great way for making windows or a door opening when modeling a house or something. With substractive geometries, there are a few things to keep in mind, and that is the order of when a geometry is placed. Now, currently, these long cubes cut into the bigger cube because they were placed in the level after the big cube. But if I were to create a new box now, so let's go to add geometries, box, and drag it into the scene, you will see that it will not get cut through by the subtractive box. And that's because I placed this one after the substractive box. Now, sometimes you want that, but other times you don't. So a quick fix is to simply select the subtractive box. You can hold down Control to select multiple boxes and then hit Control X to cut it or Command X on the Mc, and then paste it again with Control or Command V. Doing this places the subtractive boxes again after we placed the er cube. So that's definitely something to wrap your head around a bit if it's all new to you. Pay attention to the order of when you place these objects and how they affect each other. Now, if you would get more into architecture, there are a few settings and shortcuts that are going to be very important because designing buildings need to be very precise. I want to show you guys a project that I've been working on. It's entirely made with geometries, very basic shapes. I used the floor plan as a texture and scaled it so that a one by 1 meter cube, unreal engine matches with the plan. So in the next lesson, I'd like to show you how something like this is possible and how to be more precise with geometries. 4. Architectural Design: Created a very simplistic floor plan. It's absolutely not architectural correct, but it's great for practicing in this class. It's a simple PNG, which I'll import into lengin. Important to understand is that this image has a square aspect ratio of 3,000 by 3,000 pixels. So what I'll do first is go to modeling, and I'm going to create a rectangle. Place it somewhere, and for the size, it really doesn't matter that much. Just make sure you respect the aspect ratio, which is going to be one by one, a perfect square. So I'll take something like 1,000 by 1,000. Then hit Accept and we're going to go back to the selection view. Now simply take the imported texture and drag it onto the rectangle to apply. It will automatically create the material for. Next step is going to be sort of a calibration, and this is going to look very unintuitive, but keep in mind, we're modeling inside real engine. We don't have a lot of tools that dedicated modeling software has. So we often got to figure out workarounds, definitely with architecture design where it needs to be pixel perfect or millimeter perfect, I guess. So looking at the floor plan, my house is going to be 500 units wide and 400 units deep. So I'm going to create a new geometry, choose box, and drag it onto the floor plan. Now from the detailed spinel, I will then set the dimension exactly as 500 by 400. So this box represents perfectly the dimensions of the house. That means I'm going to have to scale and reposition the rectangle with the floor plan to match. Very important is that you always scale by all axises to stay strict to one by one aspect ratio. And if your step count is too much, you might want to decrease that from the scaled snapping option. So that gives you more precise scaling, basically. The same thing for position, you know, just decrease the step size for its snapping that should help to match the floor plan better. What I also like to do is go into the detail spanel and adjust the values from there. But just make sure that for scaling, the proportion is locked. And now all you got to do is just make sure that the two opposing corners kind of match. It doesn't have to be perfect, but the more aligned, the easier it's going to be to work through. So it's really just a one time thing. Alright, I've got it in place, and now we can build. The left wall is 400 with a thickness of 30. I'll change that in the details panel for my box, you know, and perhaps set a height of 300. And now I'll just move it in place to fit on the floor plan. You can see now how easy that goes. I need to move the wall up a bit as it sticks through the floor. So there we go. And now it's just a matter of building out to rest. I always like to duplicate by old dragging. So let's do the top part here at the window. That's going to be 440 white as we subtract the wall thicknesses. Always make sure to keep your snapping on, by the way, and check if your walls align. Now, just to demonstrate something, I want to make one of the walls 29 thick. And you'll notice that with the snapping on, I'm like, unable to get it in place. My position snapping is already set to the lowest, so that's a problem, right? When doing more precise work, even with the lowest option, it's just not enough. But this class is here to solve problems. Well, we can easily add more options in there. So let's go over to the menu on top. Select Edit, and then the editor preferences. And here I'm going to look for grid snapping. Down here, we'll find the decimal grid sizes from which we can add a new value, and I'm going to give it a value of 0.5 and drag it up so it nicely sits in order. Close, and you'll see now that we have a more precise snap option, and I'll be able to move my wall into place. So if needed, you can add any value in there and do the same thing for the rotation in scale two, if you want that. So I'm just going to fast forward a bit as I built this out using geometries. I'm keeping it very simple as it all comes down to the same thing. You just place walls where you have a window, you add a substractive box, and you'll notice that I always make a copy. So it puts the next geometry already in place. And I immediately have this same size or I just need to adjust a little bit. And here we go. A nice little house. You know, it could be a cabin in the woods or something. Now, there are a couple of great things to know. Like for starters, each square on the default material is exactly 10 centimeters. And so each bigger square is 100 centimeters or a meter. I'm really sorry if you're from the US, but this is how real works. But good news, the metric system is really easy to learn. And much better. Another great trick I'd like to show you is when you select an object, you can hold down Alt and then click with your scroll wheel, which allows you to temporarily drag the anchor point somewhere else. This is very useful for if you have a big wall and you're trying to match a corner, so you can then focus on that corner while having the gizmo close to you. But if you deselect the object and then select it again, it also reset. So it's really just a temporary thing. If you want to actually save the position of the Gizmo, you got to right click the object, then go to pivot and choose set as pivot offset. So now if you deselect it and select it again, you'll see it still sits there. Anyhow, I don't want to go too deep into architectural design as it's a whole different class, but these basics already allows you to create some really cool stuff. Just like this project that I made right here, it's the exact same thing, just a whole lot more work. And you can also make it more detailed by working with outer and inner wats. And the more that you separate things, the easier it will be to turn layers on and off, apply materials or mesh displacements. So it really depends on the purpose of the house that you're building. We're going to learn all of that. So take it step by step, practice to build your own house now using geometries, get familiar with additive and subtractive, tweak your snapping grid, move the gizmo, and just experiment the bits. And then I'll see you back when we're going to add some materials to the house or to the cabin the cabin in the woods or on the beach, that's going to be up to you. 5. Applying Materials: A house without materials is just a house, but a house with materials is a home. There we go. The first picture frame will hang to the wall. So let's turn this house now into a home. From the content browser, I'm going to click on the fab button to open up the marketplace. Now we'll not create our own materials. That's, again, a whole different class as well. But you can find a lot of free materials in here as well, and I'm sure you've already explored the marketplace a bit. If you were on time, you could have claimed everything from Quicksil for free. It's a publisher who creates scans from real life objects and materials. They have a huge collection, but it's no longer free. You got to pay for it now. So if you don't have it yet, I'm really sorry, but I'm sure you'll find great alternatives in here as well, which are free. So let's look for a brick to start with. And so if you do have Quicksil, you can filter by publisher and then check Quicksil mega scans. Then from the left side bar, let's only look in the materials section. And I'll just take anything you want, and choose the quality you like and add it to your project. Can go ahead and find some more materials. You know, we're going to need something for the inner walls. So perhaps some white paint or let's go for this cracked paint to give it some more texture. Perhaps it's an old cabin. And eventually, we're going to need a floor. So I'll look for a wood material, perhaps. Now, some glass is also going to be something that we need. And if you look for glass and then set the price to free, you'll actually find an advanced glass material pack. This one is really good and completely free. So let's add that one to the project as well. You can always add more materials later on. For now, let's close the window and check out what we have. Now, to make it myself a bit easier, I'm going to first dock the content browser. And then I'm going to create a filter for the material instance. So just search for it and enable that. I can now easily toggle that filter to only show materials. And if you select a specific folder, it will only show you the materials from within. Now, there are a few ways to add materials to geometries. You can drag it to a surface and we notice that the material is only applied to that one surface and not the rest. So that's already very different from a traditional mesh where it would just apply to the whole thing. So that's interesting because it means that we can have a brick material on the outside and then use that white paint on the inside. Now when you select a material in the content browser, you can then also just shift plus click any surface to apply it to that. Holding down Control, you can also select multiple faces and then drag the material to apply it to all those selections. And finally, if you wish to apply the same material to old sites like this inner wall, just select the geometry, hit Shift plus B. Which selects all the surfaces and then just apply the material to it. So those are a few shortcuts to really pay attention to. Now, I'm going to continue to give all the rest materials as well, fast forwarding this part again, as it's pretty straightforward now. Now, I do notice that I forgot to add a floor somehow, so let's create that real quick new item geometry box. But hey, wait, what is that? Why is it suddenly covered in that white paint? Well, that is because I still have my paint material selected. So if you don't want that, de select any material before you create a new geometry or simply just hit Shift B to select all the sites, and then from the DDL spinel, you can just reset the surface material. That also works. So don't panic. With geometries, you can always make any change. That's the beauty of it. Alright, let's change the size of the box so that it fits as a floor. And then reposition it in place. And finally, let me hit Shift B to select all surfaces and then apply the wood material to it. Now, maybe you're not really satisfied with how the material looks. Well, from the details panel, we have some surface properties, and this is for every surface specific that you select. So, again, if you want to make a change to the material for all the sites, then you got to select them all. So that really depends on what you want to do. So from the surface properties, we can nudge the position of the material. You have different step sizes, or you can input your own length that each step needs to take. We get some rotation options and finally some scale options. Prehps set it to three and hit Apply. So these are the most important settings to kind of know about, but later in this class, we're also going to learn about a very different technique to apply and match material. Don't worry too much if your materials don't align like right here with the bricks. You can clearly see a line where one geometry ends and the other one starts. So you could go ahead and nuch its position, but that is just so tedious, there's a much faster way to do it. But that is for later. And because first, we got to convert what we have right here into an actual mesh. I know that's kind of sad because geometries are so nice to work with. But unfortunately, they come with their own problems and a lot of limitations, as well. You could never use them in a final product, but they are great to build stuff, and once you're satisfied, you can easily convert them into a mesh. But that's for the next lesson, which will also create some actual glass windows and combine it all into one model. But go ahead now, give your house some materials first, and then I'll see you back in a bit. 6. Building and Merging Meshes: The house or the cabin is starting to look really cool, but there's one big problem. You see, when it rains outside, well, it gets wet. I'm not talking about the missing roof, but the windows that don't have any glass. Yeah, the missing roof is just to more easily show you what's going on inside of the cabin, but it's a good practice for you to make one. Now, when it comes down to windows, you most probably want to create a frame first. And this is very straightforward now. Just create some small beams, and I'll leave the creativity up to you if you want aluminum or wooden frames. I'm not sure which one is more energy efficient, but it's a cabin. We only use it in the summer, so it's fine. Alright, and we're done with that. I'm going to go to the modeling mode now because geometries don't have flat rectangle shapes, which we'll need for the glass, but that's not a problem. From the create model, I'm going to add a rectangle and rotate it. By default, it's a one sided material. So if you can't see it, just rotate it to the other side. Alright, adjust the size of the rectangle to make it fit in your frame, then position it correctly. And when done, just hit on except. We can then close the modeling view. Now, from the advanced glass back that we downloaded earlier, I'm just going to take one and apply it to the window. And I think by default, it's not two sided. So if you want to see your glass from both angles, just open up the material and search for two sided. Make sure it's enabled, and that will solve the problem. There are a couple of things that I don't really like. The frame of the windows are four different geometries, and then the glass is a mesh. Let's put everything together into one model, one mesh. Now, that does mean that we're going to lose out on some flexibility that we currently have with the geometries. Once we're converting this here into a mesh, we're putting the clay in the oven and baking it. So always check if your box is aligned correctly. Make sure that you have all your materials applied. Now we can still change the materials afterwards, but surfaces are going to be baked. Don't worry that's going to make more sense once we're going to convert the entire house. Now, what I usually do is keep a backup of my geometries. And there are two ways you could do this. Either just make a duplication of all your geometries. So Control C, Control V to copy them, and then I'll create a folder and name it geonderscore, big window or something. A second way to create a backup is by first designing your entire level with geometries. And once you're done, you could make a copy of that entire level, and you could name one Geo followed by the name of your level, because you can always copy layers back and forward between levels. So that's up to you, but I do recommend to just keep a backup. I guess it depends on the project that you're working on. Enough yapping. I'm going to select all the beams that make up the window frame. Hold down control as you do. Don't select the glass because that's not a geometry. That's already a mesh. Then head over to the detailed spanel and under the advanced section, find create static mesh. Give it a name like big window frame and choose where you would like to save it. I'll put it in with the rest in the generated folder for now. And there we go. We turned our creation into a mesh. Congratulations. Now, we just need the glass to be part of this, too. And for that, we're going to have to open up the modeling mode again, and I'm going to go over to the form tab from which you'll see a merge button. Now you will have to select more than one mesh, obviously. So control click the frame and the glass to make the option active. We can choose now to create a whole new mesh or to replace either the first one we selected or the last one. So that's going to be up to you. There's no right or wrong way here. It all depends on how many backups you'd like to keep, basically, because, yes, we are putting it in the oven again, and once it's baked, you can't undo. So I'll just go for new object. Give it a name and hit Accept. And look at that. We Gutter sells one mesh, much easier to handle, and it also makes much more sense. From the detail s panel, you'll see that the mesh now has two materials, the wooden frame and the glass. So if I want an aluminum frame, I can simply replace that wood with something else, and all the beams have changed together. So that is very useful for, let's say, if you want to try out different bricks on a house, it will just be one material slot instead of having to deal with hundreds of geometries and each of its surface. I hope that the difference between geometries and meshes makes sense now. You can see that the window frame has only one material slot now, which makes sense. We gave all the geometry surfaces the same material. But with our cabin here, we got bricks on the outside, white paint, and a floor. Once we're going to create a static mesh from this, it also means we'll only have three different material slots for the surfaces that currently share the same material. If you think that you might want to have a different color on a specific wall, just add something random to it that you haven't used yet. I would suggest to work with something temporary, like I downloaded this wallpaper material, and I'll add it to this wall. I can now go ahead, select all of the geometry layers, including the substractives. That's very important. You can make a backup if you want. I'm just going to go ahead and create my static mesh from the details panel. Let's name it cabin, where M stands for mesh, by the way. What you'll notice now is that we have an extra material slot for that wallpaper, but I can also just put in the white paint into it if I eventually decide not to add some wallpaper to it. But the option is always there for that wall. Alright, this is a longer lesson than I thought, but we've gone through everything about geometry. So pat yourself on the shoulder. You've done an amazing job so far and already learned a ton of new tricks and unreal engine. For a practice, go ahead and create those windows. We have one on the site here as well, and combine it into a mesh, and then I'll see you back in the next lesson. 7. Create Extruded Meshes: Alright, guys, let's step out of the house for a moment and focus on some props that we can perhaps use in the cabin. That means that we're going to need some more exotic shapes other than cubes or boxes. So let's open up the modeling panel, and we're staying in the Create tap because there are still a few things that we haven't explored. One of which is the extrude polygon. You're going to see a grit, and the idea is that you first draw a two dimensional shape on the grid and then extrude it. If you like, you can rotate the grid to draw something vertically rather than on the it's up to you. Then from the draw mode option, we can choose what we want to draw. We get a few presets. Some are pretty boring, like the rectangle. But there's one in there which might be very useful, and that is the rounded rectangle. You simply click to add some points and then draw the rectangle on your grid. For each different shape we draw, we get some more options. Like here, we can choose the corner radius. So that's really nice. And when you're done, you just click again, and then you can extrude it. This can be interesting for like a rounded cabinet or something like that. Definitely explore these draw modes. I'm going to show you one more, and that is the free hand one because this is where things get really interesting. We can draw anything by just clicking and thus creating a pat and see it as drawing a slice from an object like a slice of bread. I'm currently drawing a slice of a table. This freehand tool allows me to create an interesting corner. And so when I close the pat, I can extrude it and then click once more to create a mesh. That gives me a tabletop with this interesting border. I'll use the previous mesh we created as the legs, try to position the table onto it, and when they're in place, then I'll just duplicate that leg to the other side by holding down Alt while dragging. Now, all it needs are some materials. I'll give the legs that dark metal material, perhaps, and the tabletop will become wood. Finally, select everything, go over to Form and choose merch, name it underscore table, and there we go. We modeled a table in less than a minute. No, I went very fast over this, but these things we've done before, you create just a bunch of different models, design something cool, make sure that you all have a material, and then just merge them all together. One of the next tools is called the extrude Pat. It's very similar as the free hand tool from the extrude polygon. Only here we get a whole bunch more options, just like before we can draw a custom pad. But here is where things get interesting. There will be two kinds of extrusions. First one is a border thickness. So we're using the pad extrude if you want a hollow object. The thickness of that is currently set to interactive. But if I change it to fixed, I can set a specific value for it. The next option we get are rounded corners. And just like before, with interactive, you just change it by moving your mouse or set it to fixed to enter a specific value. So each time you want to go to the next step, you just click. The last step allows you to extrude as we've seen before. And when you're happy, just click again and then hit complete. Also a very interesting tool maybe a bit more specific, but at this point, we're just exploring a bit of what's possible. We're going to combine some techniques later on and do something useful with this. But there's one last extrusion tool that I'd like to show you. So there are about only tree to remember. The next one is the revolve polypat. Now, this one is crazy. It works the same. You create a custom pat, but this time you're not drawing a full slice. Instead, you want to draw half a slice. That's going to make more sense in a moment. So I'll draw like half a bottle. And when I close the pad, it gets immediately extruded to a bottle. Magic. Now, from the options, we can choose the degrease, and that immediately explains how this entire tool works and why you want to draw that half of a slice. You can offset it or make it more low poly with these options right here. And then finally, there's a very interesting setting in here. But for that, I'm going to have to draw a different. So let me put these values correct so that I have a bottle and then accept my beautiful creation. I'm going to click on Revolve Pat again to create something new. Important to understand is that the extrusion always goes around the anchor point. So if I were to create something over here real quick, it will make a long loop around that anchor point. So that's going to depend on if you want a hole in the middle of your model or not. You know, with the bottle, we didn't have that because I drew on the anchor point. But now let's check the option. Something called height offset. And when I increase that, you can see what it does. And the moment we have an offset, we can also make the extrusion loop a whole lot more than just 360 degrees. So I can kind of create a spring or something. So this could be like the suspension of a car or a motorcycle. And especially with shapes like these, the steps get more interesting as it allows you to create more interesting objects. And although this is very abstract, just give it a rust material, and it could be some junk at the scrap yard. If you play around a bit with the settings, create a symmetrical ornament or sculpture. Yeah, these extrusion tools are definitely more specific, but know that they exist. I want you to play around with them for a bit, see what is possible, and just get familiar with these three extrusion tools. And we're also kind of done with everything that can be created. In the next lesson, we're going to step into a new chapter in which we'll learn how to make adjustments to any mesh, and that's really where things are going to lift off. We can start from a cube and end up with a couch, but that is for later. I'll see you back in a moment. 8. Edit a Mesh: Far, we've only been creating models, and we start to notice that unreal engine is pretty limited in what it can create. It's either a box or some wicked tool to bend stuff and create a spring for that one time you'll ever need it in your life. So we're going to explore a whole different way of modeling now, which is by editing existing meshes. And there are two different approaches which we'll get both into. Either you start off from a simple cube and edit it in such a way that it becomes something completely different. Or you edit a model that is already a proper shape, maybe to fine tune or customize. For example, we created this table in the previous lesson. It's okay, but it's very low polygon. Let's, for example, make these corners a bit less sharp. So open up the modeling panel again, and we're going to go over to the select tab this time. That also means we're going to have to select a model to make some of these options available. And one of the items is polygroup edit. This one here holds a whole bunch of different very useful tools. There are three sections. Either we make a change to a face, which is any of these flat surfaces. We can edit the entire shape, so the volume, and finally are the edges. Let's start with that. I would like to have some rounded corners. It's obvious that I first need to select all the edges that I want to make round. So hold down Shift as you click to select multiple edges. You can also drag to make a selection. Do pay attention to the select filters from the side panels because we can select points, edges, or surfaces. We're dealing with edges now. So let's only select that, which will now select edges. And you can also select just everything with this button, and then by holding down Control and then dragging out a selection box, you can unselect what you don't want, like the leg this whole selecting stuff is in itself already something to get familiar with, but don't worry too much about it, as you will use these tools more often, it will become autopilot eventually. Alright, we've got all the edges selected. So under the edge edits, we can find all the tools with what we can do with these edges. And one of those is called Bevel, and that's the one we need. Immediately, you can see how that takes the edge off the table. You get some options to further tweak that bevel like the amount and the roundness. Now, it's possible that you suddenly see a different material on the edge. Like here, it's put the material from the legs on the edge. Maybe you want that, but maybe you don't. And that's where set material ID comes in. It's set to zero, which is the first material slot in the mesh element zero. If you want the second, which is the wood, just change it to element one. Okay, it looks good. Let's hit Accept action. That brings you back to the polygroupTols. Now, the Bevel is not baked in. We can do other edits first. But if you want to save your edits, you got to click on except. So now your mesh is actually edited, and as we've learned before, it's baked in. We cannot undo. I mean, we can undo. You can always hit Control or Command Z. But if you were to restart unreal, then we cannot go back, so just keep that in mind. Anyhow, the edges are rounded a bit this makes it much more natural because in real life, nothing has sharp corners like that. Even if your real table has sharp corners, there's always a little roundness to it. Always use the Bevel tool. It really makes your model so much more realistic. Let's explore a few more tools. Now keep in mind that if you want to select surfaces, you need to enable that selection filter again. I'm going to select the top of the table and you'll notice that we can move that surface and even rotate it. This can be useful in some cases, but it also stretches out the neighbor faces. Instead, you could use the extrude tool. And we kind of know what this does from a previous lesson. I'm going to select a few more faces to include all the corners. You can hold down Shift to select multiple planes. Going back to extrude, you can see that it will still be forced to move up or down. If you like, you can change the direction and make it extrude from the X or the Y axis instead. But what if I want to make it thicker to all directions? Well, that's where the push or pull tool comes. This is great to make a specific part of your model bigger or smaller, a different kind of extruson sort of inflating a part, a great way to add some more detail to the table. Like, I might want to pull this out a little bit more. And you notice that this creates hard edges again. So the Beffel is usually the last step. Otherwise, you're dealing with these hard edges non stop. So let's wait a bit to fix that. I first want to do something else. Like, maybe turn this into some sort of a pool table. And for that, we're going to have to make the bottom part of the table a bit thicker first. And we're getting into edits that have multiple different solutions. Like, I just could go ahead and select a top surface, all the bottom surfaces, like so, and then just use the gizmo to move the top part up, which stretches out the bottom part. And the thing is, there's no right or wrong way of doing something as long as you can achieve your goal. So this is fine. Alright, so I'd like to cut some sort of a hole to make it look like a pool table. So we're going to need to add a new smaller phase to this table. One way you could do this is with the inset and outset tool. This allows you to create a smaller rectangle face on top of the table. The problem is, though, that since we inflated the top part, it has removed the polygroup and thus the rounded corners are messing things up. There you go. Another reason that you should bevel on the end, but we're stuck with it now, so let's problem solve. We basically lost the polygon group after we pulled out the top of the table. So I'm going to just close this tool and locate the trislect tool. With this one, we can create or edit those polygon groups that we have been working with the entire time. Polygroups are nothing but a collection of triangles, the basics of what a mesh is made of. Like, real stuff is made out of atoms. Virtual stuff is made out of triangles. And with this tool, we can select those triangles. It uses a brush to select because some tree D models can have millions of triangles. So this makes things easier to select. For our example, we just need to select the two triangles that make up the top part. And then from the mesh edit, we choose Create polygroup. And that's it. Click on except and go back to the polygroupE dit, and you'll notice now that we are able to select the top without the rounded edges. Now I can click on Inset to create an inner polygroup, and this is the one that we would like to extrude inwards a bit, creating our pool table. And just like that, we're able to move planes around and bevel edges to create unique designs and make models that look much more realistic. Now I'm finishing it up a bit, but also giving these new corners a bit more roundness. It doesn't have to be much. Just take the edge. Now, only one problem that we run into are the materials. By making these adjustments unreal doesn't always know which material to apply where. And unfortunately, not all tools gave us the option to choose which material we wanted where. But don't worry too much about it because in the next lesson, I'll show you how to take back control over your materials. But first, I need you to make this pool table, get familiar with these polygroups and different tools to modify them, and don't forget about the triselect to manage those polygroups. 9. Materials and UVs: Getting to a point where we already have a lot of tools to work with, and you'd be surprised how many things you can create now. There's just one last thing missing from our tool set, and that is editing materials. So let's get back to modeling, and we're going to start in the attribute step. I need to click on Me to Reveal because I have my display scale set to very high so you guys can see everything better. We get a whole bunch of options here to edit stuff like LODs, collision, even some more options to create polygroups which we've seen in the previous lesson. But we don't need to go over all of this. You know, sometimes unreal just offers us ten different tools to do the same thing, but slightly different for a slightly different scenario. So feel free to explore, but it's unnecessary to hit you with too much niche information. There's basically just one option in here to remember, and that is the edit materials option. This allows us to select triangle surfaces and change their material. So let's start by fixing this weird book where the material of the legs are in the table. Now, we can again use that brush to make selections, and it's okay if you select too much. We're going to apply the wood texture to it. So if you already select a surface with that same texture, it will not make any difference. Now, the brush doesn't always select all surfaces correctly, especially around corners, so pay attention to. You could change the selection mode to all connected, which is going to select the entire table without its legs because those were initially a different object. And in this case, we can do that. Then we go to the material section, expand the materials property in which you'll see the two materials applied, each with their index number. So for the active material, we'll pick the first index, which is the wood, and then simply locate and click on assign active material. And just like that, we've fixed the issue. For a pool table, that insight needs to have that typical green fabric. So we're going to have to add a material slot, which we can do here. You click on the plus, and I'm going to add a green fabric material that I found in the fab store and apply it to the third material slot. We can then select it as the active material. Change the selection mode back to brush so that I can select only the insight and finally assign the active material, which is the green fabric to that selection. Click on Except and all our changes are baked in. So that is where you can change and edit materials, but it's not perfect yet. You see, we have been stretching some parts at the table, and thus the material is also stretched in certain parts. The corners don't look well. You know, just a whole bunch of stuff that can be done a whole lot better. To fix that, we're going to go to the UV tab. From here, we'll not assign materials like we did before. Instead, we'll change the existing materials, their position, scale, rotation, and all of that. So that is a big difference. Now, you can try the AutoUV which will automatically try to fix your material placements, and you can change the mode to original, by the way, so you can actually see your material. And we get some more options to tweak the process. But the moment you have some sort of complexity, it's really hard to get it. I typically don't use this. Let's hit cancel. Instead, I usually get the best results with project Ufes. Like the name implies, it's going to project the material on the object from a certain shape. By default, it's a plane, so it's coming from one side and thus creating a very stretched surface on the sides. You can rotate and aim at projection, but with a two D plane on a three D object, you'll never get good results. So you want to take the box or this cylinder option if you really have mostly round stuff. I'm going to go for a box since we have a rectangular table for the most part. You can move the gizmo to reposition the material the way you want and even scale it from a dimension option. 100 is default, normal size, but we can double that to make the texture bigger. And of course, it's going to stretch if you don't scale all axises the same. If you ever worked with decals before, it's practically the same. But, yeah, I like this. Let's hit except. And I would like to do the same thing with the house that we built earlier. Select it, choose project UVs, and with the box projection, it's going to look really good. The texture now seamlessly continues where the walls meet. Might want to reset the scale to the default size, though. Alright, looking good. Now, one small detail, though, and that are the corners. The bricks don't match up here. Some textures like bricks or other prominent patterns like a wallpaper will be more visible to mistakes like this. With a wooden table, nobody noticed because it's a subtle pattern. And the reason for that is because we're doing a perfect square projection on a house that is not a square. It's a 4 meters by 5 meters dimension and 3 meters high. And you could enter that value, which was also set by default because it recognized the size of the mesh, but that's also going to scale the bricks too much because we're no longer using the original scale of the material, the bricks are aligned in the corner, though. So the idea is that we choose a value that is closer to 100 the normal scale, but with the correct aspect ratio. You know, for instance, we could take away a zero from every value, and this will make the bricks smaller, and we retain the aspect ratio. We could double it, so 50 becomes 140 becomes 80 and 30 becomes 60. So if you want that seamless corner, always do a multiply or a divide on your actual mesh values. That's going to be a little bit of math, so feel free to take out your calculator for this. But let's hit Accept and you'll have now beautiful corners. But I still see problems. You see, we have a brick wall, but it's pretty flat. What if these bricks would actually come to life like an actual brick? Well, that is for the next lesson. 10. Nanite Tessellation: Might already be familiar with Nanite Tessellation. It's one of those new features in Unreal Engine 5 that really stands out. The brick wall that we have here is still flat, and it would be so cool if those bricks would actually have depth. Now, this is completely done within the material itself, but before we can do that, we first have to make sure that our aesthetic mesh has Nanite enabled. Otherwise, it wouldn't work. So from the details panel, let's locate where the static mesh is stored. I'll right click on it, go to Nanite and make sure it's enabled. Now we can locate the material, and I'll just double click on it. Now, this material is from Quixel. They always create their materials in a particular way. So the next step is going to be how to enable it for Quixel materials. Unfortunately, it might be different for materials that other creators have made, so I can't show every single way of doing it, but I'll do my best to explain so that you understand at least what's happening. So we're looking here at a material instance, which means that this is not an actual material. It's an instanced version of a material. That gives you this user interface with a bunch of options to further customize the material. I can change the color, the tiiling, reflections, and a whole bunch of things in here. A material instance is basically a user friendly way to adjust a material. But the real material needs to be set up in such a way to give me those options. Otherwise, a material instant is not going to be useful. Under the general tab, you'll find the actual material which is here on your parents. Now, Quixel uses a master material, one material that takes care of all their materials. That's why they had to create a lot of options for their material instant, including the texture itself, which you can find under the base color. So let's open up the master material. This style right here is the actual material, and the nodes that are connected to it define the properties of that material like what it looks like, how much reflections it has, and so on. And on the bottom, we can find displacement, an option that tells the material to take on a specific shape, and that's the one we need. This is our tessellation, but by default, it's great out or disabled. So from your detail panel, I'm going to search for tessellation, and there it is enabled, and the displacement option will be highlighted. We can now go ahead and save this and go back to the material instance. And by the way, you can already see the bricks doing something weird, but it's not doing the correct thing just yet because we've learned that Quixel materials have almost every parameter as a customizable option in their material instance. So that means we also have to look for tessellation or displacement options in. And here they are. There's an option to enable tessellation again, but we already did that in the master material, so we don't have to enable it here again. If you already see your material have this position offset, then it's working. Now, I do want to enable the displacement scaling because these two options allow me to choose how much those bricks need to stick out. And let me resize the material window real quick so that we can actually see the view port at the same time. Changing these values, the displacement gets bigger or smaller. However, Unreal still doesn't properly know how to displace this. I mean, the wall is just displaced as one flat surface. So I'm going to locate the displacement texture. Yeah, Quixel should really update your materials to have this already set up correctly, but it's not. Maybe in the future, it will, but if you see the default displacement texture in here, it's the wrong one. So I'm going to browse to the brick texture. We can do that from the base color texture. You'll see that it comes with some other textures, too, a roughness map, which can give different kinds of reflections to a single material. There's a normal map, which is this blue texture which takes care of lighting and adds some fake depth to your materials. And then this yellow texture which holds multiple properties like also a displacement telling the texture which parts need to be displaced more than others. So I'm going to drag that texture into the displacement option, and immediately you can see it working now. So this texture basically tells the displacement, Hey, the bricks need to be displaced a bit further out than the mortar between. So now we can go back to the displacement scaling and adjust as needed. The magnitude will define the overall displacement, and the center is an offset to make sure that things like corners align correctly. So this is how it works. You enable tessellation in your material and then put the displacement map into the displacement pin. If you don't have a displacement map or you're making your own material, you could try to just use the texture itself and take one of its color channels to see which one gives you the best results. Now, in fact, let's try and do that to give you guys the full picture. I really want you to understand what's going on right here. I've created this rectangle with the modeling tools, and the first thing I'll do is locate the mesh, right click on it, and make sure that Nanite is enabled. Next up, I've got this texture of some pebbles. It's just that, a single very simple image. And after importing, I'm just going to drag it immediately to my rectangle, which is automatically going to create the material for it. And when I open up the material, you can see how basic it is. It's only using the texture as its color, and that's you might want to re scale and position this material. There is a UV option and the material for that, but I don't want this class to be about material. So let's take the easy route, which we all know by now, open up the modeling panel, go to project UVs, and this time, it can be a plane because we're dealing with a flat model anyways. And I'm going to scale it down to 50 and then hit Accept. We can close the modeling panel now. All right, let me zoom in on the pebbles to see better what's going on right here. Now, open up the material again, and I will resize the window a bit better so that we can see the pebbles and the material at the same time. So first things first, enable tessellation from the material details, and that will enable the displacement option. And I'm going to start with the red channel of that texture. Just drag it into that displacement. The safe and you'll immediately see the displacement of the pebbles. You can try some different channel, see which one gives you the best result. Now, it's never going to be perfect without an actual depth map, but it's a quick and super easy way to add some depth. Now, if it is too much, we need to scale the displacement down a bit. But because we have no material instance, we got to reduce it a bit in the material itself. And a very easy way is to take the channel from the texture that you were using and connect it first to a divide node and then bring the output of that node into the displacement. So we are literally dividing the scale by half, and you can tweak how much you want to divide it by. Alternatively, I'll delete the divide node and instead look for the multiply node. Then connect it to the displacement and choose by how much you want to multiply it. So now it's double the size. Crazy. And with that, we have learned how Nanite Tessellation works. So instead of actually modeling these bricks or pebbles, you just look for a material and displace it, especially in situations like here where the pebbles come in contact with the brick wall see how much more depth we're getting from it. It are not two flat surfaces meeting each other in a straight corner anymore. But enough about materials now, this is a modeling class, and thus, that's what we're going to continue with because there are a whole lot more tools in the modeling panel that we haven't explored yet. So let's explore them in the next lesson. 11. Lattice Deforming: Hey, welcome back. From the modeling panel, we can find a very interesting category, deform. And as the name implies, with these tools, we can really shape any model we like, like needing a bread. So that allows for very interesting and custom models. But these are tools which are also often used to edit existing models. I've got this right here from the fab store. I find it a bit underwhelming. I want to make it bigger, but only the metal part, so I can't just scale it up. So let's see what we have right here. One of the tools is called lattice, and it's going to divide the mesh into a three dimensional raster. You can increase the resolution of that raster if needed. I will actually decrease it a bit so that it covers the blade better and it's not divided too much because the higher the resolution, the more work you'll have. Now, you'll find that out when you're working with a tool yourself. Now, what I can do is select points and move those to stretch the model out. And you'll see now how it automatically deforms the mesh based on the resolution we've chosen. So you can really pull and push the mesh to take on a different shape. And since it's a tree D raster, we can also make it thicker. And you'll notice that we're definitely stretching the mesh. So it could start to look a bit wobbly. So it's obviously not for every model. But for this old axe, a slightly more bended grip or blade is not going to be noticeable. But yeah, look at this. We've got a much bigger blade now. Except and the changes are saved. Now let's hang it to the wall on our cabin next to the frame. You know, it shows that we're more tough with these bigger axe. Look at that. Now, I also like to use this on patches that I find to look too flat, as well. I got this patch, for example, of some small rocks on the ground, and I will choose lattice again, and by the way, you might notice that Unreal will have loading issues with very complex meshes. That's why I'm working on a lower quality version of this model. I had Unreal crash several times before. Yeah, you can see how good we're able to add much more dynamic height differences in it, especially against the wall. You know, those rocks might have been piled up a bit more over here. So this is something that I really love to work with on patches of pebbles or ground surfaces or anything like that. I'm going to click on Except, and we can then just duplicate this patch, have them overlap to make it seem like one giant pile of rocks. Also merge a whole lot better with these height offsets now. And to avoid repetition, I like to rotate and scale some of these patches. Obviously, your custom adjustments to have these rocks a bit higher near the wall, are also gone now because you rotated it. So you might want to duplicate the source mesh and then create a different lattice adjustment, but make sure to duplicate the mesh in your content browser, because as we've learned with every change we make from the modeling tools, it's going to be baked in into the mesh. Now, we've got a few more very fun deform tools to explore. So in the next lesson, we'll have a look at some sculpting tools. 12. Mesh Sculpting: It is time to get really creative and start playing with some clay, morph a mesh into an organic shape. So that means we got to start with a block of clay. Here I have a cube to demonstrate first. From the modeling panel, go to deform and then locate the dynamic sculpt. We get a brush from which we can shape the cube the way but you'll notice that it doesn't go so well. The sculpting tool is looking for triangles to deform, but a cube doesn't really have much triangles. So you're just nashing it together to a clump, and then you'll start to see more triangles, and the morphing will go better. So unlike real clay, a cube doesn't work so well. We need more triangles to begin with, and a sphere is a perfect example of that. Taking the dynamic sculpt tool you can see immediately more triangles and the sculpting goes much easier. Now, we can click to move an area, both inwards or outwards so you can make mountains or craters. Hold down shift to gently undo the deform. So if you move something too much, you can just reduce that by demorphing it a little bit with the shift key. Now, by default, you're using the move tool. But from the brush type, we can find a whole lot more. I'm not going to cover all of them, but I will touch upon a few. One of which is the smooth tool. When sculpting, you can easily get hard edges, but with that smooth brush, you know, it smoothens that out. Alright, next is the inflate. Similar to the move, but this time, you don't need to drag. Just click and hold to inflate a specific area. And with every brush, you can hold shift to make it do the opposite. So now it deflates. However, that shift only deflates what you inflate it. If you want to actually reverse the inflate, you got to hold down Control. Now, I'm making it seem more complicated than it is, but I hope that the demonstration shows you what I mean. Just try and play around with the shift and the control keys as you use one of these brushes. In better English, you can carve out holes with the control key. Make a bowling ball or something. Now, not every tool has a control variant because it doesn't always make sense, so just be aware of that if your brush doesn't do anything. Now let's actually create something useful other than playing with this ball. I'd like to create a couch for the cabin. And there are different approaches. It's a personal preference. But here's how you could design a couch. Let's first delete these two examples and then head over to the create tab. I'm going to start with a box and I know it doesn't have much triangles, but we can fix that. I just didn't told you earlier. Let's create a new polygroup on top so I can extrude the sitting part. So go to select polygroupE dit, and we could do an inset, but we need the front of the couch to be open. So instead, I'm going to use the insert edge loop. That will create a new edge straight through the model. So I'll do that for each arm rest and also finally the back rest, which might be a little bit thicker. Then hit Done, and now we can use the push pull to bring that part down. And immediately we see some sort of a couch appear. So hit Accept and we're done. Now, for some, this might be a good couch. I like it to be a bit more softer, so let's also do some morphing on it. But first, we need more triangles. Otherwise, it's not going to work, and we'll end up with a small abstract sculpture again. I'm going to click on mesh from the tabs and pick the remesh tool, and immediately you see how it will create a bunch of triangles. And you can increase the couch for even more detail. That's basically it. Just click on Except. Now, let's go to deform and pick the dynamic sculpt. And I'll start with the smooth brush tool. Adjust the size if needed, and then I'll just go over all of the edges. A soft couch should not have hard corners. You know, I don't want to hurt myself. So smoothing all of these spiky corners out, both the insides and the outsides. Of course, you can always undo by just pressing Control or Command Z, by the way. So don't be afraid to try something out like here on the back corner. And if you think, maybe it's too much, just undo that action and try something else. Perhaps adjust a brush strength a bit. It all depends on what you're going for. So this is sort of a bevel, like we talked about before, but much more organic. Now let's take the inflate brush and add some cushions. So I might want to increase the size and also decrease the strength because this has to be more subtle. So let's inflate the back a little bit, and you can go over it a couple of times, you know, sometimes, hold down chit to deflate again. You know, it's a process, and sometimes it doesn't always work, so you got to undo all of your actions and start over. Then you inflate parts again, deflate a bit, adjust, et cetera. I'm very bad at sculpting, by the way. Don't ask me to clay something. It's going to look like something a 2-year-old would. Hey, I'm showing you the tools. The creative part is up to you. But you can see that mixing different brushes, like going over it with the smooth brush can give you somewhat good results. Alright, this is starting to look a whole lot more like a real couch or at least as real as I can get it. Now, sometimes you'll end up with some weird triangles sticking out somewhere or you feel like the shape is not what you hoped for. It's a bit too rough. Well, under the deform, there's a smooth option, and this will do a general smoothening over your entire mesh. Get some options for the smooth type and then of course, the amount, so you got to see which one works best. Look at the details. It's not always needed, but the tool is there for if you do. Alright, looking good. All it needs now are some pillows and a couple of legs to stand on. But we're going to create separate meshes for that and then bring it all together, but I feel like you no longer need me for that. Let's take a break from this class and create something, create a couch if you haven't already, and then create some pillows. I'll leave the creativity up to you, and then in the next lesson, we'll give everything materials and bring it all together. I'll see you back in a moment after you've created those pillows. 13. Modeling a Couch: Here it is, folks, a couch with a pillow. As a blanket, which we'll get into in a moment. I deliberately chosen a pillow because it's probably the easiest thing to sculpt. All I did was use the move and the smooth tool until I ended up with this. Now, you might ask, how did I get it to sit there so nicely in that corner? Well, here's the original pillow that I sculpted. I made a backup of just a straight pillow. That's how I started because it would be a mess to shape this while already sitting in that couch. So I just rotated and repositioned it as much as possible into that corner, aiming where it somehow is going to be, and now we just got to morph it again. But we need more control over that, so we can't just use the sculpt. I mean, those that can can probably use the deformed tool might be even better, but I need an easier tool. I'm going to go over to the deform tab and find lattice. We've worked with this one before, so we already know what it does. I just select a whole bunch of points and then move that part. But I also rotate some parts. Don't overdo it because you want to retain the shape of your pillow, the more you're going to stretch and pull stuff here, the softer the pillow is going to look. So it doesn't have to perfectly match. Just don't have it stuck through the couch. And a great tip here guys is to just take a real pillow and lay it in your couch. See how it looks, how it deforms in real life, and try to mimic that and unreal. Alright, so I also created this blanket from a rectangle. Same thing, increase the triangle count, sculpt and lattice. Alright, I'm going to throw a material on it, and immediately, you can see that it just still doesn't quite look right. Now, it feels very stiff, more like a leather patch and not like a soft blanket at all. Now, that's just my sculpting limitation, but again, I've got a tool. So don't worry about me. I can always find a tool to help me out of trouble. And this time, it's the displace option from the deform tap. Now, it will look crazy by default, but we have some settings. Now, this tool will displace your mesh depending on a certain pattern. Can have a noise type displacement. This is just something random. And this is useful for various things. Like if you set it to a low value, it adds much more dynamic to the mesh. And I start to believe more that this is a blanket, but it can be better. There's also an option to displace by a texture, and we are kind of familiar with this already. It's what Nanite Tessellation does. It looks at the texture and it displaces the mesh based on that. So it's a different way of tesslating your mesh. The major difference here is that we're baking the displacement in, so we can't change it anymore afterwards. Now, I have a texture of a crumpled blanket, so I'll just use that as a displacement map. The texture is not an actual displacement map, by the way, but you can often still get decent results with a regular image. Try a few color channels to see which one gives you the best results. And then you can tweak the scale and the position. Or go back to the top and adjust the overall displacement. So yeah, this is a very simple trick to make the material look better of the stuff that you're trying to sculpt or just to create it more realistic. And you could bake that displacement in and then further tweak it if needed. Alright, let's give everything some materials. I've got a few from the fab store. So let's drag one of these onto the couch. And if you haven't noticed already, you will now these are hard edges right here. The material doesn't flow through, and that's coming from the box shape that we started with. What we're seeing here are the polygroups a group of polygons or triangles. Now, we could remove or merge all of the polygroups, but that's not going to solve the issue. You see, materials are always baked in, so under the hood, they'll keep remembering the current polygroups. Is there a fix? Of course. I've got a tool for everything, guys. You know that by now. We're going to go to the modeling. By the way, don't get too overwhelmed by the so many tools you find in here. I don't know why, but a lot of these tools just appear back multiple times in these tabs. Like, here's the polygroup edit again. Anyhow, we're looking for the subdivide tool. We don't want to deform our couch, so let's set the scheme to loop, and that's it. It's going to recalculate triangles and thus kind of reset the material. Hit except, and it can take some time before it loads, but eventually it will solve the issue. I'll do that for my pillows, too. Maybe first apply some materials to it, as well, a different color, and I'll do the same for these two. So choose subdivide settings are still correct, so I can just go ahead and click on Except and also do the same thing for the Outer pillow. Alright. We're getting there, guys. Now, custom models always look better the more details you add to it. We've already seen a couple of such techniques like with a displacement here on the blanket, but there are some more things we can do, which we'll explore in the next lesson. 14. Tips and Tricks for Realism: Creating your own custom models is not easy. Even though we get a large tool set, what makes a good tree D model stand out is its creativity, and that's all in the details. Whether you're going for a low poly style look or try a photo realistic approach, both need details. Now, looking at the couch, we started from a rectangular design, Playstation one graphics, but then we smoothed it out, adding filling and created more dynamic. But it's still just one blop. If you look at a real couch, it exists out of multiple parts. So you could go ahead and design the seeding, the back crest, and all separately. And I actually went ahead and do that. You can see it right here. These are two models, same process as we did before. I smoothen out the corners, fix the triangles, and added a texture displacement like we did with the blankets. I've got two separate models, and together they fit great. Now, I'm just missing the be cushions, and I could go ahead and go through the entire process to make those again, or I can take another route. I already have the seating. The back crest is basically the same, just half the size. So let's make a copy of the seat, and I mean a true copy. Always remember that these modeling tools actually change the mesh. Drag the copy into the level and also apply the same material to. Let's already positioned the bit in place to the backrest. Now, to make it feel more different, I'm also going to rotate the cushion, so you can see, like the backside of the seat. Now, scaling it down will just crush everything together. We don't want that. So let's go to the model tab and locate the mirror tool. And it's quite self explanatory. You just mirror the mesh from the center point. So you can rotate it where it has to mirror from and then adjust. With organic models like dis cushion, you could see the line where it mirrors. Times by moving that mirror point up and down a bit or even rotating it slightly, you can get rid of that. If it's really a problem, then I do suggest to not take the easy route and just design something new. But look at that. Super easy. Hit except. We can now go ahead, duplicate the back cushion to the other side by holding down Alt, and perhaps it's a good idea to also rotate it so that it doesn't look exactly the same. When duplicating something, make sure that you don't see that it's an exact copy, and this is a way to hide. And here we go, another one of those details to make it look more realistic. This is starting to look like an actual couch, guys, but it's still missing a few things. I'm going to go to create and look for cone. Let's adjust the size because I want these to be the legs. I'm going to go for a radius of five, and I will take a height of around 30. It's way too much, but I don't want that sharp edge of the cone. I want to cut it off later, so that's why it's a bit too big right now. Hit except, and I'm going to rotate this around 180 degrees. And now let's cut off that spike. Otherwise, we'll get scratches on the floor. I'm going to go back to model, and this time, I'll take the plain cut, which will just cut it in half. Rotate it so that it cuts off the spike. I actually use this tool very often as well when I find a model on the fab store, and I just kind of, like, knead one piece from that model, so I just cut off all the rest from it. Very useful. Alright, hit except. Let's apply a material to it, and look at that. We've got a leck. Let's push it in place. Now, you can take this really far. I've got a leg piece right here that I worked on a little bit. I added a separate mesh to it that functions as a small rubber, and even that rubber got some small imperfections from the weight of the couch. So I'll go for these legs, delete the other one, and I'll go ahead and duplicate this leg to the right side and eventually duplicate both front legs to the back. You got to ask yourself, A people go to see these legs? Is it needed that I spend so much time and effort into all these details right here? Alright, it's awesome. I can't wait to sit in this couch, guys, watch a movie, and maybe take a nap. Now, let's bring those pillows in again. And when you're working on something, it's never a straight line of tools that you use. We sculpt it, fixed the triangles, morphed it using lattice to fit better in the couch, but we might need to go back into sculpting or something else to redo the material. So, the more familiar you get with these tools, the more you'll see yourself switching between them. Now, I would like to add some buttons to these pillows. Again, adding more detail. Create a cylinder and I'm going to resize it so that it looks like a flat disc. Don't worry too much. If it's not the correct size, sometimes it's easier to work on a model that is too big to eventually scale it down. Alright, let's hit Accept. And now let's go to the select tab and choose polygroupE dit. I'm going to select the top surface and take the inset option. This allows me to create a smaller polygroup insight. I will then make sure that the inner surface is selected and use the push pull to bring it down a bit. Hit except. Going to need a couple of holes in it now so that it looks like an actual button. Now, from the model tap, we've learned that we can find various options to cut a mesh. But there's one last tool on here that we haven't explored yet the poly cut. With this one, we can cut through the mesh depending on a certain shape. It's currently set to circle, and that's what we want. But we can also change it to something else, you know, even dry custom shape. So that's good to know. Let's bring down the size of the circle and make it fit correctly on the button. Perhaps increase the subdivision for a higher quality circle. And just like the plain cut or mirror, we can, of course, rotate it, as well, but that's not needed right now. All right, it's in place. It looks good. Let's hit Accept. We have to do this three more times. Fortunately, we can't duplicate a cut through, but luckily it remembers our last setting. So all you got to do is just move the cut through to a new position and hit Accept. So let's do that a couple of times until we got four holes in the button so that actually looks like a real. Alright, we got a button. I'm saying button a lot. Button. Now, we can't call it finished yet. We learned that sharp edges don't exist in the real world. So let's go to the select tab and choose polygroup edit again. And I'm just going to select everything, but first filter out to select points because we can't bevel points. If you do try, you'll just get an error. So if you see that, try to disable one of the selection filters and just try again. Great. I'll adjust it a bit so that the bevel is just subtle. Alright, looking good. Hit except action and except. Look at that, guys. A perfect button. No, I hear you thinking, and you're right. Aren't we just wasting time on such small things that you don't even see the details of? Of course. Alright, let's continue. I'm going to apply a material to the button and then move it to a pillow and, of course, scale it down a bit. It's a bit messy to get it in place, though. I will also duplicate it a couple of times to have the button in each corner. Just try to mess around a little bit, get it in place. Alright, something like this. Now, the pillow still looks pretty bad. Also just a blop. It's missing detailed shapes. So I will go back to the displaced tool under the deep form, then pick the texture option for displacement type and actually reuse the crumpled blanket texture. And here's something interesting by changing the scale of one of the axises to, let's say, 20 can get an interesting look. Of course, adjust the amount of the displacement and tweak it a little bit. But yeah, this feels now more like an actual fabric now, and it's really nice to see those fine details. So often, you can use a certain displacement texture for different looks when you tweak the scale or offset settings. And if we put our blanket in there, too, we could do the same thing. It has that blanket displacement already, but I'm just going to apply that same texture displacement again to it. But this time with a very large scale on one axis, also adding these lines and perhaps make it much more subtle. You can see how it's possible to stack multiple texture displacement on top of each other, maybe use different textures or the same with just different settings. And just like that, we have transformed the couch into a more realistic model. I'm very happy with this, so I will actually go ahead and select all of the meshes that make up the couch from the outliner. Then let's go to X form and choose merge. I'll make a new object and name it Couch. Hit except and our beautiful couch is now merged into one mesh. And if we go to the details panel, we can find all the material slots for if you want to change something. And this brings us to the end of the class already. We've gone through all of the most useful tools. I've got a great exercise for you, which I'll explain in the last video, so I'll see you back in the next lesson. 15. Conclusion: Well, let's start by saying congratulations. You've made it through the entire class and learned how to model inside Unreal Engine five. That is huge and a big step forward. You're no longer dependent on Tre D models that you have to find online. If you have an idea for something, you just create it yourself or edit an existing model to your likings. All the tools recovered can be used on models you download from FAB. Somewhere else. Now, I went ahead and finished the cabin. I put the couch in there, but I also added some more interior objects like a big painting on the wall. I gave it a bit of noise displacement to add more depth to it. Then I created these ceiling lights, and as you can see, I put some details into it. I tried to think what a realistic light fixture would look like and what it needs to be able to aim the light, hence these joints. The same thing is with this big light right here. If you have ever something going through an object, make an actual hole like just in reality. The more you can mimic reality, the better things are going to look. Same here, where a pin goes through. Then next, we got a little table right here, and you can see the same pins again, which could be like the screws holding everything in place. I got those on the legs as well. Right here a drinking glass, a very simple shape, and by adding a glass texture to it, it immediately works. We got a bowl with some oranges and natural objects like this. These are a lot of detail to really make it look realistic. So it really depends on whether you use these models. Are you taking a close up or a long shot from this? I just created some spheres and added a noise displacement. From further away, it's perfect, but you don't want to take close ups of. Very important right now is that you practice everything that we've learned. Use all the tools that I covered to create something. It's by doing that you learn and improve upon yourself. So I've got two assignments for you. You can choose or do both of them. First of all, is to try and recreate this entire cabin with all the elements inside. It really helps to have an example so you get a sense of direction. So that's why I advise you recreate the lights and the table and all of that first. I provided to the project file for you to download. However, I cannot include all the materials because they are from Quixel so you just got to apply those yourself. For the landscape outside. I did that just to make it more pretty. Now, furthermore, the cabin is still pretty empty. We don't have a door just yet. Maybe there should be a television at some wall switches for the light. And then there's this corner right here. I have no idea what it could be, but I'll leave that creativity up to you. So that's the second assignment, just adding more stuff to it. Now, go and create your own models in Unreal Engine five. I really hope you've enjoyed this class. Thank you so much for watching and as always stay creative.