Unreal Engine 5: Crafting 3D Worlds, Cinematics & Animation

1. Introduction: Hi, everyone. My name is Nico. And welcome to this course. I'm thrilled to welcome you to this Unreal Engine course aimed at advancing your cinematic animation skills. Hey, with my experience since 1993 in the animation domain, this course is geared to share with you the essence of creating professional grade cinematic content. This course zeroes in on mastering unreal engine for cinematic animations with a spotlight on sophisticated lighting techniques and cinematic tools for dynamic visual storytelling. We will delve into Adobe Mixamo for streamline character animation and utilize Quicksaw Bridge assets to enhance the detail of your virtual environments. Unique aspect of our learning journey will be the construction of a virtual environment, which we will develop on camera as the course progresses. This hands on project will provide a practical work frame for applying cinematic animation techniques in a real live simulator scenario. By the conclusion of this course, you'll have a comprehensive project that reflects your capabilities in producing cinematic quality animations and environments. This course is designed to catalyze your creative potential and equip you with the skills needed for professional animation project. So once again, my name is Niko Couch. Welcome to my course. Thank you. Bye for now. 2. Project Introduction: Hi, everyone. Welcome. Now, in this scene, I'm going to show you guys what we are planning to build as part of this course. Now, everything that you see on screen right now is built on camera. So you can follow every single component of the construction of this virtual environment, or you can deviate, which I do encourage you to do to be as creative as you like. All the assets that you see here are mainly either from mega scans or from Quicklebidge, or from Plyhaven and Adobe Mixamo. So those are the sources of all the assets, and all the assets come for free, which is amazing. So in this scene, we have framed the scene between two cliffs. We've placed the water here, and we've applied lighting techniques and fog to give it the ambience that we were seeking. Okay, guys. Well, this is what we'll be building. This is what we will be constructing. I hope you like it, and we'll just go ahead and start building it away. Alright, guys. I'll see you in the next lesson. Thank you. 3. Setup The Unreal Workbench: Hi, everyone. Welcome to the installation and setup of Unreal Engine. Okay, so we're going to head off to Google. We're going to just type in here Unreal Tengine download. And curly looking at the images. Here we go. And yeah, so this is where you want to land. This is your landing pad landing zone, if you will. There are three steps in downloading Unreal Engine. If you read from left to right, step one is to download the launcher. So if you go ahead and hit that, you should be able to get an Epic Games launcher. And if it lands on your desktop, you should be able to click it and move on to installing an Epic Games account. Once you've installed the account and open the launcher, you can then move on to step three, which is installing an engine. Now, there are multiple unreal engine versions, and I will show that for you right now. So once you've done step one and step two, and as I've explained, I will not exhaustively be covering this because the documentation online is very, very comprehensive and there are a lot of tutorials on how to set up unreal engine. It's not that difficult. All you have to do is follow the steps. Step one, download the launcher, step two, execute the launcher, set up your epic gains account, and you should land on a page that looks similar to this. Okay. So once you're here, you can then add an unreal engine. Now, if you hit the down button, it will show you what versions are currently there are available that epic game support. So there's 5.1, 5.21 and 5.3 0.2, which is the latest version currently. There is a newer version which is 4.0 preview. I don't recommend going to any preview releases as they might be buggy. They haven't officially released it yet. But yeah, so what I want you guys to do is head over to the top right hand corner and install Unreal Engine 32. So once you do that, right, you will you have an iPhone that looks like that that's going to land. All the I need you to do is hit Install. Now, the location where I want you to install Unreal Engine is actually on your C drive. However, we're going to make a few changes. All the projects will be on either a C drive or external drive as well as the vault. Now the reason for this is because the size of the files that will be coming from the project and also the assets will be quite large. So you'll be strapped for memory very, very quickly. So my recommendation or tip number one is avoid installing your projects or saving your projects on your C drive if you're strapped for memory. And also your vault. Your vault is essentially where all your assets, as you can see here, these are a list of Moloch asset stay action downloaded, where they sit. The size, epic games and Unreal Engine is very memory hungry as far as storage. So, the more you create, the more space you're going to need. And when you throne and you're adding multiple levels, the size of your post is going to get is going to be bigger and bigger and bigger and you're going to run out of space very quickly. So go ahead and install the latest version of Unreal angle. Okay, so when you're back and you have installed Unreal Engine 32, you should five to three p two. You should see something like this. Okay. So once you're here, I'd like it to then go to launch, and from here, you should end up launching the Unreal editor. Okay? It's going to take some time, and right now, it's clocking at 95%. Yep, it's coming through. And and here it is. Okay, you should see this screen. Once you're here, what I'd like you to do is head over to games. Get a third person template. So this is a whole lot of templates. Just very quickly. On left hand side, you've got games templates, film templates, architecture templates, and so on and so on. Now, what makes all these templates different is their setup. So some of them have specific plug ins or they're enabled dataSmithimports for archbsF example. There's a whole lot of things that are already pre done and preset for now, you could go here, and start from film and video in to create this cinematic project. But what I do find is that there's a lot of stuff that's inside here that I don't need, and I'd rather set them up myself. So what I like to do is go straight to games because unreal engine is still a gaming engine, right? And go to third person, make sure that I've got tracing enabled, it's desktop, and quality preset is maximum. What we're going to be doing is we're going to be basically working on desktop. And now here, nominate where you want to locate and install your project. Now, as I said earlier, you might want to install it on a SSD drive separate than your C drive. So it purely up to you where you want to install it. However, I do recommend installing it on an external SSD drive. So we're going to go ahead and do this installation. Okay, so I'll be installing the third person template on my SSD drive, and I've created a graph. And I'll be calling my project name something. Now notice that you cannot use special characters for cert projects, so you can't use dashes or anything like that. So you got to be careful there. But my recommendation is always to start numbering. So 001, if you're going to have 100 or 999 projects, I or like that. So let's go ahead and place this as Project 01. So now, we've ticked tracing, we Tick blueprint, with Hope third person template under the game's catalog. So go ahead and hit Create. Now it's creating your project. Okay. Now, when we've created the project, this is the first scene that we're going to see. And as you can see, this is just a level. There's not much here. Actually, there's not much at all except this particular template. Now, without deleting anything or anything like that, there's no point in doing that. What we're going to do is we're going to go straight to the content roll, which is bottom left hand corner. We're gonna go straight up to the highest level here, which is content, right? And we will go ahead and create a new level, right. Okay. We'll call it New World. So as we go to this new template, we'll ask you to save it. You hit Save. And as you can see, there's nothing here at the moment. That's fine. Don't panic. What we're going to do now is we're going to go straight to Edit, go to plug ins. And this is the scene This is the window that you should see right now at the moment. So what we're going to do is tuck in water, right? They're going to see two different types. It says experimental. This has been experiment for some time. I don't know why they have an experimental because everybody is using at the moment. So go ahead and tick both of these, right? As so. And it's going to ask you to restart. So go ahead and restart. Yep. Okay. Once that's done, you'll get this error message. Collision profile settings do not include entry for the water body collision profile. So this is a collision profile setting, right, which is required for water collision to function. Add entry to default engine N. Okay. So we'll just go ahead and click that. We'll clear that message, and that will be it. Next, we also want to add the movie render cute, right? And here they are. So let's click both of those and hit Restart. Okay. So now they should all be installed. So let me just check again. Water is click, yeah. Movie, render is click. Yeah, that's all good. Okay, so we got those two, and um Quickle bridge is also pre done for me. So if you do type in Quilebidge and you see that unticked, tick that and make sure that you restart again, and you should be all good. So now, what we have done is the following. We have set up all our plug ins, our water plug in, our pixel bridge, plug plug in, our movie render Que plugin. Now, by default, every time this particular project opens, it goes back to the third person world map. So what you need to do is go back to content and New World. Alright? So now we're back here, okay? So this is where we're going to create our world. So if you restart it again, it's going to again take you to the default location, which is the third first person mapper. But what we want is you want us to go to the new world level, which is right here. As you can see, we've installed the water plug in, Quicklebidge plug in and move Render Queue plug in, but we haven't configured the lighting. So go ahead and go straight to the Environment Light mixer, which is under Windows, scroll down until you hit nVtlt mixer. Click there. Now, you're going to see a whole lot of tabs at the top. Now, this is what's going to unlock the light in your world. So go to normal in advance. Go ahead and click Create skylight, create atmospheric light, create sky atmosphere, create volumetric cloud, and also create height folk. Now, all of this should be selected. And if you close that window now you can see that you actually have light. There we go. All right. So now we can start our work. Now, on the right hand side, you'll see a bunch of assets that are just being created. So if you just close all those, here we go. So we got the directional light, exponential height fog, sky atmosphere, skylight, and volumetric cloud. What you can do is you can grab all these, right click, move to create a new folder, and now they're in a different folder. So now you've got all your settings for light in one folder. What I like to do is organize it so that all the assets that are inside my Virtual world are structured in a folder. That way I can access the folders very, very quickly, turn things on and off. And if I go ahead and do that right now, now I've turned off all the lights. If I switch that on like that, bang, the lights are back on. So it's quite useful. So I'm going to rename this and call this a I bet. I don't know if I spelled that correctly, but I'll come back to that. All right. So now, this is the setup that we've done. Now, the next part of Chapter two is importing the Nga scans. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to get you guys to save this. So do a save all or Control Shift S, right, and close that window. Okay. So once that window is closed, Epic Games relaunches again. So now what I'd like you to do is go to the marketplace. And once it opens up, yet there it is, I want you to go ahead and type in Nodi. Right? And just hit Enter. All right. Now, here, you should get a whole lot of interesting assets that will help you develop the cliffs, the mountains, and all those kind of things. So what we'll do is we'll search for the nordic assets that we'll be using to create our atmosphere and so forth. So we can scroll down or what we can do is go straight to Okay, so once you arrive at the marketplace, what you can do is you can go straight to free tab, head over to the mega scans, right? And once you're there, you can actually look down and look for the Nordic Coast collection. Alternatively, you can just type in Nordic Coast collection in the search bar up here, and you should be able to find it. So once you get that tab, go ahead and click. And you can then download it or put it into your tray, and then you should be able to have it inside your library vault. So should land in here. So if I typed in Nordic, there it is. So my Nordic coast collection is already in my vault collection. So you should land there. So once more, let me just repeat. If you go to Marketplace, Nordic Collection. Here it is. I head over to the Nordic Coast Collection and download the Nordic Coast collection assets. And once you've downloaded that and gone through the cart process, remember, they're free. And also, always keep an eye for supported engine versions. This is why we're not going to 5.3 because it's not supported yet. So all the Nordic stuff that you see here on the screen only support between 5.1 and 5.3. So as you go through all these assets, spend some time looking around and messing around with some of these things, you're going to see a lot of the assets have also this feature here. Tell me whether or not it's supported on MacOS and Windows and whether or not it's supported in specific versions. Now, the good thing about all the MAC users out there is that now epic and unreal engine do support the silicon based chips. So if you're on m2m3, M one, you're in GoodNick. You should be able to be supported as well. Make sure that the assets also have the bit apple there so you can actually see that this particular asset is compatible to the particular chipset for MacBook Pros and MacBook studios and so forth. Okay. So once you downloaded Nuti Cos collection, we'll go ahead and download the European folage which is this one here. So if you go ahead and also download this one. So what we want is the Migascan trees European beach. So that's the other asset that we wish to download. So once again, if you don't know how to download it, let me just explain to you how that might work. Let me find one that I haven't downloaded. Okay, for example, this one, right? I have not downloaded mob Desert collection. I actually use this after all. Just add to CAT, and you should see it here. So once it's in there, you can just follow that and go straight to Checkout. You can see it's $0. It's free. Now, once you've hit Check Out, right, this particular asset is now downloading behind the scenes. So you can actually now go to library, and if you go to your vault, and I should be able to see that asset that I've just selected, which is here, the Mobi desert collection asset. Now, once I've got this asset, I can then add it to the project. Now, once you have downloaded the Nordic collection, so let's go here, Nordic. There it is. Nordic coast collection, I can add it to a project. Now, what I've done is I'm going to show projects. Let me I create my project underscore 01, so I can select that project and just go ahead and hit Add to Project. Now, what's happening here and it'll take some time. It's going to cue this particular download. So it's downloading off the Internet. Now, because I actually had this particular Nordic project on my SSD drive, it doesn't have to download from the Internet. You basically find the location where the Mega scan Nordic Forest five Library is, and then just copy all the assets into my project. So we just finish just finished watching it complete, and we'll see what happens with the project once this is complete. Just hold on for a bit. Okay. After you have successfully added the Nordic collection and the European trees inside my project Amber core 01, we'll go inside and have a look. So if you just go in there and double click. Okay, here's the third person tech plays all we want. We'll go to our new world about But what we're going to find here is on the left hand side, you've got additional folders. Here's the European beach folder. So this is what we downloaded off the mega scan stores. But we also have a lot of geometry that's come through and a lot of materials. Now, if you go down to the folder called mega scans. This is where you will find a lot of the assets, the nordi coastal assets, like a rock, for example, here's a rock. And if we just stack out a little bit, we can actually see where it is, see how it's highlighted, and so forth, we can move the rock around or do whatever we want with that particular rock. So now we've got all these assets. So if you go back and mess around with it some more, for example, let's grab a cliff. Here's a very big cliff you're actually inside the clf. So if you back out, there it is. It's massive. It's really, really large. And the level of detail is amazing. So when you go close enough, you're going to see what I'm talking about here. So these are exposed bits to the sun, so you can see how the shapes are a little bit strange. But we will be working on some of this on some of the rendering to make it look way, way, way more realistic than what this is. So this is a particular stone that came out of the asset that we had just placed in our project. Now, before we go any further, we need to get some basics around navigation and how do we move these items? How do we zoom them in? How do we place them in the world and some fundamentals and tips and tricks on making it look all good? Remember, we have a project to do, so we've just embarked on bringing in the assets from the asset library to get these amazing high quality images into our scene. Okay, folks, well, this is Chapter two. 4. Navigation & Scaling: Hi, everyone. Welcome to the navigation lesson. So let me go ahead and grab a few shapes. Let me get a cube. Let me get a cylinder, and let me get a cone. Okay. So notice how they're all laid on each other. You can't see them. If I navigate around very quickly, you don't have to do this just yet. They're not anywhere. So what I'm going to do is just going to highlight them one by one, and I'm just going to move them to the side, and there we go. Alright. Now, how do you navigate? You're on a Windows PC, you just simply hold down the left button and move the mouse forward and back. And this will give you that forward and back movement. If you want to look around, you can do the same thing. Just move the mouse around as you hold the left mouse button. Now, let me change a setting. Now, notice how it's very jittery. It's very, very fast. That's because my camera speed is quite high. So what I need to do is reduce it and drop it down to say maybe two. Maybe one. Okay, let me try again. Okay, now that's going to take me forever to get there because these objects are quite far away, and my camera speed is very, very low, so let me increase that slightly. There we go. There we go. Okay. So that's much, much better. Okay, so movement. Mouse button, left mouse button, forward and back. Or, if you keep on holding it, you can turn around. Now, the right mouse button is essentially just that. You can rotate around. That's it. You can't move forward and back. You can just go look up, look down, and rotate around. What happens when you click both of them? Well, when you click both of them, you can pan up and pan down, left and right. Okay? So just memorize this. Left is for going forward and back. You're basically traversing the world, you're moving around. So it's very, very useful. So you're moving the mouse around. The speed is dictated by this one here, the camera speed. So you can increase both of these and go very, very, very, very fast. And that sometimes really is spooky because you end up in a completely different place and you don't realize your camera speed was significantly high, and you're like, Well, where am I? Okay, to fix that, let's assume I am going to go very, very far away. And bang. Right now, I know where I am. I can't see my objects. Where are they? Okay. So the best way to get back to your scene is you go to the right hand side. You say, Okay, I know I have a cone somewhere. You can highlight it and double click and you take it straight back to your cone. Now, before you do anything else, let me hop the speed again because I don't want to lose myself in this world. It's massive, by the way. Let me drop that down. Okay. Let me increase that a little bit more to say, that should be fine. Okay. All right. Now back here. Now, what I use is I use on the left hand side, I've got a sky mouse, which is by three D connection. I'll drop the link in this lesson. And on the right hand side, I got a conventional mouse, which I use to mainly click a lot of these objects. So as a summary, if you want to move forward and back, left mouse button, if you want to rotate around, it's the right mouse button. If you click both at the same time and move the mouse, you will be pounding up and down the left and right. Okay. So that's the basic way of moving and navigating inside your unreal engine virtual world. Now, what I'm going to do is I'm going to walk you through these buttons here at the top. The arrow button is Q. So if you hit Q on your keyboard, goes to the arrow button. If you hit W on your keyboard, it gives you this access button. So you're going to have a red axis, blue axis, and a green axis. If you want to rotate, which is the E button. So you just click E or just select it. You basically be able to rotate objects. And finally, if you hit the R button, it's the scaling. So you can scale the size of this. So all these buttons are actually lined up QWER on your keyboard. It's very, very easy to map out the visual arrangement, as well as the keyboard arrangement. So let me go back to the selection. So selection is just about selecting any one of these objects. If you select the object, you'll see on the right hand side, all the information about the detail of the object presents itself on the bottom right hand side, and up here, you can actually see all your assets inside the world. So you can see that I've highlighted a cylinder. If I go ahead and click cone, they can see the cone details are all here and cone is highlighted. Same thing with the square. So that's your selection button. Now, let me go to the kick W on the keyboard. Now this is your XYZ axis or blue, green, red axis. Notice how the blue green is also very much aligned and consistent with the green, the red, green, and blue numbers here. So you know that any number that you change here, you can change the location. You can change the rotation and the scale. These three items here that are stacked, location, rotation, and scale are the same as this, location, rotation, and scale. So these three are actually here, but in number form. Okay. So if you want to be very, very precise about your location, you can get it down to the 0.01 of a specific unreal unit or a specific degree of rotation and a specific degree of scale. So you can do it from here or you can do it by selecting one of these objects here. Remember, W E, and R. So let's go to W. Now, W is all pushing moving the item or the asset up or down left or right, or in and out. So that's all that is. So if you highlight any one of these axes, as soon as it goes yellow, that means that it is activated, press the left mouse button and move the mouse up or down, that's it. If you want to go in the red direction, you do the same thing. If you're going to go in the green direction, notice how it's kind of a little bit fuzzy. There's a pattern on the green. It doesn't matter. As long as it's yellow and it's highlighted, even with the pattern, if you drag it, you'll move forward and back. What that means when it's got this pattern, it means that it's being blocked. So if I go on the other side of this cube, now the green arrow is visible to me and therefore, I can do it that way as well. So it doesn't really matter. As long as the actual axes are highlighted in yellow, you can do that. Now, here's a little trick. What if I want to copy this cube? Now, I can do Control C, Control V, right? But what if I want to copy it in a certain direction? Now, here's a little tip. If you actually highlight the blue axis and you press Alt and you press the left mouse button and move it up, you've automatically done a copy and paste in the vertical axis. What if I want to do two of them, but I want to do it in the red plane. So basically I want to move I want to make a copy of these two, but across to the left side. Again, highlight the red, make sure it's yellow. Hold the old down, and while I keep the left mouse button clicked and move to the left. Done. You can do the same, and you can do it from here even. So you don't have to rotate around. Just simply click all four, for example, and let's make a copy in the green axis direction. Highlight the green. Press Alt left mouse button and move the mouse and Weller. Here we go. There we got four cubes. Nice. So four cubes here, and four cubes there. Okay, fantastic. So that's how you can use the XYZ axis button or W. Now, now we're going to go into the rotation. Okay? So now let's pick a different type of object. Let's go with the cone. So let's highlight the cone. Now we've got the rotation button here. Now, what if you want to rotate the cone? Well, before we do, why don't we make a copy first. So let's highlight the yellow, the blue axis, so's yellow. Alt Shift, and up we go. No problem. Now, I want to rotate this cone so that the pointed part of that cone is aligned with the pointed part of that cone. How would I go about doing it? Okay, see, on the right hand side, you've got number zero, zero, zero. Okay, if I click the E button, green is going to pan up or down, as well as red. So I could go in each any of these directions, and I'll basically be able to align the tip of my cone with the other tip of the cone. So let's go to either red or green, and let's type in -90 degrees. Okay? That's fine. That's in that direction. Okay, let's go minus 180. There we go. Okay. So now, I've got the cones facing each other. Okay? And because I copied the cone in the exact same vertical alignment, I know for sure that if I lower this in that same pane, I'll make sure that I'm able to touch the two cone pointed parts together, and there we go. Okay, so that's that. So that's the rotation. Now I can do that using the transform numbers on the right hand side, or as I'm going to demonstrate here, I could do it using the mouse, as well. There. Okay. Now. So that's the rotation button. Now, let's go scaling. Okay, so if I hit the button on the keyboard or this particular icon, I can scale now my cylinder. Now, I can scale the cylinder in the Y axis, red axis, or the green axis or I can scale in all three axis all at once. How do you go about doing that? Notice it's a white cube. If I highlight the white cube with my mouse, all three axis are highlighted. That means if I hold my left mouse button and move the mouse forward or back, it scales in all those directions proportionately. Okay? Now, what if I want to scale in one direction? Well, in that case, you highlight one of them, and there you go. Skin scale up or scale down. The same thing over this way and the blue direction. There we go. So if you're going to hit Control Z, you go back to where you started. It's very similar. Control Z is fairly universal. Control C, Control B, Control Z also work in Unreal Engine. Okay, so now, what about these numbers? Now, all these three here, that one, this one, and that one are associated with your XYZ, blue, red and green axis, your rotation, and your scale. Okay, if I wish to move objects, right, without any issues, just make it really really smooth. There you go. I make sure that that icon is not highlighted. The moment I highlight this, it means that it's going to move in 50 unreal units of movement in any direction of choosing. Now, 50 is quite a bit. So I'm going to reduce this down to say ten for demonstration purposes. So if I go like this, notice how it's sort of a bit jaggery. It's not quite smooth. It's jittery a little bit, see that? Okay, let me increase that to say 50. Boom. There we go. Notice how the axis in the world also changes, right? And then we reduce that down to say one, a little bit smoother, more granularity involved. But if I go up to 100, there we go. It's a little bit more jittery, as well. And if I remove it, nice and smooth. There we go. Okay. So that's what this does. Next, it's the angle icon. So notice that it's selected, it's in blue. So when it's always selected, it's always blue means that it's active. So keep if I unselect it, it means that I can move this particular item, for example, and click the rotation. Smoothly up and down. No problems. See how smooth that is. It's moving at a two decimal point angle of separation. So you can see here it's going -2.22, -2.7 a, it's quite accurate in that way. However, what if I already know my angle and I want to just move it there, I can just simply go to the numbering form. Numb to the numbers on the right hand side and transform it. So I want to go to zero, zero, zero. Okay, so we're back there. I want to move the cube in the green direction, and I want to make sure that it's at 90 degrees. Bang, there we go. You can do it that way much quicker, much faster. Or what you can do is you can simply go up here in the icon, highlight the icon, switch that to say 90 degrees and swing it around. There we go. Let's do the exact same thing as if I was doing it here on the number pad. Alright. Now, next, what about this one here? This one is all about scaling. So if I go to any of these objects, say, the cylinder again, I'm scanning the cylinder quite a bit. Let me choose a different. Let me go with this particular cone. Now notice how I've selected or highlighted and scale is selected on the right hand side. That means that if I highlight any one of these particular axis, that's the direction I'll be scaling in. Now, notice again how there's a white one in the middle. As soon as I highlight the white one in the middle, all of the others go yellow. That means if I click it and move it, I'll I'll be changing the scale in all directions uniformly. Now, what if I highlight, say, the red one? I'll go to red, green, and blue. Same thing. So we know all this. So what does that do then? Okay. Notice how it's not highlighted. Means that it's fairly free form. There's no snapping into some sort of grid. Now, if I click it and say I increase it to ten, this means that now it's scaling to ten. Notice that that's quite horrible, right, because it's such a big scaling number, right? There we go. It's quite a big cone here. So what if I reduce it down to say one? Okay, let me scale it all the way down. That's going down in a little bit more of a controlled fashion because, again, it's just about the scaling size that we've actually allocating here. So that's what these three are. They're just size scalings for XYZ, access, rotation, and the scaling button here. Okay. So we've just discussed the camera movement as well. So if you increase that, that means you're going to go very, very fast in the world. And I explain to you how to go back where you started from just by highlighting one of these items and double clicking. But if you really want to be moving around a very concentrated part of your world, then I'll recommend that you drop the speed and the camera speed scalar to something a little bit smaller. Otherwise, if you go this high, you will basically disappear very, very quickly in the world, and it'll be very difficult to go back. So Guys, that's all, folks. This is the basic stuff about navigation, copying, rotation, and scaling. So hopefully you've got some value out of this, and I'll see you in the next lesson. Thank you. Bye bye. 5. Windows and Menus Introduction: Hi, everyone. Welcome back. In this lesson, we're going to discover the menu items and the windows that form the unreal engine user interface. So what we're going to do is we're going to start with the main menu file. Here, this is where you can create new levels, open assets, saves, export files, and obviously exit the project. Very important. Edit, the one that I find that I spend a lot of time in is the project settings and also the plug ins. So if you want to add additional plugins, you can just go ahead, click that and you'll get the plug in window. So you can just search the plugins and find the plugs. And if you don't have a plug in, you can just add and add a new plug in and you'll prompt you as to where that plugin is located. You provided the path, and then you'll be listed here and you can activate the plugin just by clicking the box the selection box. Let me go ahead and close that. Next is the project settings. Again, a very important area. This is where you can activate certain features on the application. So if you want to see if your rate tracing is on, there it is. If you want to see if you got lumi or anything like that active. So there's a couple of things that you want to do at the global level, and this is where you do that. You could do it at the project settings level. Okay, if you want to change the thumbnail of your project as well, it's quite neat if you can do that. So you can do it all from here, so from the project settings. So once again, edit. Project sense and plugin is probably one of the most important things. In the windows, again, this gives you access to all the different types of windows you can open. The one that I find that I usually use the most is the environment light Mixer. I spend quite a bit of time here to activate different light features, et cetera, but you can also do it in in the details paint on the right hand side, but I usually just find that I tend to go straight to Windows and environment mixer and do it from there. What else are your world settings again? This is this particular window, so you can adjust any type of world type setting, so the entire world gets impacted. So any particular configurations that you apply here, they are applied across your entire level. So you got to be careful with that one, but I do find that particularly useful if you know what you're doing, and so that's the Windows one tools. For this particular project, we don't spend an awful amount of time here for that, but if you are in the game development industry, you probably might want to spend a bit of time here as well. The render resource view, I do find that I usually spend a bit of time here as well, but we'll skip that for now. We'll jump into that a little bit later on. Build the Now, sometimes certain assets need to be rebuilt. So I usually go here and build all levels, so it does a rebuild for me. If I want to rebuild just the nanite, you can Google what nanite is, but you can do it straight from here and click rebuild NanitRbuild this landscape. So when you introduce a landscape, which you will later on, you can basically just rebuild the landscape, et cetera. So this is I spent a bit of time in this particular menu item, as well. So that's ito. So those are the focus areas for the main menu. Now, as we look down a little bit further, we'll see this particular tab. So this tab shows you that you are currently in the new world level. And from left to right, we'll just go through all that. So this is saving. This is browsing. Now, this is the one that I spend a bit of time clicking on and off, and this is the selection mode. So these are the different modes. So you got the selection mode. That means that we can select stuff, right? So you're going to spend a lot of time in the selection mode, believe me, but then you got the landscape mode. This is where you can actually see where your landscape is. You can modify your landscape. You can shift it up or down. So there's a lot of cool features here. As you can see here, we can lift the landscape and move it around. And obviously, you can do it here from these numbers. You can apply certain material to a landscape. For example, if you want to apply grass or don't have brass. Let me see if I can apply scope pink, right? I can create a pink landscape. Yeah, there it is, right? Horrible pink. I don't know why I did that. But yeah, so this is what you can do in landscape. You can increase different parts of your landscape. You can do a lot of cool things here with the sculping tool. But that's what you do in the landscape part. Let me just undo all of that. There we go. And there we go. Okay, so that's the landscape mode foliage. Now, if you have a landscape and you basically or a mesh or a platform of such, and you want to add trees and grass, this is how you do it. You just simply select the foliage. For example, we have nordic there. So if I go ahead and select the foliage and I basically say, Okay, well, I want to apply the foliage on a specific part of the landscape, which I don't have here, so there's no way that I can actually apply it. Then you can basically add some trees and so forth. So let me go ahead and put something together very, very quickly. Let's add a landscape, so let's do a little mountain here, I guess. Yep. Okay, that's just not right. Let me do it over here. Okay. So now if I switch over to foliage, now what I can do is I can select my foliage, and now I can Ooh. I've just added too many trees here. Let me undo that. See, I've added 735 trees in one go. Let me just reduce that to something a little bit smaller. Or what you can do is do a single instance. So what I'll do is I'll click that and boom, there's a tree. There's another tree. Here's a third tree. Tree tree, trees everywhere, right? So you can do it like that. So that's the foliage selection, okay? Now all your foliags you can actually see all of them listed here because we've added it to our content browser at the very beginning of the project. So now what's done is grab all the foliage items that are tagged foliage and it's dumped it here in the asset. So I can choose whichever foliages I want, and I can just simply add them however I wish. Now, if I don't want to go ahead and add trees willy nilly, what I can do is I can introduce a brush, and say, for example, I want to add five trees in one go. Therefore, I can just select What? Look, I s that. Oop. It's a bit too much. There we go. Now, that's a lot of trees. Okay. So now, that's what foliage mode does. So you've got the selection mode. You got the landscape mode, you got the foliage mode. You also got modeling. Okay, so let me undo all this now. Control Z. Let me just make sure I remove some of the stuff. Control Z. Okay. So, oops. Okay, so let's remove the landscape. Yeah, there we are. So we're back here. So that's the foliage. Now we have also the mesh paint. We'll skip that for modeling. Modeling is really, really cool. This is where you can do a lot of really, really interesting stuff with some of your meshes that you might create. So, for example, if you want to transform certain objects, make them, you know, look wider or whatever or modify them in any way, this is where you'd go ahead and do that from. So if you want to do some vertic sculpting, you can do that. Oops hang on. Let me just try that again. All right. So if you want to sculpt a surface, you can do that, and you do that by just simply clicking with your mouse and moving up or down, however you wish. Now notice here that the number of vertices is as that is, but you can basically add additional vertices and break this up even further and be able to do some really cool sculpting on some objects. So that's what the sculpting the modeling mode is all about. What I usually use it for in quite a bit is actually, I use a different tool for modeling, but I do find that some tools like the polycart I need to use because as you can see here, it's cutting straight through this particular mesh. So as you can see, that's quite useful. So if you have a wall and you want to get rid of it, you can simply say, Okay, well, I want to put a window here, and I would like to put it there. Now, if you don't want it there, you say, Okay, well, that's fine. I don't want it there, but I want it to be vertical, and I want it to be like so. So you can actually do it exactly like this. So you can move the window. It's a rectangle now, and you can adjust the size of it. As you can see here, I'm adjusting the size. You can adjust the width. And the height, and you basically cut through objects. So I find this tool particularly useful. So once again, the modes are selection, landscape, foliage. I find the modeling one quite interesting. And then you got other ones here which will not be covering in this course, fracture, brush editing, and animation. Okay. So that's for a different course. Now. So that's the modeling selection. So let's go back to selection. Selection is probably the most important. The one that you're going to be spending a lot of time on is that particular one. So that's the selection mode. Now here, this is where you can add objects like you saw me before shape adding shape. So I can add cubes. You can add um planes planes are quite interesting because sometimes when you do import certain objects or certain assets, those planes don't quite suit or they're not quite accurate. So what you end up having to do is create your own plane on top of an existing plane to cover certain areas that that particular import did not achieve. So planes are very, very good and very important. So yeah, you can add all sorts of shapes. You can add cinema things like, for example, a camera. You can let me go ahead and add a camera. Here's a camera. Right. Now, here on the right hand side, you can see what the camera is actually looking. It's actually looking at this cube. Let me move that around. Let me shift that to the right. Now, one way or another way to control the camera is by actually going to perspective and go straight to the camera actor. And now I'm actually inside the camera. So this is me moving the camera and everything that you see is what the camera sees, okay? So if I want to exit from this camera perspective, I just go here with eject button. So hit the eject button. Bang. Now I'm outside of the camera and here's the camera that I was inside before. So once again, let me go ahead and just click that, and I'll go into perspective. Here's my camera actor that I just added in, and this is what I see when I'm looking through the camera, right? So you can zoom in, you can zoom out. Now, if I click the camera here on the right hand side, I can adjust the type of camera I want DLSR, for example, or keep it as film. Oops, I got stuck and let's try again. There it is. So I can basically select any type of camera I want, any type of lens I want, five milia or maximum focal point of 1,000, so I can do 2000 or even higher, right? One of the things that I've used quite a lot is actually the focus pane. So here, if I want to basically focus on a specific cube, now this pink tells you that I'm focusing right where I drop the little pin here. So you can see I'm focusing on this particular corner. So when you're doing your cinematics, you can basically make sure that your focus is on a specific area. So as the camera is moving, you adjust what you're focusing on. Right now, you can see how I'm far far away. So therefore, I've got everything out of focus. Now, the closer I get into these objects, you're going to start see it. There we go. You can see the white coming in through here. That means I'm focusing on now focusing on this and focusing on that. Now, you can change the focus point, but you can also remove this pinky mask, and there you go. And you can just use this little droplet icon, and that will tell you, Okay, boom, you're focusing on this cone. The focus assistance is 1,466. So if I grab this droplet again, and I say, Look, I want to focus on this nearest object here, which is this cube. But it's gone down, so it's closer to the camera, so it's 1033. So that's the focus point. So let me not spend too much more time on this. Let me inject Okay, so once more, this is your camera. And the way you get to that camera is simply by going to cinematics and adding a camera actor, right? A medium plate, really nice feature as well. I don't want to get into that too much right now this session, but it's just to navigate you around. So you can have a lot of fun with a lot of these different options here. One of them that I spend a lot of time in is also is Quiaw Bridge. Quicksaw Bridge, this is where you can get a lot of your assets. So you should be able to see this icon. If you don't see this icon, it's because you have not had it the Quisaw Bridge plugin. If you want some instruction on how to do that, please message me. But essentially, all you have to do is go to the marketplace in Unreal Engine. You type in Quixwbidge and you basically should be able to download the plug in, and then you should be able to install the plug in to your project. If you don't see this, then that's the way you'd go about doing it. Message me, and I'll send you the details around this otherwise, feel free to Google it. So Qixil Bridge is where we will collect a lot of our assets. So, wait, wait, wait, here it is. Look at that. The details on this asset is absolutely amazing, amazing. I always fall off my chair. Every time I look at the details on this, you got four K, two K, eight Ks absolutely unbelievable. And the cool thing this is all for free. Oh, well, if you're vegetarian, you probably won't like this. But then you've got these ones over here. You got a pair that has a bite in it, right? You can download it, and then you can hit ad and you'll go adding it straight to your project. Again, not what we want to do for this particular lesson. But going back to this, this is probably one of the most important things that I use here besides these ones, this one's appeared to get content. Pixel Bridge is it. You can also go straight to the Unreal marketplace, which brings up Unreal now. And this is where you can basically do more searching across the entire marketplace, not just Quixwbidge. But here, if you go to library, and you should be able to see something like this. Saying there's an update a, which I need to refresh, you install it to the engine so that when you click your engine, which is 5.3 0.2, and you go to install plugins, you should see Quicklebidge right here ready for you, okay? And if that is the case, then you can simply go back here, and you should be able to see Quilebidge right here and be able to activate it as soon as you click it. So that's Quixel Bridge. This is quite useful quite a lot for blue printing. So we'll basically cover that a lot when we're talking about meshes and textures. Now, here, this is your cinema icon, so you can add new level sequences. What that is is essentially a scene, like in a movie scene. So you're doing one scene, you know, start, shoot the scene, then cut, shoot the scene and cut. And that's what this essentially is. It's a level, so you can have camera movements, multiple camera movements. You can record it, and you can add multiple number of level scenes. What that means is they will capture the scene the way it is. So if you modify anything, the camera will stay exactly in the same spot capturing the same thing that you've told it to capture regardless of what's in front of it. So that's what the add level scene does. Now, here, this is more for game modes. If you play it, let me just hit play. Okay, my guy here is not going to move anyway because there is no plane. He's just dropped in midair and he's falling forever. Perpetually, he's gone, he's gone. Yep. Okay. So if I have a plane here, I would basically be able to Y, let me just spin aro. Yep. There we go. Sorry about that. He would actually land here. So that's the play button and so forth. So that is this particular menu item. We've covered this in the navigation. Now on the right hand side, you've got something called the outlier. Outliner. Outlier? I think it's outlier. It's an outliner. Now, this is where all your assets are. So you can by simply clicking these eyelashes, right? So, for example, that one. See how I can where is it? Let me see what am I clicking Ce two. There it is. See how it's turning on and off. So you can see the eyes on means that it's on eyes on, eyes off, eyelids, halfway go, right? So that's what that is. So under each cone, you're going to get a mesh. Now, the meshes normally are not triggered. There's that part of the actual mesh. There's a lot of detail behind that. There's a lot of conflict behind that, so you don't have to turn that on and off. To turn that particular cone on and off, you go to the parent code to the parent object and you just click it on and and now, if you want to make any adjustments to any of these assets, you simply click the acid and you basically can see the hierarchy of the acid, and from there, you can make adjustments as to its rotation, location, scale. You can change the meshes are basically what it's composed of. So all the details, all the triangulations that make this particular cone in place, that's what the mesh is. Then you can add materials. Mateials it's all about what texture is on it. What are we actually representing here? So if I go ahead and select a different ash, sorry, different material. Now I've got a silver material, so you can see how it's reflecting quite interestingly. But yeah, you can select any particular material that we have. What's this one doing? Not sure. Okay? That's a very strange one. Okay, but blinking text. That's what that one is. Okay. I discovered some new things all the time. Look, let's look at this one. Odd, very strange. So that's what the material is. And that's what happens when you click one of these assets, you can then modify how it behaves. What does it have? What texture is it and so forth, so forth. So let me just close that. Let's go back to just a linking carat. Okay. I don't know what that is. But anyway, it can be lost in all this stuff. So if you want to see if you want to basically have what that one is, so instead of actually trying to search for what it is, you can just click the one right next to it. Find out, oh, it's called basic material. Okay, cool. Then you go over here and you basically type in basic Basic shape material, bang, and now we're back here. Okay. Cool. So that's so that's essentially it. I'll move these cones around inadequately. But anyway, so that's on the right hand side, it's got the outliner of all the objects that are inside this particular world of yours and all the details. So every time you click any of these things here, you're going to be updated with the details of whatever you selected up here. Okay? So if you select any object, the same thing happens. So if you select any of these items, both the outliner and the details change immediately to whatever that object is. So you can do that in any of these modes. So you don't have to be in the select mode, right? I use select mode. I usually am either in one of these modes, right, or I'm clicking here on the right hand side and doing searches. Okay, so that's that. Now, the content drawer is down the bottom. This is where your whole structure, all your filing system is located. So everything is under content. Now, as you create the new levels, right, the new levels are basically using the foundation of everything you've structured, but just adjusting it to whatever conflicts or changes you make to those objects. So if you basically remove a very important item from the directors or from the folders here, it will affect all the levels. The levels are really cool because you can create a different version of whatever you're creating using the same assets and the same folders, the same data and the same information that is under content, but just as a different level. So you don't have to copy and paste the entire project. You can create multiple different levels simply just by clicking here and you can duplicate, right? So now I've got two levels. So I've got this one over here and this one over here. So if I go here to say the the new level, level one is going to ask me to save it. So I'll go, Okay, fine. I'll save it. Now, if I go and grab this and move it to the I'll just delete it. Okay, so I've deleted all this, but guess what? All the content, all the configurations, all the textures of everything that I created in the first level are still there. It's just in this level, I've removed objects, I've removed assets of the screen. So if I go ahead and I save this, and if I go back to my first level, it's still there, right? But if I've changed the specific texture that both of these levels you're using, you will see the change over and over again. So if I'm in, say, New World ten and I change a particular texture or delete a specific file that's inside the core root file of this particular entire project, it will impact all of the levels. Okay? So the levels are really, really cool to have because you don't have to recreate all of your assets. You can just reuse them and just modify them and configure them how you wish. I particularly use this when I want to say, Okay, I'm doing a scene that's in the daytime and a scene that's in the nighttime, but I just want to use the same assets. Then I just create different levels, and I modify the lighting for that particular instance. So that's what leveling is. And this is a particular area where I spend a lot of my time. Modifying and changing and renaming and creating different directories, et cetera, so to make sure that everything is structured nicely and form very, very well. So you can see some of the geometry that we've entered, remember the European beach that we introduced as an asset right at the beginning of this course. Well, it's all here. Okay? So, folks, that's a quick introduction of all the menu items. We've done a clockwise circle around. We started from the top, came down here, went to the right, we spoke about the details, and then we just landed here on the content drawer. Guys, thank you very much and look forward to catching up with you guys in the next lesson. Thank you. 6. QuixelBridge - ALERT - Skip to Next Lesson on the new FAB Library: Okay. Hi, everyone. Welcome back. And in this lesson, we'll be working with Quixwbridge. So we'll be exploring how you bring in assets from Quixlebridge over into your project. So what we're going to do is go ahead and click the content draw. Now, there's a couple of ways you can do that. But before we do, we're just going to go head over to our new world level. So I just double click that. That should look familiar, right? So what we're going to do right now is bringing some assets from Quixlebridge. Now, very quickly, you can do that in multiple ways. You can go ahead and click the right mouse button anywhere in this area. Yeah, oops. Why is that not working? Hang on. Go. Yeah, there we go. So you can click your route right mouse button and the top end, the third from the top, you're going to find Add Quickle content. You can do it that way, or you can simply just go over here and hit Quisle Bridge as well. So what I like to do is, I like to just go straight here in the content itself and just go, Okay, add Quicklebidge content. Now you're going to get this window, and this window is going to appear. Now, if you haven't logged in, it's just going to ask you to log in. So it's going to ask you for user name and password, you log in, and you should be able to see this particular window. Now here, you can go to the three D assets, three D plants, services, decals, is great. It's important to know what kind of decals you can use. For example, if you have a wall and you want to make it a little bit rough or a little bit ragged, or maybe even spray painted. There's a lot of cool stuff here in the decals, Imperfections as well, the same sort of thing. So if you've got a piece of land and you want to basically throw some charred wood, imperfections would work really well, but also imperfections coming nicely for glass material as well. So window stains, things like now let's go ahead and go to say three D assets, and let's bring across an asset just so you can see how that works. So if we go to historical and let's go ahead and bring in one of these assets. I don't want anything like that because a bit more, but oh, let's go grab this Japanese bridge. So if we go and click this Japanese bridge, now the top right hand corner, you're going to see a little green arrow. That means that you have you haven't downloaded yet. So if you click it, you can hit it to favor, so it will appear in your favor. So let's go ahead and do that. And here you determine what kind of quality you want. Now, the higher the quality, the more memory it's going to consume on your hard drive, on your hard disk. And that means you're going to carry it wherever this project goes. But let's go ahead and pick the highest quality possible. We're going to hit Download now. So once you hit that, it's going to take a little while. It's going to download it. Back on the icon, you can actually see the percentage download. Over here, it just shows you the green line that's spinning around clockwise. Just wait until that's completed. Once it's complete, we're going to go hit Add. Once you hit Add, it's going to add it to that particular project that you're working from, and it's going to put it in under the content folder. So let's wait it's almost done and bingo, right? Okay, it's done. So now you can see the ad button is down blue and it is activated, so just go ahead and hit that Cool. All right. And it shows you where it is in the actual content browser. It's right here. So now what you can do is just let's move this particular window away. And now that this window is actually activated, what we can do is simply grab the static mesh. Now, every time you bring in assets, you can simply search on static mesh and highlight just the static mesh. The static mesh is the actual polygons, the triangles that basically create this particular structure. And you can actually see when you highlighted the number of different vertices and the number of triangles that make up this particular asset. You can see there's 4,419, so it's quite intense. And you can also see how big size of an asset that is from a memory consumption perspective. So you can see, it's 18 megabyte megabytes. So what you've got here is you've got quite a very detailed asset. So let's go and grab that asset. So you left click, drag it across to your world, and it should appear anywhere you drag it into. So now, let me just bring that window down for a bit, and let's have a look at this asset. So if you look around it, it actually looks pretty detailed. If you come in close, look at the level of detail you're looking at here. It's amazing, right? Fantastic. Okay. So there you have it. So now when you've got this particular asset, you can simply do what, what we've done in the previous sessions, just click it. You can lift it up. You can lift it down, bring it to left, bring it back and forward. You can spin it around, and you can also scale it. So make it very big. There we go, or make it very small. There we go. Okay, so that's how you bring in assets. So that's just an example of how to bring in Quicksawbidge assets. Now, what you can do is once you've got that asset back in, you can just go back to your content browser, do exactly the same thing and click and add a different kind of asset. For example, you can add, Oh, this Japanese letter looks pretty cool. So I grab that, and it's downloading, does pretty quick. I know that just highlighted. So again, it depends on the speed of your Internet. So if you're on a Wi Fi four G, you're going to weigh a bit. If you're on a five G, and you're looking at speeds of, you know, above, you know, 400 or 500, it's going to be fairly quick. So my internet is fairly fast, so it's happened very, very quickly. So don't panic if it doesn't work exactly the same way it's working on my machine because I just have a very good deal with my Internet service provider, I've got a very good Internet. But if it is a bit slow, just give it some time. So now it's downloaded. So let's just add it to the project, and it should appear. Here. So if you go now to your mega scans, you got your three D assets. Remember, we've added the Nordics, and here's the bridge and here's the Japanese lantern. So what I'm going to do is I'm just going to grab the lantern and place it in my world. Now, let's go in and have a look at this lantern. There it is. Pretty cool. That's a really cool lantern. So basically, we're going to grab it, go to bring it up. And then what you can do is you can simply just place it near the bridge and you start creating a scene that way, right? And that's the cool thing about having such an integrated way of bringing assets and assets that are of high quality such as this. So if you zoom in and you actually look at this lantern, look at that level of quality. It's actually really, really good. Now, just another little hint. When you've got a lot of things highlighted and you want to get rid of this yellow line outline and also the X axis and all that kind of stuff, go ahead and hit G on your keyboard. Once you do that, it all disappears. So you've got a very clean look here at the moment. Okay. Excellent. So, guys, that's how you bring in assets. Now, what about materials? Okay, so let's go back into Quicklebridg. And I like to go content and right by the click add content. Now, what about materials? Okay, so we've done the three D assets, and let's go to surfaces. Let's type in Let's type in wood. Right. Okay, so we want to look at wood floors or wooden. So there's a lot of assets here, but we want to look at materials, particularly, so right, well, let's grab wood floor, see if that's going to help. Um Yeah. Okay. Excellent. So now we've got some wooden planks and floor planks that we can basically bring in. That looks good as well. So we've got various different things here. So let's go ahead and grab, for example, that one, right? So we can just add that in. So let's download that. So now, what are materials? So what we're doing right now is we're adding a material to our world. Mateals are essentially objects in the unreal realm that if you grab and you place it on top of another object, it would absorb its properties. In other words, if you want to make something look like as if it's right now, we got a wooden floor, you can just grab this material and drop it with your mouse, and it will basically look like the wooden floor. So that's really it. That's what materials are. Mateial instances are instances of the original material. So therefore, if you want to change the scale or, you want to do it in the material instance, because if you do it on the material or the main material, material instance, what's going to happen is it does change across everything. So that can become very problematic, especially if you apply the floor in many different areas, and then you change a scale on one particular area, it will change it for everything. So you want to always have material instances, but I'll be discussing that in a different lesson. For now, let's go ahead and add that. So if I now go and close this window, and go back to my content drawer. What I can do is just type in wood, and there it is. Here is my wooden instance. So if I go grab that and dump it on this particular box, you can see that right now, this box has inherited the material properties of that material object that I just downloaded from Quicksaw Bridge. So let's do it again. Let's grab sake, for example, this particular cube. Actually, let's go a little bit more interesting. Let's grab this cone. Now, remember, the wooden planks are very vertical, so it's going to be very interesting to see how that looks like. This is a big experiment. I haven't actually done this yet. So you go to the material instance, you grab it and you dump it. Oh, there we go. So now we've applied the particular material instance on the cone, and you can see the level of quality that that is. I can see how the light is a little bit diffuse, and it's reflected perfectly. Beautiful. Down the bottom, the, yeah, it's applied at the bottom, as well. Isn't that great? Okay, so that's how you bring in materials. Okay, so now let me explain a couple of things. You got the material instance. You also got what they call a material texture. Material texture is what this material is composed of. So all these little textures here make up this particular material instance. We don't need to go into great detail, but just know this. When you've got a ball that has a particular material, you can grab that and dump it on any object in the world, and you'll inherit straight away that particular property. So now I think you're getting the hang of this. So, guys, this concludes this particular lesson on how to bring in objects. So static meshes. Remember, this is a static mesh, right? So these are objects that are coming from Quicksil Bridge and materials. So these are materials here that we just grab and we can apply it to any object that we've created in this particular world. Okay. So thank you, guys, and I'll catch you in the next liston. Bye, bye. 7. Quixel Bridge To FAB TheWayEasyWay: Hi, everyone. My name is Nico. And welcome. As you all know, Epic have made a significant change in the recent few weeks, and that change has impacted everyone across board because it changes how you access your assets and your materials, your textures and so forth. Previously, what was baked into Unreal Engine was Quicksaw Bridge. Now, that's still there. You can still access it, but they're going to decommission that very, very soon, so it's not going to be available in possibly the next couple of releases. Until that happens, I really recommend everybody move over to the fab. So now, why has Epic done this? Okay, well, for a lot of reasons, number one, is to unify all the assets because they were across a lot of different platforms. And two, also is to enhance the quality and the user interface for all the developers across board. So that doesn't just include architecture visualization people or visualization people per se, but also a lot of game developers. So it's bringing a lot of assets from like Sketchfab other locations into one location where everybody can access their assets. Now, here's the good news. The use case or the workflow using Pixel Bridge, that was really, really easy, straightforward. Well, that hasn't changed much with Fab, and I'm going to show you how. So here on the screen, this is how Fab looks like at the minute. Now, when you open Unreal engine, which I'll do right now. Okay, so now, as Epic games launches, what we're going to find here is on the top part of the menu, you've got news, but you also got now a new tab here called Fab. I used to be mega scans, if you recall. And then a library twin Motion and Reality Capture or great products. Now, what we're going to do is just going to hit Fab. As soon as you hit Fab, you're going to have this question. Hey, do you want to explore Fab? Now, if you want to hit this button, all that's going to do is going to take you back to this screen, which is their website, right? We don't want to do that just yet. We want to show how you work with fab inside Unreal Engine the same way you worked with Quicksawbidge. So the worst way to do that is to avoid that for the moment. Go to library. Now, here's all my versions. Here's a bunch of projects that I've been working on. And down the bottom, you're going to see fab library. So go here. You can click this button. What that does is it refreshes the fab items, which is all these things. So what you can do is move over to the right hand side and type in fab. Yep. Now, as soon as you do that, you're going to get the fab, E plug in, right? Now, what you can do is you can click it. Now, I've already installed it, so you can't see any of the engines to install. But once you do, you're going to get a drop down menu, and you can basically install it across 5.3, 5.4 and 5.5 for now. So as soon as you've done that, great, move on. Here's my Unreal engine project. Now, I've brought in some assets before just to play around prior to this video. But in essence, everyone's familiar with this viewport. And now, a couple of subtle changes. If you go to Windows, you're going to find Fab here. Also, if you right button the clock, you're going to find Fab very very same places we used to find QuicklePridge, or Quile content, right? So now, what you're going to do is also you're going to find that once you introduce fab assets, there's a new library structure. So all the assets, materials, et cetera are now under Fab, used to be called mega scans, right? So you used to get mega Scans library up here at the parent. So right under content, get mega scans, but now it's Fab, and then under Fab, you have mega scans, and you're probably going to have a whole lot of different assets if you go deviate outside of the mega Scan asset library set. So now, what we're going to do is we're going to demonstrate how to get an asset inside a specific project. So we're going to look at this cube here. We are going to give it a material. Now, the way we're going to do this is we're going to write the click, go to Fab, and as soon as we go there, you're going to get this window pop up, and here it is. Now. Alright, now, first things first, let's have a look at what's actually on this window. So from left to right, this burger icon here shows all the different options you have, you've got Discover, and under Discover discovering whatever you want to look for. So to the assets through the assets and so forth. Then you've got Milibrary my library, all the assets belong to me. Now, not everything is in here, right, but a lot of them are, okay, because I was importing them in and importing them and so forth. Now, when you go to Fab and you go to any of your Quicksa bridge assets, you're going to just hit Add to my library, and they should all appear here ready to go. So for example, let's have a look. Okay. If I click here on this one here, I can see all the assets that are associated with this particular asset. Now I can do add to project or add to my library. Now, because it's already there, I don't need to add it to my library. So what I'm going to do is show you how to access QuicksL. So now if I go over here, go back to Discovery. So this is your launching pad. If you type in Quisl Now, what you're going to see is you're going to see a whole bunch of assets that appear under the banner of Quixle. So if you go and hit Creators, you're going to see Quickle as one of the creators. So you can go ahead and click Quickle, and now you're going to see all the quick Quisl assets. Now, what's important is for you to claim all these assets for free that were free under mega scans as well before the end of 2024. Otherwise, in 2025, you'll be charged an amount per asset. So if you go ahead and say, click any of these assets, there's a little icon here says, get all QuickSol mega scans for free. Click that, and you should be able to claim all your mega assets for free. Now, I've already done this, so I don't need to do that. All right. And it should look like something like this. Mega screens have been claimed, and you're good to go. So now back on my library, so let me just close that down. So now, if you decrease the window size, this is a window inside unreal, okay? So it's very similar to how Quisawbidge was working where you had a model window appear or window appear on the screen. So instead of being Quicksawbidge, it's fab. Now you can go ahead and add this to the project. Now, this is going to take some time, so I'm not going to add this massive scene. But once you're there, you can go back and click the Quixle icon and you see all the Quixle bridge assets you found previously. Now, some of the assets have been broken up into individual parts. So they're no longer in this massive library. So you're going to have to just basically go individually and select each and every one of them individually. Now, for example, if I type in Nordic, Right. Now, these assets all used to come into one folder in mega scans. Now they are individuals. So you have to grab each one of these individuals and drop it into your screen. So what we're going to do is we're going to basically go ahead and say, I like this rock. So there's a little hand that appears right above the rock, grab it, move it, and notice how the fab icon appears there, and here it is, right? It's a tiny rock. But Daisy Rock. Right? So now, another one here is, for example, this one here, we'll grab this one. I think this might be a very large asset. No, it's not that big. Okay. So now I can move that around and so forth. So now, all these assets are now appearing here in the content browser. So under fab, if you double click Fab, mega scans, three D, and they're all appearing here. So they're all located right there. So now, what about materials? What if I want to dress this blue cube using some sort of fabric, I can do that. So simply dragging and dropping, I should be able to, um it's downloading it. And here you go. Now we've got stone on this. I should be able to let me see if I can find something else. Let's get some rusty painted metal sheet surface there. Okay, so it's very similar to Quixlebidge, no different, no different and no different. Okay, so now you've got various assets that you've placed inside inside your view port in your unreal engine. So now, going back to Quixlebridge, let's just navigate a little bit more the actual user interface. So if I close that, so unfortunately, there is no Quixlebridge discovery set here, but if you do do the following, if you go ahead and click models, you can then simply cancel that search, and then it gives you this option of search results by product or by creators. You can go ahead and hit creators. Now, you should be able to find Quicksort Bridge here. But another way and probably the best way to do it is just simply typing in Quixle and as soon as you type in that, you're going to see the icon, the Quixawbidge icon. So if you click the Quiawbidge icon, you're going to land right here. Okay, so from here, you can introduce you can get all your assets and don't forget to claim them before 2024 and then just drag and drop them into your scene. It's as simple as that, really. So if you just want to grab any particular asset, it's as simple as drag and drop very similar to what we were doing with Quicksawbidge earlier. Let me just see what's happened here. There we go. Okay. So you can can do it all that way. Now, what else can I show you here? Okay, on the right hand side, you have the various formats. So if you don't want to see anything but unreal engine formats, you can just remove these, and basically all you're going to see is the Unreal engine formatted library options here for you. And now, what I do recommend is just keep them open. If they're all under QuicksL, they should be fine. You should be able to grab drag and drop them. You've got the download size. It tells you the size of them. You've got the pricing. You can do for free. So click on for free. So this applies across the board across the entire platform, not just to Quisle. So you can do things like on sale. So what's on sale? Now, obviously, now I'm under Quicklebridge, there's nothing on sale yet. Because all those items were for free. I still until 2024. So let me remove that license type, give you some information about licenses, ratings, so you can nominate what assets, top rated assets you want to look for or if you don't care about that, that's fine. Published dates, so things that have been published in the last six months, one week, so things that are current, you can filter on that, allow for use with generated AI. Now, this is very important. I think some of the products here that are generated by AI are really not that good. You can just say, Okay, look, hide all the ones that are AI generated, show me the ones that are generated by humans, right? Now, as AI progresses, I think this is going to be quite relevant where you would actually want to reverse this and say, show me all the AI ones because they'll be that good. Until then, we basically have this toggle switch, okay? So and obviously show mature content. Now, this is the filters for this. So this gives you a lot of power to control your filters and what you see here. But again, it's a bit clunky. The fact that you can't get to Quixel Bridge from a menu item, you actually need to type in QuixL my microphone is in my face at the moment, so I can't see the keyboard, but yeah, I've done it right. So just basically find any asset with a Click Quixel Bridge logo, and you should be able to go straight to Quixlebridge and see what they have on offer. Now, again, it's a replacement of Quixobidge but it works pretty much the same way. If anything, the search mechanism and the capability to explore and look for things is much quicker, much faster, but it also gives you access to a lot of the other items that otherwise you will still be able to gain access to from the market store on EP however, it all gives it to you in one location, one place, and I'm pretty sure you'll find what you're looking for. Okay, that's all for me for now. But let's see what happens with some of the integration aspects between Fab and Unreal Engine, how that improves and moves forward. I'm pretty certain there are a few glitches and things that need to be ironed out. But I'm quite excited about the new changes. They all look very positive. And, yes, I look forward to seeing what the new version of UnuLEngine will provide us as far as integrating assets with Quixwbidge but also fab in general. So that's going to be quite an exciting event. Alright, guys, thank you all. And bye for now. 8. Materials vs Meshes vs Textures - Know the Difference: Hi, everyone. In this session, what we're going to do is we're going to touch on how do you create a material and how do you create a material instance? Okay, so now, we've grabbed a material from Quickle Bridge in our previous lesson, but how do you actually make one? Right? So what if you do have a texture of your own? You've done a little photograph of a particular area of a concrete and you want to create your own, right? Now there's a lot of different ways, but I'm not going to deep dive into this. What I'm going to do is, I'm just going to create a material from scratch. And I'm just going to use textures that are there and easily available immediately available using the third person template that we created this project from. So if we go ahead and what I'm going to do is I'm going to go to materials, right? Let me close that. And these are a couple of materials I just created earlier just to mess around with. But anyway, let's do a brand new one. So what I'm going to do is write on the clock. And if you go to material here, right, you can create a new material. So let's give it a name. I'm going to give it a name new material underscore EU Demi. Underscore N K one, right? Okay, so now it's very important that you have a very good naming convention. This is not a very good one, by the way, but, yeah, so anything with materials, you might want to have it, you know, as an M underscore, meaning material. If it's a material instance, it's a common way of naming it. So the naming convention is MI for material instances, M underscore for materials. So let's try to do that. Let's go ahead and just rename that. Let's call that M underscore demi underscore tutorial. Ah. Oh, it's moved. Let me try that again. Underscore shoot, underscore zero, one. Okay. So now we got a material. Excellent. Okay. But what's inside the material? You can see it's actually the gray shades of gray circle. So actually, there's not much there at all, right? So what you do is once you double click it, let's try that again so so it didn't blink. Here we go. So what I'm gonna do just double click. When you double click, you get this. What is this? This is an editor for the action material. And this is called a blueprint for that material. Okay. So now you can see here every material that you start from the beginning has some very basic elements to it. The base color, is it metallic? Is it rough? Is it immersive? And then you've got the normals and the tangents and a whole bunch of things here that we're not going to go into great detail here in this session. Okay, so I want to add a texture to this particular material. The way we do that is, well, we add a texture sample. If you we collect anywhere on the screen and type in texture sample, there we go. We should be able to find it straightaway. Easy. So next we're going to connect the RGB, red green blue circle on the left hand side with the base color circle on the MI U Dimihut window. So now what we got is an error. Why did we get an arrow? Well, the error is there because we haven't allocated a particular texture. So again, we're highlighting the texture sample, see the yellow line around the box. On the left hand side, you're going to see there's none. Okay? That means we haven't allocated a texture. So what we're going to do is going to drop this down, and we're going to look for one. So let's type in tail or tail. Okay, let's have a look at what we find here. Okay. Well, this one might be okay, so we're just going to grab this one. It's just a random one that we just chose, and we are going to say, Okay, well, we'll take that one. Thank you very much. Now, what we're going to do is we're going to now look at maybe adding a metallic and a roughness as well perimeter. So what we're going to do is going to add a perimeter parameter and a scalar perimeter. And we're going to call that one metallic, right? And we are going to do a control C control V, and we're going to rename this one to say roughness. Okay, so now we're going to grab that one to that one and to roughness. Okay, so now we've got two perimeters feeding metallic and roughness on the right hand side. And we also have the texture sample feeding the base color for we're using this particular texture. Now, if you want to change the sizing of the actual of the actual texture. Notice how it's a little bit blurry. And also notice how when we did attach the metallic, it went really sort of almost glassy. So if you look at it and you spin around, look how glassy it is, the reflections are amazing. I love this. So next what we're going to do is we're going to add a texture coordinate, texture coordinate. Okay, now, this is going to help us tile it. So let's just go from one circle to the other. There we go. And we're going to see some parameters here. So if we go to say, 0.1, 0.1, Okay, it's almost smooth. So let's go there. Let's go five and five. Well, that's a little bit more acceptable. Okay, so we're going to leave it at that. So now we've created a material. So what we're going to do is we're going to save this and close that. And now what we're going to do is we're going to create a material instance. So let's go ahead and right by the click create material instance, and we're going to name this MI and give it a say number zero, two. Now we've got how did this happen? Let me just see maybe as a typo. Okay, so now we've got a material. M and the material instance. So the material instance is you can see here, it says material instance. That's how you know the difference. But what I like to do is apply a naming convention. So all materials just have M underscore. All material instances have MI underscore. And I think a lot of people use that in the industry as well. So when you see an MI, you know that's the material instance, and the M is the material. So you don't want to manipulate or play around with the material. What you want to do is create a copy of the material into a material instance and inherit all these properties and be able to play around with that, which is what we are going to do. So what we're going to do is going to grab this material a drop and dumping on this box. Okay. Fantastic. Looks great, but it's very tily. So let's go ahead and click it. And on the right hand side, you're going to see that the element 01. So if you don't see the scroll down until until you get to the material section, you're going to see element 01, and you're going to see the particular ball here that resembles the tiling and the texture that we've just created. So go ahead and double click. So now we're back here, and now notice that if I and decrease the window. I'm going to now play around with this and see that and hit apply and see if that changes yet. That's much, much better. So if I go back to 11 as a UV tiling for U and V, so it looks a bit blurry here, in the little window. But on the actual world, which is measured using one unit unreal unit, it actually looks pretty good, and it's very glossy, isn't it? So what we're going to do is going to save that, and let's have a closer look at that material. Okay. That's how it looks. Not bad. The actual texture wasn't high resolution anyway. But let's just leave that at the moment. Now, what do you want to do is create another one. But not using this material. What if I want to change that to something a little bit different, but using the same texture. So I can use the same material as so. But now instead of dragging the material here, I'm going to drag the material instance here. So now if I manipulate the instance, I won't affect this one, which is the material. So now the material instance is here on the right hand side. Notice how the right hand side it says MI underscore. So we're going to go ahead and double clock, and here is the material instance. Let me just move this to the right a little bit so you can have a look. So this is in our current main window, and this is just a pop up window. So now what we're going to do is we're going to change the metallic and the roughness. Notice how these two perimeters just appeared here. Let's save that and have a look at where they came from. So I'm going to go back over here, double clock, and here is the actual material. This is where those two parameters come from. So we created these parameters, metallic and roughness, and there they are. Okay, so this means I can manipulate these numbers and change this material instance however I want. So now if I go to the MI and the scow Dimmi table and let me just play around with this a little bit. Ooh. Okay. Notice how as I do that, I'm not impacting the original material. And that's really good. That's really handy. Okay, now let's just assume that the roughness, we'll keep it almost nothing. And the metallic, we're going to make it super Lemmy Okay. And that should do the job. Um, opacity. Let's maybe increase that to five. Okay. So therefore, we've got a material now, save that right? That's here. It's darker than this one. They're different, but they're using the same texture. So this one has inherited all the properties of this sort, but we've manipulated some of those properties like we've just showing the metallic and the roughness to get this particular texture. So that's how you work with materials. That's how you develop a material. That's how you build a material instance, and you manipulate it. Now, let's do a little quick summary Okay, to create a material, you just go to say, a folder. In this case, we have a folder call materials. I always recommend that you do have a folder call materials. If you don't have one, create a folder. All you have to do is go to the content right by the click and go new folder and create the materials folder in materials. That's where you should drop all the materials that you're going to build new ones or even the ones that you do bring in. So here you just go right by the click. And add material. And if you want to add a material instance, you highlight the material itself, right then click, create a material instance, naming convention, M underscore for material, MI underscore for material instance. Okay, folks, that's all that we need to know about materials for the time being. So to grab a material and drop it on any particular item, you just simply have to click it. Grab it or grab a material instance, do the same over here, and so forth. We can also even place that against any Quickle bridge item, as well, which I wouldn't recommend, but anyway, you can do that. So now we've created three cubes, right? These two cubes here left on the far left on the far right are coming from the material. This one here in the middle is from the material instance. Okay, folks, thank you very much. Off to the next lesson. Bye. 9. Add Land and Oceans: Okay, so, hi, everyone. Welcome back, and now we're going to get right into the project. So first things first, let's just create a new level. So let's have a duplicate level here, and this is going to let's rename this to project, and we'll just give her a number 01. Okay. Alright, so this is the new level. Let's go right in it. So now we're here. Okay, now we have created some assets here that we need to remove. So one way to do that is, um because we have all our ambient stuff here at the top, we can pretty much select everything below this and just highlight it and just hit Delete. There we go. Now we're back where we started. Now. First things first, to start this project, the first lesson is all about creating putting the landscape down and the water material. So what we're going to do is we will be going straight to landscape, without changing anything, just keep it the same way as it is. We're just going to go and hit Create. All right. And this is it. So now we've created the landscape. It's just one big massive square. It's absolutely huge. So without hitting anything else, I'll show you how to create little hills and stuff a little bit later. But for now, let's just go ahead and add the ocean. So down if you go to the quick add projects and go straight down to place actor panel. Okay. So go ahead, click that, and just type in water here. Now, remember, we added the water add in, so it should be fairly straightforward. So what we're going to do is grab the water body ocean, click it, drag it, drop it. Done. Okay, now look on the horizon. W, we've got water. Fantastic. So now, let me just back out of this for a little bit and zoom out. Alright. Okay, so that's how that looks like, and you see the ocean? Excellent. So now, we don't have to do much more than this, really. So we just have created the ocean, and that's fair enough, and I'm happy with that. So what we're going to do now is just have a look at the water properties. So if we go ahead and move to one of these shores, let's go over here. Alright. Here we are. Okay. Now, you notice that let me just go back to selection. Here we go. You notice that the water, there's some really crazy stuff. There's a lot of big waves here. There's a lot of stuff going on here. We can leave it as it is, right? It looks a little bit turbine. But now, to change the properties of the water, what we do is we just simply select the water, and on the right hand side, we go to details, and we go straight down to the water material. Where are you? There's a wave one here somewhere. It's got a wave icon. That's interesting. Okay, here it is. Here it is. Here it is. And there. Okay, we found it. So we go here and we just double click. And now, as we just double click that, we can actually see a sample of what we're seeing on the left hand side, so you can see all the ripples and so forth. So what I want to do is just want to just open that, go to the waves, go here, wave lengths. We can manipulate that, and we can change that. So now it's really, really rough. Or we can smoothen it down a little bit. So let's just reverse back to what it was before. So we can manipulate the actual details as to what the wave is. So you've got the wave numbers, so we can decrease that a little bit. So it's a little bit smoother, so you can see, as we change it here, the pool is actually changing in the world as well. So if we scroll here, it looks a little bit calmer, a little bit more acceptable, and minimum wavelength is fif 80. So if you mess around with this a little bit, you could actually change that a little bit here. So it looks a bit strange still. So let's just go back to 80 amplitude. So minimum amplitude, that's pretty high, so let's just drop that down to calmer waters, let's say, maybe ten, right? Minimum amplitude is eight to a little bit calmer direction. So now we can change the direction of the water direction of the waves. So notice how the waves are kind of on a bit of an angle. So what we can do is move that around here. So notice how as I'm moving it up, there we go. There. So I wanted to go straight to the shore. So now the waves are coming in towards us, which is great. Now, direction, angular direction, 1,700. Okay, so let's change that there. What if for tip in zero. Okay. Let's have a look. That's actually not bad. And zero? Okay. Yeah, I accept that. Alright. Great. No problem. So now we've got water coming towards us. It's not bad at all. Okay, so now you can mess around with some of these things. And again, it's all because we added that feature. So I'm just going to go ahead and hit Save. And once again, we can change these properties at a later date, but that's how you add an ocean to this particular world that we've just now created. And that's it, folks. Okay, thank you. 10. Change Size of Island & Water Direction: Okay. Hello, hello. Welcome back. And now in the last lesson, we added the ocean and the landscape. So what we're going to do is go ahead and make a jiglic at that level, and Project 02 is on its way. So now we're in 02 project. So the idea of all these projects is to be able to go back and be able to sort of see where we were. So if I go back to New World, you remember that? And then this part, and Project one was obviously the first ocean and Project two. Is a duplicate of that one. And here we are. Okay, so now what we want to do is we want to change a couple of things. So now if I highlight the islands, just click and highlight and I go into there we go. So if you hit this particular water, you're going to get that. So if I move it to the right, you can see how I kind of I'm manipulating this apparently. If you actually move it, it actually looks like just a blanket of ocean that I'm moving left and right. But let's just ignore that for the time being. So we will be going in the X axis direction. So remember, we put the waves so they actually moving in that direction. So let's go ahead and go to this part. So red is pointing that way. We'll be going and sitting here. Now, notice that we're very close to the box what I want to do is I want to be able to change the size of this island. So what we can do is just back out a little bit, and notice how you got these little white squares. If you click them, you get this X and y x the spleen. So what I want you guys to do is click one of and just move it. As you move it, you can see the oceans coming in a little bit. So let's move it again, and there we go. So keep on doing that. So let's move that there. Us. Tanger. So that is going to give us a lot of runway here with the water that's inside this box, right? So what I'm going to do is I'm going to just click that in and get a bit more and that in a bit more. So now I'm going to go down now. So let me just go down here, and this is where we are at the so again, I'm not quite happy with that scale, so I'm going to click it again and get a bit a little bit more just going to get a bit close to the Okay, I'm just going to click the white part there. Okay. So that's plenty of runway. So let me just back out a little bit. So if I look out, so I've just created this long, long ocean gap here between my island and the rest of the ocean over here. So that way, I will have a nice beachhead. So what I'm going to do is just going to flatten this out a little bit. We don't particularly care what's on this side of the island. We only want to focus on what's that side of the s. So we're going to box in the scene right here. So this is we're going to add the clefts and everything else. So it doesn't really matter what's on this side of the island. It's actually it's more important than what are we going to do for this part of the l. What I'm going to do is I'm going to get those spleens a little bit closer in a little bit more. So let me just select that. There we go. And where's the other one here it is. And why did that go over there? There we go. Okay. All right, I think that's enough. All right, so now we does a bit of the island reshaping. So again, the way you do that is you click the water body that's inside the square, and you basically find these white dots and you just click them, and then you can move them by highlighting the white round sphere in the middle or any of the axes. If you grab this one here obviously going to go up and down or left and right, or in and out, which is what we've just done. Okay. So now what we're going to do is we're going to start adding some assets. So this is the body of water. This is the direction, okay, that we'll be working towards. The water is actually going away from us. So let me fix that. So let's go here and try to find that wave, Okay, so I have to remove the filter. That wave icon, whereas it should be somewhere here, there it is. So what we want to do is make sure that the waves are coming into us, not away from us. Doesn't make sense. So let me direction. So let me just do this Wile at. That's better. So now it's coming into us. So let me save that, close that window. So here it is. So the waves are coming into us now, so that makes sense. Hey, guys, well, that's how we change the direction of the ocean of the wave. And also, this is how we can change the size of the island. So I think we'll leave it there, and next lesson, we'll start adding some assets. Thank you, folks. Bye. 11. Adding Cliffs: Alright. Hi, everyone, welcome back. So I've created another level, another project. Project underscore 03. So here we are. Okay, so we've directionalized the waves, and we created the ocean, created the landscape, we move and modify the landscape. So now it's time to start introducing the assets. Now, before we do that, it's always, always, always good to have a point of reference as far as size is concerned. So what better way than actually adding a and mannequin. So what we're going to do is we're going to go and reach out and and see if we can find an appropriate mannequin to just j drop into our environment. So let's go ahead and see if we can find one. There's a lot of them here, as you can see. So let's go with this bloke here. Alright, so let me just drop this person, this mannequin. Right here. Okay. There we go. So here it is. So we'll just add this mannequin. And so let's get him to face there. I try. Okay. So now, what we're going to do is we're going to start adding some of the assets here. So a good thing to do is probably start adding the big things first, and then we'll start adding the little things around that. So that will at least give us the frame. So let's go ahead and go to our Nordic mega scan asset library. So remember we added the Nordic library. So let's go ahead and search for the nordic. And you can see here we've got one. So let's grab that and move that in place. So here we go. So we place that one there let's have a look at it. It's on a bit of an angle. That's fine. We'll just basically keep on adding. Now, the good thing about these meshes is that you can keep on adding these meshes and you can end up sort of merging them together and layering them. So let's keep on going. Let's go to the next one. And okay, this is a very, very big one. Okay. So, excellent. So we're just going to move this block here to the side. And landing in there. Okay. Just bear in mind, not all of them are even down the bottom, so you might need to just dig in a little bit deeper, but it doesn't matter. It still looks good. I really like how these cliffs look like. I look amazing. So let's keep on going. There's another one. All right. This is a colossal one. You can tell how big that is. So let's move this massive class over there and underwater. So, there we go. And notice how I've combined these two together, so they're kind of overlapping, but it looks like as it's seamless. So let's just drown that a little bit. And there there we go. So it's nice and tight. And here's another big one. All right? Now, this one here doesn't have a back. It's just it's all front. So we've got to be careful about these ones here. So let me just push that one up there to the side. And let me tip it over. You can get a little bit creative with these things, so let me just go, I'm tip you over. Flips. Okay, it's 90 degrees, so let's change that down to ten degrees so this doesn't flip like crazy. Okay. That's cool. Alright, so let's turn you around a little bit. There and let's move you over there a little bit. Kind of obscure. So there we go. So sign to form shapes. The clips are coming on the side. So if we actually look at it from this perspective, it's starting to look good. Let's move him to the middle so that we've got a point of reference. Now, what I like to do is usually try to put a camera in place so that we can actually track our progress. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to just grab a cama, cinema Cama camera, oops, dyslexic. Um, and here it is. This is where the camera is. Let me inject, and there it is. Okay, so now the way I did that is I simply went to perspective and sorry, this menu buy here, trade camera, and I went for a cinema camera actor, which is this one here. So now let me just add that. And let me put that into place. Something like this. I can actually see the whole thing and back it out like that. That way we can snapshot our progress. Okay, so I'm going to take a little quick snapshot of this one. So high resolution snapshot. There, that'll be cool. And now let's go and take a break right now, just a short one. Okay. All right. I'm back. Sorry about that. Okay, so what we've just done is oh, let me just go back. There you go. Let me back out a little bit. So I'm right now driving the camera. Okay. So what I want to do is I want to take snapshots of our progress. I'm just going to leave this like that at this angle. And since I'm inside the camera, I can take a snapshot, high resolution screenshot here and capture. Now, this is going to store it at a directory of your choosing wherever your assets are, and you can always have a look at it. So I'm just going to leave this camera here. So I'm just going to exit the camera for now. And so the cameras up there. So that camera is going to be our progress camera. So as we're adding things, it's going to continuously I'm going to go back and just keep on taking more and more snapshots. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to keep on adding some more of these assets and see how we go. So let me just select this one again. I don't like exactly where it is. Let me just push it to the side and so forth. Get really, really creative with this. So this is my advice right now is, play around with some of these cliffs. So go to content and keep on adding more cliffs and just explore some of the assets that are in place there. Okay? For example, this cliff is really good. Oops, spies are turned upside down. Here we go. And there we go. And you can sort of sync all these clifs. You can expand them. You can scale them up. For example, like, se and just place them wherever you feel that they should belong in your scene. So this is where you get really creative and this is where you can discover what you can achieve creatively with your world. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to expand this one here and make it wise a bit too big. Scale scale, there it is, scale is one. That's 0.5 here, here, and wide. Yes, that seems to be good. And let's move that to the side a little bit. Let's sync it down. And yeah, and push it off center a little bit. So therefore, you can just keep on going through these clefts and just keep on adding them. Some of them will make sense to be where they are. Others just don't. So you got to be very creative and just experiment with what you have. Some like this one here is very blocky. So so you might want to think about changing where this one resides. Other than just see that one there. So you might want to push it to the right. Makes sense like that. Like two layers of laying now. Remember, the whole idea is to create a frame with an outlet. So we want to keep an ocean als so we don't want to block this view. We want to keep that view open because we're going to be looking at the horizon. And yeah, so let's take another snapshot with a camera. So hit perspective, go to cinema camera. This is your camera angle, and just click the menu item here, menu icon, and hit a high resolution screen capture and done. Okay. So now we've got a couple of screenshots here already. And, yeah, so what I'm going to do is I'm just going to go quiet and just keep on adding some of the clips. Okay, guys, well, thank you, and I'll catch you in the next lesson. So this is what we have so far. Bye and for now. 12. Add Grass Terraine & Trees: Okay, guys, welcome back. Now that we've created these clifts we added a whole bunch of clefts here. Now, what we need to do is change the landscape. Notice how it's got these squares. Now, these squares are going to translate into the water, and at the same time, we don't want to spend too much time plugging in a whole bunch of assets all the way down. As you can see, goes all the way down. It's really deep. We don't want to be doing that. What we want to do is we want to be able to have some coloration other than this actual blocky squares. What we do is we simply just click this right, and we want to change the landscape. So what we do is we want to add a landscape material, however, which is here on the right hand side. However, we can't do that just yet because we don't have anything to put in there. What we're going to do is we're going to go all the way up just remove this filter all the way up to the top. We're going to go to content. We're going to write button click. We're going go to add Quixlebidge. And we are going to search for we can search for some vegetation or we can search for sand or rocks. Let's go to sand and sand rock. Maybe that might work, and let's just see what we find here. Okay. Rocky ground, we can look at that. Let's just download that one, it's the highest quality. Okay. Add that in there, and we'll try that one that's Salt Coven, Rocky sand. This might work as well, so we'll just download this one. So we've got so we're downloading two samples here, one called rocky ground and one called rocky sand. And this one here is also rocky sand. It's kind of like that Pavle. So that might work as well. So let's just download this one as well. Actually, it's very similar to this one. Let's go something different. Scattered with debris, no gravel. It's probably a bit too gray, a bit too modern. We want a little bit we want it to be a little bit more ancient or a little bit more off world. This is probably a little bit too concrete. Yeah, yeah. What we're going to do is we're going to stick with the rocky ground, the beach sand. Let's download that as well and the rocky sand. Let's go ahead and just add these to the project. Click the item, it's downloaded, hit Add, this one he's still download is 42%. Let's just wait for a little bit longer. To talk TikTok and add come on, come on. Done. So now let's minimize that. Let's go over here and we should see it under surfaces. You got the beach and we've got wooden floors. We don't want that rocky sand. Let's go here. Let's just grab that and dump it here in the landscape and see what happens. See how that looks like. Et's just drop this a little bit so we can actually see the description of the landscape, and let's type in sand. We got this sand, which is like this. It's not bad. I actually works really well. Let's try the other one. Okay. Probably a little bit more what we need or what we're looking for. So you can see here how it looks in the water. It's not bad at all. And what about sand mesh? No, that's horrible. So we've got rocky sand. Actually, that's not bad at all. Now that I look at it, it's not bad. But yeah, the definition is that it just disappears after a while. So let's go back here. Rocky Rocky sand. Yeah, I'm going to go for this. We're going to leave this, but notice how it's all kind of like that. We'll address that now in a bit, just a second. Okay, guys, so what we've got here is we just added this sand here. This is going to help us as we're going to be populating the shoreline here. So let's go ahead and see if we can find some rocks that we can put down here. Now, we've been working with Nordic, so let's go back here, and we have beach boulders, rocks, cliffs. And what else have we got here? Shoreline beach rocks, wood, anything else that we can use now that I can see? So what we can do is grab some of the beach ground. And we can probably just even replace the sand with that ground nordic beach material instance. That might give it a little bit more more of a nordic feel. But here here's a sample of what we can do. What we want to do is we want to go grab that and drown that in the water so to create some of the rocks. But let's see if we can find something else here that's more suitable Nordic coasts, rocks formation, beach rocks. Those are just rocks and boulders. That's fine. We'll just have that one there. Let's just go through these very quickly see what we can find. Okay. Let's see what that is there. That's cool. We can grab that. We can just drown that a little bit. And that's nice. So let's see if we can grab that and place it over to the side. I like so, and um we don't want to have too many things, obstructing the actual view, so we want to make sure that we're not piling too much stuff right in front of it, let's just move that to the side here and let's just keep on going. That's cool. Let's just add that in there. And, um, Yeah, you can just play around with different components, and hopefully you'll use some of your creativity to just figure out what it is that you want to achieve, what is good for you. Now you can get carried away and spend a lot of time rendering this, which is fun. I mean, this is part of it. It's all part of just having a good time, enjoying yourself. I find this very, very relaxing, very soothing. I hope you do too. And yes, so you can just keep on going. Here's a bit of texture on the ground. Let's just toggle that over like that. And what we can do is also copy and drown and spin around so that it doesn't look like it's copied like that. That will give it a little bit more of an interesting feel. Here's something that I think we need to do a lot of copies and paste. So what I'll do is scribe that. And remember, Alt orangey yellow arrow. Alt press Alt all the time and move as such. Okay. Now I'm going to go quiet and you guys can follow me. I'm just going to speed it up a little bit, and so we will catch you when I'm done with this and we'll see how you guys are going as well. Okay. Hey, guys. Now what we're going to do is we're going to add some grass or some foliage. So the way we're going to do that is, first of all, we're going to see that there is any grass long grass. We want some lot of grass here. So we want to make sure that we have the right type of folage. So these all trees, but there's no long grass here at the moment. So what we're going to do is we're going to go straight to content, right by the click, go to Quicksawbidge, and we are going to type in grass. Alright, it looks like my keyboard just went to sleep. Just bear with me as I just charge it up. Hang on. Okay. Alright. Here we go. Grass. Okay. Dry grass. What kind of grass do we want? Okay. So we want some vegetation, some tall grass. Okay, well, this is interesting. So we'll go ahead and add this. So we add this grass here. What else can we find? Okay. We have some wild grass here that will do as well. So let's just add that in there. Okay, we have some sea thrift grass. Et's download that. And what else? Let me just see. I've downloaded quite a few items here in my time, so we can go straight to here. Hang on three D plans. Grass clumps, yeah, that's the one we want as well. So this is going to give you that density that you need. So you can download grass clumps as well from Quickle Bridge. So if you grab that and do a search on that, you should be able to find the grass clumps. So highly recommended. Okay. And here we are. So now to add follage, what we've got to do is we got to go here in the mode. But before we do that, let's just hit save just in case, and we go to folage. Now, you go to Add folage, you can go to clumps. I think it's clumps or grass clumps. There it is. So we can add these. And as you go across these, you can actually do a filter on clumps and highlight some of them. So if you highlight multiple, what happens is they add all these three to any location that you apply it to. So if I just go like this for a moment, all right? There you go. I've just added that grass there. So it's a mixture of these three. So you can see the count, 15, 11 and 13. This is how much grass components are actually added in there. So you can just keep on going and just keep on adding Tala, and just keep on increasing the density of that grass element there. And, yeah. So that's what you can do. So let me just back out so you can see what's actually going on here. So that's what's happening. So now, to speed things up, what you can do is increase the brush size. Right? And what you can do is also sees here the density so you can increase the density, like that. When I hit so the brush is a bit high, so let me just reduce it to something a bit like that. So if I go like this, boom, right? So now I've actually got quite a bit of grass there, and I'm going to add a little bit more there and a bit more there, and a bit more there. So now, I've got all the ingredients to create a forest right behind me. So now, let me just add a little bit more foliage here. Great. So you can see that we've got 7.74 thousand of that particular grass. If we just remove that one and just focus on say this one here, the tall one, we can just add the tall components. Now you've got a bit of a mixture of different types of grass. Now, the quality isn't so high, but we'll fix that later on. You can see here we're actually adding quite a bit of grass elements here. So now, what we do what we don't want to do is bring the grass right up to the shore because it just doesn't have that natural look. So we've got to modify that quite a bit. So let's just remove that for the time being, and let's just add some trees instead. So if we go here, remove clump and let's go down to say this. So just mix it up a little bit and just see what how that might look just there a little bit. And so now we're adding these three up here and these two now. Then what you're adding actually you can actually see what you're adding by looking at the ticks. So you can untick that. See these ones here are ticked and the brush density is 716. That's okay. So we can just basically just add a little bit of there, bit there. Let's decrease the brush size. So it's nice and compact, so we can see what we're doing. So we're just going to scatter them a little bit here, so it's not too obvious that the grass just finishes all of a sudden and then the beach starts. So that's how that looks right now at the minute. Okay, not bad at all. It's very high quality stuff here, and they're really enjoying it. It's really good. Okay, so now that's foliage. Now let's add some trees, right? So if we go ahead and add foliage, so let's grab a tree. Let's do a single instance. Of a tree, just so to see how that looks like. So if I add a tree here, wait, wait, Okay, right here we go just remove the foliage so we're not mixing trees and foliags. Hang on, okay. So now let's go and add a tree there. Okay, single instance mode selected. So we should be able to There it is. Okay. So here's a tree, a tree here. Now, I notice that they're both exactly angle the same. So what we do is just click this one here. Select click and we just turn it around a little bit, so it doesn't look exactly the same. So let's just move this to the side here. So it's not blocking our way. So we're just going to add this tree here. And now, of course, I'll show you how to change the texture of the leaves, so the leaves are not always super green and lovely. So that's how we're going to remove a little bit of that sort of plastic, pre rendered kind of feel to it. So it adds a little bit more realism to the scene. So what we're going to do is Add some more trees to have some more volume to play with. Let's go for this one. Where are you now? There you are. Let's move that one. Here we go go on this one, let me just confirm its single instance just in case we got a tree here. Yeah, it's a very, very tall tree, let's go here and let's mix it up with one more here, and there. So what we can do is size them up as well. So if we go here like this one and decrease the size, there we go. This is change the the scaling factor, or let's just remove it together, and there we go and make it really wide, spin it around a little bit. There we go. So it's not all the same, so it gives you that variety. I notice how the shades are now trying to hit the back of the Mannequin, which is interesting. So it gives you that feel. So now, always turn them around, spin them around, okay. Don't have them looking all the same. So now if I back out and have a look at what we've accomplished, hit G, right? And let's remove the foliage. Just go straight to selection. And this is what we have so far. Okay, so it's not so bad, but notice how this a little bit flat, leaves a little bit flat. That's because we've chubbied up this particular tree. So let's elongate it a little bit. So what happens often. So now, if you have this problem where you want to select the foliage after you're in the selection mode, it's going to select all the foliage. Way you minimize that is by actually going to the fol itself and from here, you can select the individual tree. Here, let's just scale this up a little bit more so that it's not so chubby. Let's just leave it like that for the moment. Now notice that we're getting shades now landing on the water as well, which is fantastic, gives you that nice look there. Now that's what that is. We've added grass, we've added trees, we've added some more cliffs and let's see what our camera is looking at. Let's go back to selection. And oh, we've been doing this while the camera was actually with us. So let's just back out. I think it was sort of right about here. So let's move the camera so it's away from the branches, and let's just have it sort of right there. That would be a good location for it. Now let's take a picture. Capture. Okay, excellent. And hit save. 13. Adding More Density: Okay, guys, back. Alright, well. We've done quite a few things here so far. So what we're going to do is we're going to just go a little bit freestyle and just keep on adding more vegetation. So I'm just going to fiel myself adding a couple of more trees and bushes and adding a little bit more content here, a bit more density as far as assets. Feel free to add whatever you wish. After that, we'll be looking at making some enhancements and changes such as enhancing the shadows and also the wetness of the rocks and more fog and also increase in performance. So that's in the next lesson. For now, guys, I'm just going to freestyle this and just add a little bit more content, and we'll see how we go from there. So, guys, you can follow with you can follow me, or you can just do as you like. Okay. Alright, let's go for it. Mm and Mm. Okay, everyone. Now, this is okay. It's good. So we've framed everything. And now it's just a matter of doing a few configs, working on the shadows, and also making some post volume changes and updates. Okay, guys, thank you very much. Bye bye. Hi, everyone. Okay. Well, this is it. And now we're going to do some additional configurations to make this look good. We're going to add a sky. We're going to do some minor cofics and changes. But essentially, it's going to be fairly straightforward. So next lesson. It's all going to be about configuration and fine tuning. Okay. Thank you. 14. Rendering Technique - Part 1: Configuration, Performance Improvement, Realism: Hi, guys. Welcome back. Welcome. Welcome, right now, next. So we've done a lot of work already. We've added a lot of different assets. The water's looking great. The scene is looking fantastic. You can spend a lot of hours modifying this, perfect, adding additional assets. What I've done given the time, I just basically add this lantern here as well, just to add a little bit of something. But you would have seen me grab that from Pixel Bridge and dropping it here in this particular scene. You would have seen me modify some of the textures here on this particular tree. There's a lot of little things that you can keep on going, and you can just spend days and days refining this, making it absolutely amazing. So what we're going to do now is we're going to do some modifications, and we're going to increase the performance. We're going to be adding additional fog. We're also going to make the rocks closest to the water look wet. And at the same time, we're going to introduce post process volume. And I'll define all those little bits and pieces and elements to you so you know what we're doing and why we're. First things first, why don't we have a look at these rocks? These rocks don't seem to be normal. I mean, look at this. This rock is the same color in the top as it is at the bottom. The same thing. Now the thing is, if there's water, you wouldn't expect that. You would expect some parts of the rock to be darker and other parts to be lighter. So you have that wet look. So this is very unrealistic. So what we got to do is figure out how do we go about doing that? So this is how if you go and grab any of these zoc and you go to the right hand side and you click the material. So you just double click the material, here it is. Now, if you go to hierarchy and find out what what's the parent chain for all of these nodic materials. So you go and click there and you find out, Okay, well, this is it. Now, I don't know why this is the case, and I think it might be something to do with performance. But notice how that circle doesn't actually connect to the nordic default material. The shore wetness isn't actually connected. So how do I know that? Well, if you click it and drag it up the top, it just goes nowhere. So what we're going to do is grab that result and we're going to connect it to the material attributes and boom, Bingo. See how that changed? Now that looks like it's been wet. Okay, excellent. So we're going to apply now, save everything, close this window, and we'll notice that now. Here we go. See how that rock now, it actually looks a little bit wet. And you see this, like, line coming across all the rocks as if there was a high tide and a low tide. And now this looks way, way, way better and a lot more realistic. Okay. So ticking the box, we've applied the wet rocks. Next, how do we increase the performance? Now, the more of these assets you could throw into play, and I'm pretty sure you're going to spend hours and hours playing with this, adding additional rocks and vegetation and different assets, what's going to happen? Is your laptop machine, whatever you're using back the MacBook Pro or what have you, is going to start slowing down and causing a lot of headaches. So what we're going to do is we're going to try to increase performance. The way we're going to do that is if you go to edit project settings, and if you type in virtual texture, texture, if I can spell, enable that. Yeah, that's going to give you extra performance. Now I'm going to go save, and I'm going to restart. Okay, so, welcome back. And now we will go back to our level project level three. And let's just decrease this window. Here it is. The wheel's back again. Now I notice how that looks a lot lot better, and it's not struggling to render the rocks. The rocks are rendered everywhere. And that's really, really good. So that performance setting did magic. So now, what do we do next? Now, the thing is that fog is something that's really ambient. In other words, when you add fog and a bit of atmosphere in that way, what happens to the scene. The scene just looks that much better. So let's look at it from this angle because we've got sun coming from the top, right? What I want to see here is a change that scene as soon as I add volumetric fog. So if you go to fog at the top, go find exponential fi fog and type in the search. Polymetric fog, go ahead and click it. Bingo. Look at that. Unclick. Excellent. Click. Bingo. Love it. Now that looks amazing. That looks fantastic, guys. Awesome. Okay, so that's polymetric fog. Next. Now, there's something called post process volume. Post process volume. Now, what is that? The most artists and designers, they will use post processing effects to make sure that everything looks as real as possible. So that's done by combining a whole lot of different properties. So when you add the post process volume actor to your scene, you can do a lot of interesting stuff. You can add a lot more properties that will make it more realistic. So instead talking to you about it. Why don't we go ahead and do it? So what we're going to do is going to go straight up here, and we will be adding a place actor panel up here. And what I want you guys to do is type in post process volume. Okay, there it is, drag and drop. Notice how it creates this square. Okay. So what that means is that everything inside the square will have all the properties applied to it. Well, that's not going to really work for us because we want the entire scene to have these properties. Now, good practice is to have everything defined within specific perimeters, so you're not wasting processing capability on areas that don't really matter. But because we are in a very refined, very small area defined by this massive cube in this world, let me just show you that there. So we're just here, okay? Let me just zoom out. We're not in a massive, massive world. And the thing is that, yes, I would totally and completely agree if we were in like a grand theft order with multiple levels, et cetera, et cetera and I would agree that yes, maybe you want to refine this to a specific area. However, in this particular ce, we do not need to do that. So why don't we just go ahead and just type in infinite Okay, now click here, infinite extent unbound. As soon as you click that, that means that all the effects that we're about to configure in post process volume will be applied for the entire level that you see here. So now, first things first, let's enable Bloom. So if you go down to Bloom, find Bloom, method, standard, and convolution. Alright? Now, that's great intensity. We can just basically go to eight, and now you can notice how you can change it a little bit. So let's just go to about there, 2.65. That seems a little bit more realistic. If you go too far, it gets a little bit hazy. So let's just keep it to sort of like let me change that to say 0.75. Yeah, that will work. Okay. Now, next, let's go to scroll down and make these changes on the flight. Lens, skip that here, do not need to change anything here. Advance keep that there, loom. We just did that change, scroll down, scroll down. Exposure. No, we don't need to change anything here. Advance, no, keep on going. And camera, no, we just keep that the way it is. Lens flare. Yeah. Okay. So we just add a little bit of lens flares, got 0.75. Okay, and hoop Lens flare. Where do we go? Oops. We need to go back to process, post process volume. Okay, so we over here. I think we came down to lens. Image. Yep, yeah, we want this, so on. So notice how when we increase that, it gives you that extra depth and more of an immersively on the sides, it sort of goes a little bit darker, right? So if you go all the way to one, that's what you get. But let me just have it so it. So it's at 0.85 seems to be a good number. So let me have a look. Yeah, it does. It gives you that sort of freshness, that coolness in there. Now, sharpen so we'll have it there. So now notice how everything is so so accurate and sharp. Excellent. Okay. So next rendering Oh. Hang on. Where do we go? Okay, there we go again. So depth of field, leave that. Temperature. We don't need to change that. And shadows we'll leave that alone, highlights, leave it, leave everything here, nothing here to do. Okay, global illumination, we'll keep it as lumen and we will have lumen lighting at maximum. Okay. And advance we'll keep that. The y tracing, we'll keep that as it is. Now, if you do change that to brute force, right? You get some amazing reflections, but this could end up costing you a lot on the processing. So we'll leave that as it is. Now, let me go back Reflections, um, um reflections, quality two. Okay. Excellent. Ray tracing, we're not going to do anything here. And motion blur, no need, ray tracing, ambient later maybe intensity. Now, leave that alone. And I think that I think we've path tracing. I think we've done what we need to do here. Post process volume settings. Leave it as is. Maybe a 2.2 is fine and nothing else. Excellent. Alright. So now let's have a look at our world. As you can see, it looks spectacular. So if you hit G, right, we have a chance to look at it in a lot more detail. So notice how everything looks fresh. Looks a lot more interesting. Light's amazing. There's a little bit of lens flaring here, which is a little bit annoying me, but what we can do is we can catch that. So let's go to the lens and here we go. Let's drop that down to 0.35. There we go. So it's a little bit less. So the rocks are nice and wet. And our Mankins looking like he belongs there, which is good. So I'm really happy with how things have turned out, so it's really really good. Let me just check everything here. Gee, yep, the box is there. Okay, guys, well, as a conclusion, we have added wet rocks. We've increased performance by enabling virtual texture support, we added volumetric fog, and we've done some post process volume adjustments. Next lecture, what we're going to do is we're going to work on our sky, our lighting, and we're going to add some actual fog on the distance. And I think we're getting really close to completing this project. Thank you very much, guys. Bye for now. 15. Rendering Technique - Part 2: Lighting, HDRI and Water Adjustment: One. Alright. So we have added quite a few things here. We've done quite a few little configurations, and we are going to continue that effort. So what we're going to do right now is focus a little bit more on lighting and ambience. So first things first, what we can do is go on the top right hand corner, and let's go and look for directional light. If you type in directional, you should be able to see it right here. Now we can see that the directional light intensity is at ten lux. That is quite a bit. So if you drop it down to say point, that gives it a little bit more of a dramatic feel. Notice how now it looks a little bit more interesting, right? But what I want to show you guys is also how can you position the direction of that light? So what you can do is you type if you hit the k and Control or option on Mac, right, you're going to get this little half sphere, and that's going to appear right there. Now, notice how notice how it moves. So if you move your mouse to the left or to the right, right, the light spot starts to move left and right. If you move it up or down, it does it again. So now, so what you can do is position wherever you wish. So what we can do is make it a little bit more dramatic or a bit more sunsettyO can lift it a little bit higher up there and it, so we've got a little bit of sun coming through. That looks pretty good, or maybe shift on the other side and bring it like that. Maybe this size a little bit better because there's more vegetation there. Or you can turn it all the way around and spin it all the way behind us, as well. So there's a couple of little things we can do here. For time being, I'm just going to leave it right there. Now, let's have a look at adding an HDR. First of all, let's define what that is. It's the high dynamic range image. So what that means is that we will basically color the entire sky with a different kind of image. So notice how here we've got these clouds. That looks really good, as it stands. That's fine. But that's not what I really want. I want to be able to change that. How do I go about doing that? Well, first things first, what we're going to do is we're going to go to this particular button here, we're going to go down and add a actor panel. And what we're going to do is type in HDRI. Here it is. Now, if you do not have an HDRI, the way to get it is go to edit, lug ins, type in HDRI, and click that, click it, and then just reset the project and then come back in and do exactly what I just did. I go here, hit that, go to the Place Actors panel, find it there. And all you have to do is pretty much drag and drop. We've got a different type of sky, which is great, which is fine. Now, let's have a look at how that actually looks like. So what we're going to do is we're going to pop out a little bit, and there we go. So notice how we just created this bubble over our scene. So that is what an HDRI is. There it is. That's what it is. So what you can do is you can grab different kind of things, different kind of pictures. So this one here has a bit of greenery and a bit of grass and so forth. So the sky is very, very interesting. But it's not what we want. So if we want to change that and look for something else, what we can do is we can go to Poly Haven, Holly haven, here it is. So what we're going to do is we're going to go to assets, we can find any type of sky we want. Now, my suggestion is use the left hand side as your guide. So we want something outdoors, click, and we want something overcast. But what you can do is just simply scroll down and try to find the one that really, really tickles your fancy. But also, this one's pretty cool. Alright, so what I'm going to do is I'm going to grab this one. It's a few stars here, a lot of clouds. That's what we want. So you go over here to HRI and make sure that you selected HDR, and then you go ahead and click Download. So once it's complete downloading, we are going to go back to the scene. We're going to go to our content draw. And what we're going to do is we're going to go to the outliner and type in HDRI. So here's our HDRI. And that image here in the cube map, this one right here where my cursor is is actually this one. So we want to swap them. We don't want this one, which is that one there that you see on the screen, we want a different one. So what we're going to do is we're going to basically go to the content draw so what we've done is we're going to go here, and you got an HGRI directory. So what we're going to do is we are going to add our new HDRI. So go ahead and write Mass button click anywhere you wish here and go to import to Game HGRI. Click that and go ahead and find your HGRI you've just imported and open it. It's going to take a little while. It's importing, and there it is, right? Wait for it to complete all the texturing, et cetera. And then what we're going to do is once that is complete, we will be swapping this one for our new one. So now, I want you to go ahead and highlight your new HTR as so. And now, over here on the right hand side, make sure you got HGRI back drop selected. Go to your cube map. There's a little left arrow with a circle around it. Go ahead and click that. That should replace this with the one that we selected here in the content draw. So that's essentially what this arrow, left arrow with a circle around it does. I just says, select from the content menu. So the content menu is the one that we highlighted, which is surrounded with a blue outline. So notice now the sky of this HI has changed. There's another thing. It's kind of too small and it's also very high. So what we're going to do is scale it. So we're going to increase the size of this HGI. And the way you do that you just simply go to size, and so you want a six kilometer radius. So there we go and out. Good. So now, it's a little bit more immersive. There's a lot more distance between our mannequin, which is somewhere inside here and the horizon. But also notice that the actual HDRI is actually covering the ground as well. So as you selected the HDI backdrop, notice that it says here projection center, and it's got the green, red and blue arrows. Just highlight the blue one and drop it down. There we go, and that should look familiar. All right. Keep on going until you find a suitable. Now notice that everything looks really, really awesome now. So we've got a different type of backdrop. Now, if you want to change the direction of the HDRI, just simply go here on the right hand side, and you can change the rotation through that. Or what you can do is just highlight the rotation icon, and now you can turn it around. There we go. I particularly like this one, but I can't really judge it from here. So I want to brasly go back to my maticin. So let me remove that and just go mannequin and double click your Matkin. And here we are. Now, let's have a look from this perspective. Now, notice that the HDRI is very, very bright at the moment, but that's also because of the backlight that's coming out of the world and into the HDRI. So what we're going to do is we're going to remove reduce the sky light by going to sky there and reducing into there. So indirect light intensity has been reduced. So now you can actually see that the HI is a little bit more prominent. However, we're losing a little bit of sunlight, as well. What we're going to do is we're going to go. Again, I think I like the stars, so I'm going to shift them to the right. So I'm just going to select the HDR one more time and see if I can actually move it a little bit more. Let's go Malkin. Let's go back there. That's a quick way to get there. And notice that my manca selected, but I want my HD selected. And there it is. So my HI is selected, or you can just go and click anywhere in the sky. You should get it. Now what I need to do is find where the rotation there is. So now I mean just backout a little bit. There it is. So now I can turn it around a little bit. So I've got more brightness from this side of the HGRI, which is fantastic. So now the HDRI is what's illuminating our scene here. It isn't the actual back light at all. So let me go back to the HGRI again and move it again. Go Mecan, and there we are. You can play around with these settings until you feel confident and comfortable with them. So let me just do them back in. There we are. Now, let's have a look at this. And now selecting HDRI, we can play with some of these settings. Now notice here you have the intensity of the HDRI. You can reduce it now here. You can go from one down to something a little bit darker. There we go or even further there. Notice how now you got a little bit more contrast with the stars at the back. Once more, I'm not quite happy with the positioning. So you can highlight the rotation, the blue one is going to spin it around for you. So what I'm going to do is going to turn it around a little bit more until I see something that I like and keep on going. There we go. That's zero. Let's go 18070, maybe. Or you can use the HDRI rotation icon, which I'm trying to look for now, and I don't seem to be able to find it. There it is. So now what you can do is move it around. The selected something completely else. Here we guy and a big guy. And that's pretty cool. Alright, so now what you can do just play around with the settings on your own. And so you can change HDRI. You can go back to the skylight and change the intensity again if you like. It's gone back to one. We can drop it to 0.7. There we go. And now we've got HDRI illuminating and adding a little bit more contrast. We can drop that further down to SAPSo 0.3. So therefore, we're getting the illumination from the HDRI itself. You can then increase the HDRI illumination and going over here and increasing that a little bit more. So therefore, you've got a little bit more light coming from the HDRI and not the skylight. Now also at the same time, remember, you can go to the directional light, which is over here. Oops, I double click the directional light. Let me just go back to my Matkin. There we go. And you can also decrease the directional light. Let me just go here. Intensity of the directional light as well. So it's 0.5. We can drop it 0.3 light or even less, to give it a little bit more ominence. Let me go back to the skylight and check on that. The scalability of that is there. As the threshold and so forth. So you can play around with some of these settings all you want until they find what specific view you would like for your light. So once more, can reduce it, drop it quite a bit. You can drop it almost zero, and then you can just go increase your directional light, for example, So if I go over here and increase the directional light intensity. So you can go from here to 0.6. And therefore, now you've got a nice kind of contrast between the hills, the mountains, the water, and also the landscape. Now, let me have a look I don't really like the shadows. So what we're going to do is we're going to go ahead and fix the shadows as well. See how it's falling on the water. The shadows are not realistic at all. So the way we're going to do that is by changing the isotropy of the actual water material. So let's go ahead and type in water. There is body of water, and we're going to go down to the material. So there it is. Double click that. And we're going to go down to the is there it is, anisotropy, and we're going to change that value. Where is the shadow? Here it is. So we're going to increase that. There we go. So now that looks way, way more realistic. Yeah. So now you can see that the shadows sort of right there on the surface. It's not just on the surface. It's actually further down lower and gives it a little bit more of a real feel. So remember, just go to the material of the water and type in anisotropy, and you should be able to just increase it until you get the right effect. Just keep the two windows open until you do so. Now, let me just close this and check the water figurations one more time. Let's add this. So now, this is going to give it a very see how remove that. Right. So if I now go into the caustic and I click that, right? Oh, that's giving me these little ripples that are coming across. So the reflections are happening down on the bottom of the water, which is actually pretty cool. So we can add that in there. We can do a few more little things. Feel free to play around with it. We could play around with also the colors of the water as well. So if you want to make a little bit less blue, you can do that and hit okay. So now it's a little bit more white, or you can just bring it back up to the blue. There we go and hit save on that one. And then you basically can just keep on going and playing with some of those settings. And until you find the type of water you want to have in your scene. Remember, this is all subjective. You can create it in any which way you want. I prefer to have my water a little bit clearer. Other times, some people like it really, really green, which is kind of strange for me. But nonetheless, we could probably add a little bit of green in there and make it a little bit more bluish, I guess, and green. That's okay. So that's just going to close this window, and there you have it, guys. Now, this is our new scene that we've now just made up. Now we've played around with the lighting. So you now know how to play a directional light, how to modify your skylight, how to apply an HDRI, and how to rotate it, and how to also increase its intensity. So now you can turn off the skylight altogether and have your HGRI illuminate your entire world. It is purely up to you how you want to go ahead from this point. Alright, guys. Thank you very much, and I'll see you in the next lesson. 16. Rendering Technique - Part 3: Exponential and Local Fog Adjustments: Hi, everyone. Welcome back. In this lesson, we'll be focusing on fog. So this is the scene that we currently have, which is great. You can almost film this and color that. It's really good. Most scenes, be it a cyber punk type of scene in a city or even a wild Western scene or this kind of scene we're mainly looking at nature and environments. What is very, very common is to add fog. Fog brings that depth to the scene. It's not just a tool. It's really a paint brush for immersiveness and captivating scene. So this is what fog you provides you that capability to be able to add more depth, more intensity, more meaning to a specific scene. Now, here, scene is fantastic. It looks great. It's a clear day. But if I add a little bit of fog, say, for example, here and here and also in the world, I think I can do a better, more realistic, a more captivating scene. So first of all, let's have a look at what fog components we already have. So if you go to the right hand side and type in fog, all right. Alright, I've got exponential fog. Now, there are two types of fogs. There's the exponential fog and also the local height fog. Now, you can actually see them side by side. If you go to visual effects, we got exponential fog, which is what we have here, and we got local height fog. So what we're going to talk about right now is the exponential fog. Let's go here. Double click on the exponential fog. And as you do, on the right hand side down the bottom, you're going to see a bunch of different setting. Now there's a lot of settings here. You basically have a lot of settings, a lot of things that you can configure. Now, in order to make meaningful changes to the fog, particularly the exponential height fold, these are the only things that I recommend you look into the fog density and the fog height fall off. Exponential height fold is exactly what the name tends to suggest. Basically, as you get closer to the ground, the fog increases exponentially. As you go further up, it decreases. So that's what exponential height fog is all about. So now, if you change this value, say, if I want to increase it, notice how I'm increasing the fog on the ground. So if I actually go up, see, there's not much fog there. Fog go down, the fog increases. So that's what exponential height fog is all about. Here, no fog down here, a lot more fog. So that's what that's about. Now, the height fall off, it just tells you it's a coefficient of how the actual fog is going to fall off. So if you put zero almost zero, right, it means that all the fog is going to come down and the actual fall off is zero, which means that the exponentiality from top to bottom is almost uniform. But if you start increasing that value, then what happens to the coefficient for the exponential graph for dropping it from zero to the ground, right, is going to be more down closer to the ground. So watch this. So let me increase that. Now, I'm going to grow straight to two. That means that all the fog is down here. So the moment I go there's nothing. See what that is. So basically, if I decrease it, that means that the fog is going to be more uniform from top to bottom. So there's going to be less of that exponentiality drop off. That's what that fog height drop off does. So what we want to do is we don't want to engulf the entire scene with too much fog, so we want to basically have it so that the fog is a little bit closer to the ground, right? Like so the moment you sort of come up from here, there's less. And the moment you come down, it's a little bit more. Right. So now, straight off the bat, the scenes a little bit more interesting. It's more captivating. So if I go here and increase the fold down like so. Right? That means that the folds are really close to the ground. So let me just lift it up a little bit. There we go. There, right? Now, let me also decrease the density of the fog, so it's not too dense, so I want to be able to see the horizon a little bit, but still have that fog feeling. So there we go, not completely zero. Let's go like that. So it's a very subtle change, but that will be enough. So now, folks, this is how you can basically play with it. So feel free to spend some time and play with these two settings, the fog density and the fog height, fall off. So this is a secondary fog, so you can do the same thing with a secondary fog exactly the same. There's a fog height offset here, which makes it slightly more interesting. So if you drop off the fog density, say to zero, so there's no second fog data, and now slightly increase it. And I increase the fall off. So there's more down the bottom and the offset is where the actual fog starts from. So actually again, if you want to investigate this, you can just pop up and see what's actually happening in the world. Now, that's what the exponential fog does for you. So have it played with this until you get the right scene. Now, it's all up to you how you want your scene to look like. Now, I like my scene to be a little bit foggy but not too foggy. So let me just decrease the secondary fog a little bit. That's more like it. I think the good place is 0.02. That's enough. Right now, that is the exponential height fold. Now, let's save this. And now let's head off over to the left hand side. Go down to visual effects, select the local height fog. Now, here it is, folks. That's what it is. It's basically a sphere. Now, you can do a lot with this, a lot. Now, a lot of people look at it and go really confused because the borders are very, very sharp, but you can adjust that. So if you go to the local height fog and here, the top one, two, three, four settings are probably going to be the only settings you need to adjust for this. So first of all, let's reduce the density. So I can make it too dense. Let's give it a 0.2, or maybe last 0.1. That's the fog you want. Now, once you put it into position, we can also change a little bit later because the setting also dictates how much fog you want to apply. Now, the fall off. Now notice how the fall off is you want it to be closer to the ground. So it's very, very misty, or do you want it to be sort of somewhere in between. Like that. Now, what I like to do because we're going to place this fog on top of the water. What you want to do is have it so that it's not all over the place, but it's closer to the ground. So notice how it's very light up here, but closer to the bottom. So when you place it above the water, it actually looks the part. Now, what we don't want is this borderline this borderline coming on the outskirts of the sphere. It's obvious that this is just a fog component. So what you want to do is you want to move the radial attenuation up or down, right. Now here, notice how the fold is coming a little bit more in and it's less pronounced on the outside. So that's really good because that's what you want, because if you have it too close to the edge, it doesn't look real, right? So you can also offset that with the fog density as well. So the more density is, obviously, the more it's going to get closer to the edges. So by playing with these settings, you can sort of get it just right for your scene. So now I want it to be 0.00 20.03. I work with 0.04, five. Now, there we go. Now what I'm going to do is I'm going to grab this fog and I'm going to put it in a position somewhere. Now, notice how it starts changing the scene slowly. So what we're going to do is we are going to place it here to the side slightly. There. And in this little gap here. Now, you can place it anywhere you want in the world. It's really up to you how you want to do this. Now you can always push it into the mountain as well, so it doesn't have to be just standing out there in the middle of nowhere. And therefore, it's going to give you that pronounced borderline. So notice how it's right here and now at the moment. Great. But notice also, if I look at it, it looks kind of weird. So we don't want that. We want to basically change the offset. So it's a little bit lower. There we go. Now we can also move by moving it and making these little adjustments, you can get it just about right. So and zero. Three. There we go. So now you've got fog there on the left hand side. Now, how does that look with or without? Just go over here, eye off, eye on. Notice how he adds a little bit more ambience to the scene. So now what we're gonna do is we're going to add a few of these, so let's go ahead save. Now, one other thing, guys, the more assets you add to your scene, right, you will start experiencing lags, crashes, all sorts of things will start happening unexpectedly. So my suggestion is always make sure autosave is enabled, but try to do it as often as you can by yourselves. Otherwise, all the hard work and texturing and rendering can disappear in matter of a few clicks, and then it's gone, right? So now, let's add a few more of these. So we're going to add one over here maybe in this gap here and patrude out a little bit. Now, obviously, if you now, these are two unique ones, so I can actually change this one here on the right hand side to suit, but I actually like how it looks anyway. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to also grab this one, and I'm going to put it up on the mountain as well. So I'm going to go ahead and copy and move that there. And I'm going to tilt it there. So you can do things like this to give it a little bit more of an interesting look. There we go. See now. So now, it's really good to put them behind edges of LC. See this edge is pronounced. The fogs right behind. Now, let me just reduce the density of that fog. So first of all, let me reduce this one says 0.015. And this one here, I want it to be slightly more. So 0.02, right? So, the further out you go, the denser the fog. So you don't want to have it all uniform. So now I could keep on going with this and say, I want to have the lower end of this water ridge to be actually all fog. So we just go ahead and let's grab the first one that we did. Right. And there we go. So we're going to push this one all the way out around about there. And now we are going to scale this up, say, it's 500 now, we're going to go to three. Well, let's not. Okay. Green is where we want to go. So let's scale it up to 2000. 3,000 or 200. There we go. Now notice how I've got fog right on the surface. If I remove all these items CSE now, it gives me that infinity pool look right at the edge there. I've got a bit of fog here on the side. It's giving a bit of a glow because the sun's shining into it. Now, the other thing is that you need to have daylight. If you put fog on midday where the sun is right above you, you're not going to see it. You want to have your light more closer to the horizon and that's what's going to give you the fog look. Okay, so now let's go back here. I like it very much, but let's pop it up a little bit, as well. Alright, guys, well, that's it. I'll see you in the next lesson. Bye for now. 17. Character Animation: Hi, everyone. Welcome back. Now, I hope you had some time to work on your environment. You now know how to work the skylight, the atmospheric light, the ambience around that, the directional light. You now know how to add og. So you can create a scene that suits what it is that you're trying to achieve. So here you can see, I went for a little bit more of a sunset feel. I wanted long shadows. I didn't want too much light in my scene. I wanted to give it a little bit more of a enticing ominous look. And I think I've achieved that with what I have right now. From this angle, there's a lot of light. From the angle that we're going to be filming a lot is it's a little bit more interesting, a little bit more yeah, there's quite a few compelling things here, as you can see, with the fog coming down the sides of the mountains, the large cliff at the top, the stars on the horizon. The water is flickering. So there's a lot of movement, a lot of things happening here. But what's out of place is our friend, Medic. So the purpose so the purpose of today's lesson is about replacing A Mannequin. We could actually keep it and just give it animation if we like. But I think what we're going to do is we're going to explore Adobe's Mixamo option. We do have the option of using meta humans from Unreal Engine itself, from the Epic games marketplace. However, let's explore. Let's deviate a little bit from Epic games and try something else. The process is very similar anyway, so it's not too different. All we want to do is we want to give our Mannequin a friend right here. So what we're going to do is we're going to head over to Mixamo. So if you type in mixamo.com, log in, and you should see this particular page. So there's two main menu items, two main tabs at the top, characters and animations. So what we're going to do is we're going to go to characters first. So we're going to select one of many characters that are pre built. Remember, you don't have to pay for this, so do not worry. Over here on the right hand side, you can see one of them. So once we select our character, we're going to basically download our character. Then we're going to move over to animations. And here we have a whole lot of different movements. Some of them are hilariously funny. Select which movement you want. And then what we're going to do is we're going to download the characters and download the animation separately, and then we're going to combine the two in our virtual environment. So let's go ahead and go to characters. I want to look for the spot character. So what we want to do is we want to download the Swat guy character. So we go ahead and hit Download. We can leave TPos there, and we're going to download an FBX file. We can go to 7.4, which is a High Resolution one, I guess, and hit Save. So it's going to ask you where you want to save it. So save us somewhere where you know where you can go fetch it a little bit later on. We're going to add a few more characters to this scene as well. So I'm going to Go ahead and do that one. Okay, so after SWAT, we could end up getting something a little bit different. So we got an army person, so we can go a little bit more adventure if we like. Okay. Erica the Archer, I like her. She looks fun to have here in the scene. She's got arrows and a bow. So that makes it really interesting. So that's going to be good. So we can go with Erica. Okay, great. Thank you, Erica. So let's download Erica. Okay, so we got Erica. She looks like a powerful warrior, which is fantastic. So that's what we want. Okay. Let's see what else we can download. We can do a cartoonish, but it's not going to fit in our scene. We could do a bit of a parody if we like with Big Vegas, for example. I really like this one. Um, that's not gonna fit in the scene at all. We've got a signs Drake or what he says a vampire or some sort. We got this guy here looks very scary. Or we can stick to Okay. Oh, there seems to be another powerful female character here that we can add in as well, which is great. Arisa. Okay, great. So we're gonna download Arisa as well. Now, what I like to do with all my downloads, I like to put CH as prefix to all my characters. And for animations, I usually place An. So the first two characters are those two things. That's how I name all my assets. So CH underscore the freestyle describing what it is. And then numbers like one, two, three, as in different versions of that same character. The same thing with animations. I tend to do the same thing there. So let's find another character, as well, maybe a Sci fi character. So that's Adventure. So we got two we got Erica, we got Aria, and we have the swat guy. Oh, vanguard, we got to have someone that looks a bit like that. Yeah, that's good. That's good. So let's go ahead and we'll grab this one, as well. Okay. So once we filled our director with a bunch of characters, we can then go back and placing them inside our virtual environment. So once we found out all the characters that we want, we can go to animations. Now, in animations, this is where we're going to download the actual animation itself sequence from the list of animations that are here on the screen. So we can collect anything we want. So what we're looking right now is to find a animation that we can place on a loop inside our environment. And usually they are the ones where people are standing and breathing and not doing much at all. So that means that if you do loop them, it doesn't look out of sorts. So for example, yeah, standing with a briefcase, that's interesting, but we don't have a briefcase, so this is going to look strange. Let me see what else we can find here. I like this one standing with the thumbs up. That's great. But again, different setting altogether. So let's just go ahead, and I'm just going to go and type in idling idle. Okay. All right. So that one looks really interesting. Looks interesting enough that it's not just not doing anything, he's got his front foot fall back on his body weight is in the back leg and he's just breathing. So what I'm going to do is going to download this without the skin because we might want to apply it for different purposes, so we're going to go ahead and select 60. Now, we don't need 60 frames because there's not much happening here for 60 frames. But nonetheless, let's go ahead and hit Download. Alright? And again, it's going to ask you, where do you want to download it? We prefix it with AN, underscore, and then we can just give it any file that we wish after that. Okay, so once we're done here, what we're going to do is we're going to go back to our unreal engine. And we are going to create two folders. But first, we're going to put everything in one folder. We're going to call these actors as in characters. So now we've got Anim and we've got characters. So inside characters, we're just going to go ahead and add a bunch of different imported characters that we just saved. So just collect all the ones that you have saved and just drop them here in the characters. Now, a good way of organizing this is to have a folder for each. So therefore, all the materials and meshes and textures don't mix. Some of the characters are named very well, so they're prefixed with the Acura unique character, others are just not. And therefore, you're going to mix the different textures, et cetera. It's going to be a bit of a mess. But for the sake of progress, just collect everything and dump it inside this particular directory, and let's set the defaults in there and import all. It's going to do something, yep. It's moving ahead. So now that's just basically downloading characters that you save from MixMO. Now this is just a warning. So let's just have a quick look at it. I tend not to just bypass these things. Okay. Okay, so it's giving me a bit of a warning, but that's okay. Nothing drastic. So if we go back to the content drawer, here it is. This is what I meant by being careful with, you know, your imports. Notice how everything is kind of looks a little bit messy, but some of these characters, you could actually see that, you know, they've been prefixed like for example, this one here, vanguard. So you can see all the vanguard textures and all the vanguard measures. Others have a specific number in front of them, which is good. A recess fine. But then you go with things like arrow and arrow Div. You don't know who that belongs to. So if you've got 100 characters in here, it's going to take a long time to figure out which one do you want to modify for the particular character. So it becomes a little bit messy. So for now, we'll move away from character. We're going to go to anal animation. And here we're going to do the same thing. We're going to write button click Import. And we are going to find a how animation. And now notice how these two bunts here put all in import are not highlighted. That's because we don't have a skeleton, so we did not import it with skins. So what we can do is we can just basically select any one of them. So we've got Arisa, we got Erica with the bow, SWAT, vanguard, and so forth. So they've been all listed here because we've saved them just earlier. So what we can do is say, select Erica. And we Let me just do that, Erica and import all now we should have Erica there. So what we can do now is simply place Erica next to a stand up bloke, the white mannequin that we've had for some time there. So just going to click the animation, drag and drop. There we go. So now it's facing the wrong way. So let's just straighten it up. So now that's interesting. So notice that Erica fits the scene really well. Mannequin Man, not anymore, so let's just retire him. Now we've got her. Now, this looks really compelling. However, it does move away from the realism because and this is a thing. When there's a lot of light happening, you can start seeing textures like this. They're a little bit too smooth, not rough enough. And when you come in a bit closer as well, you end up seeing the face. Now, in this particular setting, this environment, I'll have to really dim even more in order to get the ambience that I want so that I don't actually expose some of these plastic details from this particular import. Now, of course, you can find better characters with more details, but this particular one doesn't actually suit the scene. It's not the right one for this particular scene. So either I have to change the scenes to suit the character or change your character to suit the scene. I'm going to do is I'm going to basically remove her force to lead and remove the character out of the scene, and I'm going to try it again. So I'm going to import, find the animation, and I'm going to give it a different skeleton now. Let's go with the SWAT. And yeah, it should be here. Now let's bring him across. Okay. Alright. Now, I believe he suits the scene much, much better, not because of any other reason other than the fact that his face is covered. His costume and his outfit seems to be of high detail, high resolution. So therefore, if you do zoom in and do some close up camera work, it is convincible. You can convince the audience that this is actually more real than not. So now notice that he's facing the wrong way. So you can adjust that by simply going ahead and selecting zero for painting up and down, green, zero and -90 so that he's facing forward, good. So there we have it. I don't want to place him dead bang in the middle. Looks a little bit rehearsed. So what I'll do is I'll move him a little bit here to the side, right? Let me go ahead and, um, and capture a high resolution screenshot. So if you want to do that, let me do that once more and a little bit slower. Just go here to the burger menu item icon to scroll the way down, go to high resolution screenshot, and you'll screenshot whatever is on that particular scene. Now, these items here, these grids, if you want to get rid of them, just go ahead and click G. So if you click G, the letter G on your keyboard, they all go away, and now you can have a clean screenshot. So let me remove that let me do one from a different angle. So with a lantern. Yeah. Yeah, that will work. And now we are going to press play. So we go up here and hit play. Notice how now he's breathing in and out. So now that you can place that on a loop, and therefore, that's not going to impact your scene, your cinema scene. Alright, guys. Well, that's it for now, and I'll see you in the next session where we're going to start creating some sequences and scenes, and we're going to then basically move from there to a post production phase where we're going to basically edit it and put it in a scene. 18. Filming - Part 1: Basics: So the next thing we need to do is start thinking about creating some filming sequences. So the way you go about doing that is there's a couple of ways you can do this. But first of all, let's create a directory where we'll be placing all our filming sequences. Let's call it filming. I believe I did not spell it correctly. Let me try that again. Where are you? Okay, and rename. Filming. Okay. Here we're going to place all our sequences. First of all, what you can do is you can write button click and you can create a sequence from here. Or what you can do is go straight up to the what you can do is go straight up to the add level sequence and do it from there. What I'm going to do is I'm going to add level sequence. It's going to ask me, where do I want to save this sequence? You can leave new level sequence as it is, and as you add new ones, it's going to be a rolling number forward. It's going to be just incrementing by one forward. So let's nominate the directory that we just created. Here it is. Film me. Alright, so now, this is what we've got down the bottom. It's blank. The reason why it's blank is because we do not have a camera allocated as yet. So what we're going to do is we're going to add a camera, and you can do it in many different ways. You can do it at the top here. Like cinematics and add a camera. You can do it here, create camera here, right. So you've got camera actor and you've got a cinematic camera actor, which is the one that we want. Or you can just do it here as well, create a new camera instant right there. So what we're going to do is we're just going to create a camera instant. Right as such. Now straightaway, once you do that, you actually see what the camera sees. This is what the camera sees because right here on the left hand side, you can see that you are currently the pilot actor of the camera. You can eject and go back to the normal view or you can stay here. Now, on the right hand side, straightaway, the moment we did that, the cinema camera has been activated and you can actually see the details of it right here on the right hand side. Now, just a very quick introduction. Again, very similar to most other objects in unreal. You have the location, rotation, and scale of the actual camera. And again, this is what the cameras looking right now at the moment. So if I move this, that means I'm moving the rotation right or left. So on the bottom half, now, this is where it gets really interesting. This is where you got the actual camera features and functions that you can modify to get the best outcome or the outcome that suits you best. So as you can see here, one of the most interesting ones is this one here. We can increase the sensor width height aspect. You can leave it as 16 19 or change it to a wider screen, even an IMAX 70 millimeter. So you can do all these things. Now what we're going to do is we're just going to leave it on the default of 69 digital film. So that's what we're going to do for the time being. And and let me just Yep. Okay. Paused. What I'm going to do is I'm just going to save the sequence for the time being, and here it is. Now, the moment the moment you save the sequence, what happens is your cursor is located where the red pointer is, right? So that's where you are at the moment. Now, when you move this pointer, right, that's where you can nominate where you want to be next. So once more, very important point. Where the red pointer is at the moment is where you are right now. If you wish to lock that point in time of the camera, including the focal point, then you need to click these circles on the left hand side. They're like circles with a plus. That would mean that this camera has been locked into that position. Then if you want to move the camera in a different position, you move the camera mechanically or via your mouse, and then but you move the red arrow first. And then you move the camera, and then you update these circles again. So let me start that again. If you wish to lock the camera where it is at the moment, just make sure you click these circles. So on the left hand side, you've got the camera aperture, focal length, manual focus distance, which is something that we're going to talk about very briefly. And the most important one, which is where the camera is transformed. So if you click the parent one here, which is the top one, all the rest will click order automatically. Now, if you want to move to the next camera spot, first, move the arrow. So you want to get the next movement done, say in 1.35 seconds, then you click these ones again to basically make sure that the camera moves in this direction. So let's try that, okay? So now, very briefly, as you can see here, the scene looks fantastic. Scene looks phenomenal. So let's do the first scene. Let's do the first scene like so, right? So what we want to do is want to come from this angle and pan forward. So remember, try to keep the scenes short and sweet. By default, you get 0150, right? That's the length of time that you have for your sequence. You can move that to the right by increasing this. We'll do that a little bit later on. So for now, let's lock in the camera position as it stands here at the moment. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to just go ahead and click this and I'm going to also change the focal setting. So if you go to the camera, which is over here, so you click the camera here on the left, you get the update on the right, and you go down to your focal settings. Right now, if I click draw Debug focus plane, this is going to show you where the focus point is, which is really, really far away. Now, if I want to bring that in right? Now, this is where the focus point is. Now, I want to focus mainly somewhere here. Now, that can become a little bit difficult to see. So what you can do is remove this tick so it's not there anymore and use the little pin drop here. And place it somewhere in the world. So what we can do is we can use say, we can focus here and notice how at the moment we've done that, the number changed here. So it's 1,957 centimeters and straightaway got updated here. Now what we're going to do is we're going to go ahead and click focus. Now, for these type of scenes when you're really close to the ground, what's good to do is actually have a focus point ahead and have these ones a little bit blurred out because otherwise, what can easily happen is that you have focus at the front, but it's all blurry at the top. So it depends on what you want, but let's try it both ways. Let's do a short focus like that, and let's update the scene. There we go. So let's go back a little bit. What we can do is we're going to try this the way it is right now. We're going to have a little bit of this rock here. So it's 229 centimeters. Let me confirm that. Yep, 229. Just try that. Get rid of these. And let's select the camera. Once more. Okay. Let's have it like that. So let's not chew too close. And Okay. And now let's get the position updated. Okay. So here's the position that we want it in. So we're going to update the transformation. So let's just drop that one, go here and update. Okay. So now, this is where we are. So what we're going to do is we're going to move the red arrow right till the end here. And now we're going to move the camera. Oops. Big. Right. And we're going to move it maybe You can try this in many different ways, but what we're gonna do is we're can move it right. We've got too much sun there, so right here. And then adjust the focus. There and then update the transform, which is the location properties, and we're going to expand the camera and adjust the focus point. Now, let's have a look at what that's done. Now, it's a very short period of time. It's going to go probably a little bit too fast. Well, let's see. So it's cutting through, and there we have it. Okay. So that could be a first scene. So what we're going to do is we're going to say that. I'm not quite happy with the focus point. So what you can do is as you're co through now notice has cutting through the rock here. So we can add a point somewhere here and lift it a little bit. Some point right here, so it doesn't cut through the rock, like so, and still keep the focus on the grass there and update the focus point there. Alright. And so let's have another look so you can rewind it, play. So it's not cutting through the rock. Excellent. Fantastic. So now, the other thing is that I notice how when it comes here, we need to adjust the focus a little bit because it's a wider span, so what we're going to do is we're going to adjust it so that it starts looking ahead, like somewhere here. So what we're going to do is we're going to increase the focal length to 3,000 so go for 300 to 3,000 very, very quickly, and then it's going to stay like that for a little while. So let's have another look that's better. Excellent. Now, we want to focus on him just a little bit earlier. So let's just bring it a little bit earlier. So focusing the camera is something that you do after you position the camera, and then you walk through the scene step by step and look at what's being focused and what's not. And then you adjust the focal length as you do that. So here right now, I want to start focusing on him, right? And let's update that and see how that starts to look. Yep, but it's still a little bit out of focus. In case this focal length here should be really there a little bit shorter. So let's try that again. Excellent. And now you probably want to stay there a little bit longer. So let's just increase this from 165 to say 200 move over. Now, what we're going to do is we're going to stay exactly there for a little bit longer and just pan out a little bit. So here, notice how this red herring lines there. That means that you're only going to export everything from green to red from this green line to this red line. So what we're going to do is going to stretch the red line out to the end. And also at the same time, the footage or the camera is going to only begin from green to red, so it's going to be cut out. But notice how it hasn't been stretched out to the new red location, so we're just going to click it and drag it. Across. Excellent. So now let's add a new camera position. And we're going to slowly pan out to the right Okay. And click the location, and we are going to adjust pan out to the right. Like there, that's a better location. And now what we're going to do is we are going to change the focal point. Again, let's click the camera. Focal point, whereas the focal focus settings. There it is. And we are going to look out ahead. Okay. So let's adjust that. There we go. Alright, now let's have a look how this whole thing looks like from beginning. So let's play. All right. Here we go. And now and out. Done. Okay. So now what we're going to do is we're going to add a little bit of time in the same spot so we increase this to 220. We're gonna go all the way to the end. Move that all the way to 220, 200 2019 should be fine. And we're just going to sit here. Right? And the focal point is going to be, again, the distance, the far distance. Let me see what else. I will pick up a bit too foggy there. And yeah, that's fine. So we'll just use that far distance. Yeah. Let me see where, let's bring it a little bit closer in there and remove it. Maybe a little bit closer in. It's too close in there and drop it. Okay, wait for the update the sun to come through. And that looks that looks good. Okay. Let's get a bit of the stars. Damn. Okay. Bring it back over here. And oh, sorry, the camera. Don't forget the camera. You have to move the camera. Move the red arrow first, then move the camera and then capture capture where the camera is, and also the focal point. And that's it. Now, this red ending bar here, we're just going to push that all the way to the end, as well. Now don't forget, get the scene across as well, all the way to the end. And now let's see what we've done. Before you do anything, click Save and let's start from the beginning. Alright, so nice. Here we go. And there. Okay, now, the camera movement at the end is a little bit too jagged. So what we're going to do is just add a little bit more time, say 270. And now instead of redoing it, we're just going to highlight all these like so. Let me just move this arrow here. We're just going to highlight them, and we're going to move them all together at the same time. We didn't highlight that one, but we can move that one as well. Okay. Now, the red arrows there, so we're going to move that one as well to the end. So that gives us a little bit more time to allow for that camera movement from bottom up. So, you know, how we're painting it up to the sky, so we want to make sure that's nice and smooth. So give it a little bit more time. So let's have another look, the stuff from the beginning. And here we go. Alright, so grass, hills, swat guy, looking out, and slowly up. Yeah, that works. Now, let me just try that again. The focus here, right? So it's focusing on the rocks, which is fine. And let me try that again. Okay, so what I would like to do is make sure that my focus my focal point. So let me touch the camera again. My focal point is there. But let's just push it a little bit there. So now, these arrows on the left and the right of the circle tell you to go to the next nearest mark point. So let's just go to the next keyframe point. So just here and let's see what what we see here. So I want to make sure he's highlighted there. So let's just make sure that is updated. This one here, I can't actually see his back. I want to make sure that I got him there. So update. There we go. And let's get rid of the pink screen. Wait for the light to come back. And here we go. Play. Now, he's in focus. And now we'll go at the top. Okay, so now let's try to make sure that he's in focus even when we're behind. So let's just so we've got the focal point here. And then what happens is the focal point goes to 5,000 very, very quickly. So what we can do is put a point in between. Say, here. So now, is he's in focus? We should still keep him in focus. Now the focus going to change. So we should still have a point here, and then start transferring the focus away from him. So let's just keep his focus there. And then from this point, we'll start moving across to a different focal point. Okay, so these are like little things that you'll learn as you're doing more of these. It's all about where you place the focal point depending upon the context of what you see, that's much better or what you're trying to achieve. So let me try that again one more time and play. Excellent. Love it. Okay, so now let's just make sure that we've got everything in order before we export. Okay. Alright, guys. So now we've captured our first scene. We are going to save that sequence, and now we're going to learn how to export the sequence. The way you do that is by going to this particular icon. You click the three dot sandwich on the right hand side. Got two options render Q or movie scene capture legacy. Now, I prefer for this particular course, just to focus on the basics. So we're going to go with the legacy, and we're going to click that And now when you click the icon, we have this screen pop up. Now, what we can do is just very quickly go through that, it tells you, well, which format do you want it? No, we don't want a bitmap or EXR. These are static images. So that's fine if we're doing just a static image. We want an ABI, so we'll leave that as it is. No audio. We are not collecting any audio at the moment. Now, you do want to keep it at 24 frames per second, just that film film frames per second setting. Me is a little bit too rich and it looks a little bit too fake. So you really want to have that fuzziness a little bit in all of your filming because, I mean, that's what gives you that cinematic feeling. Once it's really, really refined, and I do see a lot of movies out there, particularly degrade movies, where the cameras so refined, it looks so realistic. It looks like something I could do with my handheld camera. So what you want to do is avoid that by maintaining 24 prays per second, which is the film quality. Resolution. I like to increase this as much as I can. So what we're going to do is a bare minimum, we're going to look at 19:20 or 38 40. So let's go for 38 40, which is four K. And next advanced, we don't have to do any changes here. Where do you want to save it? Very important. Now, usually, I like to keep all my videos on the same directory where my EU Dimi files are. There's a special folder that Unreal always saves it at. And so therefore, when you go come back to it, you can find all your videos that you've captured in that one location for that project. The moment you start saving videos in a different location, you then lose track of what's where. So a good practice is to have it all saved initially under the same folder of where your project is. By default, Unreal engine will do that for you. You will save it under your project name. Saved folder, as you can see here, and video captures. That's where it's going to save default. Leave it like that. When you want to move things into post production phases, then you can grab it from there, the raw video and copy it somewhere else, and then you can file manage it differently. So here, yes, we're going to leave it exactly where it is, and we just have to hit capture and wait a little while. So it's going to ask me, Hey, do I want to save this? This is the level Project ten, a smart level, and I say, Yes, I want to save my project before we go ahead. And now we just have to sit back and wait. Now, you're going to notice the top left hand quits. I'm give you a little render preview. And once that render preview is finished, on the right hand side, down the bottom, you're going to see finished. And then once that's finished, you can open the folder and it'll take it straight to where the project folder is where it's saved, which is this path here. So don't worry too much if the quality of this isn't up to scratch. It's because, again, this is just a preview. It's a low resolution preview all up. Okay. Now, also, one other thing I did not do, which is the compression quality. You really want to push that to maximum. Okay. So you want to push that to maximum. So let's allow this render to finish. And next time around, we're going to basically have the highest quality compression. Otherwise, if you want to remove the compression, have it raw, which means that you're going to consume a lot more hard drive space, you can do that as well. So my suggestion is, I would usually like it uncompressed, and then I compress it myself through the post production video editing tools. However, it's up to you. Okay, guys. So I'm going to pause the video, and once it's complete, I will restart it restart recording. Okay, guys, we're back. Notice how on the right hand side, capture finished is what it says to us and open capture folder. So we're going to go ahead and click that. So what you got here right now is you've got the ADI file, so we can play it and see what it looks like. Oops. Hang on. Let's try that again. Alright. So this is what we have just filmed. Looks amazing. Looks fantastic. Okay. 19. Filming - Part 2: Lighting: Now, so what we're going to do now is move on with the animation. So we have now learned how to film the scene. We don't have to change anything as part of the sequence. All we have to do is activate the animation. So what we need to do is we need to grab the person and on the right hand side, you're going to see the actual skeleton of the person get activated. So what we need to do is add them to the sequencer. So this is all the camera sequencing. So now we need to add the actual animation as well. So what we're going to do is we're going to grab him and we're going to drag him across. Now, I notice now we've got AN for animation Idloh three. That's what we called this particular animation. So now what we need to do is make sure that we also have him animated. And the animation sequence where you're going to use is the idle sequence, which is here. Okay. So that means that this character is going to be breathing in and out. So if I just play this, there we go. So notice how that's happening right now at the minute. Okay. So now if we go to the camera and now notice how the camera position, right? Is right here. On the right hand side, you can see the camera position, right? So this is me looking at him. However, he's only going to be doing that breathing up until around about here. So we want him to do that animation all the way to the end. This is why we chose to find something a little bit more generic and something that we can loop. So what we're going to do is going to go grab this particular part of the animation and drag it all the way to the end. And now let's just hit play. Remember, we are not in the camera Suisse. We are just looking at our soldier, our swat guy. So it click Play. And let's see. See now he's breathing, and it's looping around. He's breathing. Okay. Excellent. Excellent. And all the way to the end. Fine. Now, let's go into our camera scene. So go ahead and click Perspective. Find your camera actor, I believe, is just sync camera actor, which is that one. Okay. And now let's play it from the beginning. Let's just true write our sequence a little bit. There we go, and click Play. Now, notice a subtle movement in there, and that's exactly what we wanted. Now, the other thing is that because the movement is so subtle, we don't get to see much of it. So let's just go back. Now, see the head moved a little bit, which is great. So what we can do is stay on him for a little bit longer until right about say he's standing here so we can pan around him a little bit longer. So that means that what we're going to do is we are going to increase this part here. So we're going to push that out a little bit. So it's 270. Let's go to 370. So let's move all the way here. So now, this is where the arrow is. Okay, so we want this movement here to allow for more time so we can watch him breathe in and out and apply the animation. So what we're gonna do is we're going to grab this one here, so grab all of that. Move it a little bit. Crab this. Move it a little bit. And let's see where we are here. Hang, grab this last bit and move it all the way to end here. And now don't forget the red line, which tells us where do we end it all? So let's just have another look at it from the beginning. Drop this a little bit and now sit back and watch. Okay. Everything looks good so far. There's notice a shoulder movement. Good. Okay. Now, it doesn't have to be super focused, so you don't have to watch him actually breathing there, but we just want to make sure that he's in frame when he's doing that. So here, let's just grab this point and move it a little bit. Out. So we got more of his focus. Yeah. And this bit here, let's move that out a little bit more. Okay, and let's try it again until we get it right. Okay, so it's coming in. Nice. Yeah, yeah, we got more breathing happening. Awesome. Now, there's a little flicker there. I don't know if you noticed. Let me just have another look Okay, let's go back to the animation. That's why. Because the animation just stop right there. You got to be careful with these things. So I'm just going to grab this, bring it all the way just before the red line here, and also he's breathing there towards the end. So now let's play it again. Save, save the sequence. And 37 seconds sequence. So it's not very long, but Okay. Yeah. Okay, guys, well, that concludes this lesson on filming. So let's just to recap. We placed our character in the scene. We made lighting adjustments in the previous lesson. And in this lesson, we placed the camera in the scene. We made we configured the camera. We moved the camera. We did a little bit of editing. We essentially changed the focal points. We covered how important it is to ensure that the camera is focused on the correct subject that you're filming. We then exported it into an AVI file, and we ran it. So now let's conclude here, and I'll see you in the next lesson. 20. Filming - Part 3: Animation: Now, welcome back. Now, what we're going to do is we are going to add some lighting to our filming sequence. So let's just close the sequence, and let's see where do we want to place the lighting? Now, if you go up to this square up here and go to lights, you've got different types of lights that you can utilize. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to grab this rectangle light. It's a little bit more of a diffuse light, and I'm going to place it close to him. Now, the fact that we're panning the camera behind his back some of the detail on his back and it is in the back of his helmet is lost. So what we want to do is we want to increase that. And the way we do that is by introducing a light. So now I press G, so I can actually see all the different grids. And what I'm going to do is I'm going to flip it around. Okay. So this is like having one of those big umbrellas in a photo shoot. We're going to change intensity. Just let me get position, right. And there. So we want to have a subtle light on his back like so. So when we're nice and close and we're looking out, we actually do see some of his back. So now let's just decrease the light 8-1. That's a little bit too much. Let's go 0.5. That's a bit too much, zero point. One, two, five, so quarter. 0.05. That's better, but let's go a little bit higher. 08. 0.0. Let's just go 0.1. That's better. Now let's change the light. Let's give it a little bit more of a reddish color. Does it have to be there we go right. Maybe a little bit closer to here. It's too red there. And see what that looks like. All right? So that looks like, you know, the lights being reflected and we're getting light reflection on the back of his suit. So when we do pan out and we do this gp we get this scene. We do get a little bit of in there as well. So I want to reduce the light again even further. 0.089. 2.07, that would do it. Okay. So now we got a little bit of green to give it a little bit more of an intrigue. Let's remove the grids and see how that looks like. There we go. We still the long shadow, so the lights are not interfering. And there. Okay. So he'll be out of focus for a bit, but we'll still see him more or less in the scene. Let me just grab that light again and possibly reduce it. So let me try to find that light. Here it is. And let's go 0.05. That's it. Alright. And let's make it a little bit whiter. So it's not too red. Yeah. Okay. So this tells you how important lighting is. So let's go back to the sequence that we just did, which is here. And let's change the perspective to the camera and let's hit play and see how this looks like before we take it to print. Okay. There you go, it goes. Much, much better. So you can play around with the settings and see how important lighting is. And the color of light, as well, is what gives you a different type of feeling. So you don't want to do when you're working with light, you don't want the light to overcome the character of the scene because otherwise, it looks like it's been placed there. You want to make sure that it doesn't look like that at all. So what we're gonna do is we're going to save and save this. And off we go. In and around the SWAT character that we have here. So let's go to light. Let's grab another rectangle light. Again, very very powerful intense, so don't worry about that. We will be changing that. We're going to be now flipping it so that it faces him a little bit. So let's just move it in the right position. Well, there we go. My mouse is playing up on me guys. Okay, so we're going to lift the light, and we're going to have it there. Now we're going to reduce the intensity of the light. So let's go back here. Double click. We want, say, 0.1. That's good. But let's go a little bit lower because it's supposed to be a subtle light, and I don't want it to be too to I don't want to take away from the scene. It needs to look the part, so we don't want the light to overcome the character, I guess, and make it look too obvious. We've just added a light there. Okay, so let's just decrease the intensity. Also, the attenuation radius is very, very large, so we want to reduce that, say, down to 100. So it's just in this particular area because if you have the light, it's going to shine on the rocks. So we don't want to have that. We want to have a nice and compact right next to the character. Now, as far as the color of the light, we want to bring in some depth. So we want to have a little bit of redness in this particular scene. So if we have it like that, Okay, let's see how that looks. It's a little bit too, too too subtle. Let's go. If we go extremes a little bit too much, that might work. Okay. And now, I'm going to remove the grids by clicking G, and let's have a look. Okay, excellent. Already, you can see that by adding this light here, we're adding a little bit more depth to the scene, and it's stained to look good. Now, here on his right, our left, what would be good to do is have a body light on the side here. So let's go ahead and do that. Let's add another light. Ah, sorry. And come grab that one there. There it is. And press G so you can see the grids. So you can see the orientation of the light. Okay. Now, what we want to do is we want to have it side on, fully side on. So let's just grab that there. That's what we want, but not at that intensity. Okay. So what we're gonna do is we're going to drop it down to one. Again, too much light, 0.5, too much. Let's go 0.1, better, zero point oh 85. That's better. So now, if we switch it off, that's how it looked, switching it on, that's how it looks. So let's go a little bit further down 0.06 make a little bit more subtle. Zero con 05 because when you film it, normally what happens is the colors just come out darker than what you see here on the scene on the screen with unreal. So let's just hit G again. Alright. So now, let me hit G one more time. Okay. And so this is the direction of the light. Let me just make sure that positioning is correct because I've got a sense that it's missing my character. I think it is. Okay, so let's just pull it there. That's better. And push it away from him. Like so. Don't want to hide behind the rock. That's better. So now we've got the side of his shoulder lit up, red on the other side. So now we can play around with that a little bit more. I'm not particularly convinced with this light. It might be a good idea to maybe put it on an angle, like s and bring it down here. So it's shining like that. Let's reduce the light There. Now, that's much better. That's way way better. So if I actually go here, switch it off, nothing, switch it on. That gives the whole scene way, way more depth. Let's remove the grids by clicking G. Alright? So now we've got a nice little lit character. Now, the other thing is that we have this lantern, this Japanese lanter. So what we're going to do is we're going to go grab a different type of light. Let's grab a point light. Now let's bring it across. There it is. So we're going to do is we're going to put this light inside the lantern, so as we get through this together. So so once in a while, my voice will disappear. That's because the mouse has forced me to go somewhere else in this world. So Alright, go, so we are adding now the light to now we're adding the light to the scene, and we're going to reduce the intensity so we can actually see what we're doing here. So let's go down to one. Okay, now, that's good. And now we want it to resemble candlelight, right? But don't want it to be too To fluorescent, so we want it to resemble that. So the way we're going to do that, first of all, let's try to position it correctly. So is it position correctly? Think it almost is. Yep, it is and balance it out there. Okay, great. Now we got light coming from here. Now we want to reduce that to say to candle light. So we want number candles intensity. So that's one. We also want to use an attenuation of, say 100, so it's not too loud the candle. And we also don't want it to be completely white. We want it to be warm. So what we're going to do is we're going to have it like that. Okay. So now let's back out a little bit. So now we've got Okay, different types of lights. We got the lights that's impacting the character. We have the lantern light, which needs a little bit more work. So let me reduce that down to 0.5. 0.2. That's better. And now, that's how it looks. Okay, guys. So now, the fact of the matter is that it could probably be a little bit louder this light. So let's see if we can increase it and see what it does when we go to 0.8. Okay. And we just get rid of the grid. There we go. Okay, that's cut it ice. I actually don't mind that at all. It looks pretty good. Okay. Excellent. So the reflection is not too heavy on the rocks, and there's just enough illumination, but it gives that kind of nice appeal to the whole scene. So let's just leave that as it is. So right, guy. So next thing is to add this particular setup to one of our existing sequences. So what we're going to do is we are going to open up one of the sequences and just pretty much replay this in the sequence. Now, the fact is that you've already created the sequence, so you don't need to recreate. You can just re record it. So what we're going to do is we're going to go to one of the original sequences, which is over here. Let's hit S first before we do anything else. We don't want to lose any of our good hard solid work. So, here it is. So this is the sequence that we recorded earlier, right? So what we're going to do is we're going to do the same thing, right, and just play the sequence with this setting, right? So we're going to hit we're going to go to the actor. There it is. So this is where the scene begins, right? And we're just going to hit Play and see how that looks like. Alright? Excellent. Let's have another play. Okay. I think that light on the lantern is a little bit too intense. So let's go out of the camera. So we're going to hit the eject button on the top left hand corner and go straight down to the lantern. We're going to pick that light and say, you are too intense. I love you, but we're going to drop you down to 0.6. Okay. To make it a little bit more subtle. Okay, now let's get rid of the Gs, get rid of the grids, get rid of the Gs, and let's go back into the camera and press play again. That's a little bit better. Okay, so after we re record the sequence and we save the MP four file, this is how it looks. We just need to do some more work with the other sequences so that we can capture the lighting changes. But this concludes this final session on filming and lighting. Thank you very much and bye for now. 21. Conclusion: Hi, everyone, and welcome. Welcome, welcome, welcome. As we draw the curtains on this course, let's take a moment and reflect. We've covered quite a bit of ground, and we have developed quite a few skills in this journey, and hopefully with an amazing outcome at the end, with a wonderful project that we can share with our friends and family and colleagues and also added to our portfolio. Together, we've navigated the complex, sometimes frustrating process of installing and configuring unreal engine. But we have to cross that bridge. We also touched on some of the basics of Unreal Engine, a topic very dear to me because I think it's very important to understand all the aspects of the tool that you're about to use. We ventured into the vast ocean of different plug ins. We've explored the water plug in, for example, and we simulated the aquatic environment. We've changed the type of water, the waves, the color configuration of texture. We even configured the shading as well that you get on the water to make a little bit more realistic. Also played around with the post production volume, which I believe is probably one of the most important plug ins you're going to use. And that particular actor, plain actor that we've added, IE, the process volume actor, that one there is very, very useful. It elevates the impactfulness of the entire visual effects. So you can introduce things like like lumen and modify all your configurations, your and yeah, so you can do a lot of really, really, really necessary things using the post process volume plug in. So then what we did is we journeyed over into the Unreal engine marketplace. We connected with Quicksaw Bridge. We pulled in HDRIs from Poly haven, and then we also dived into Adobe Mixamo, and we collected a bunch of characters. Some of them worked. Some of them didn't work. Again, depends on what you like. We can be very comedic, can go in a completely different way, or we can, you know, stick to the script and try to try to make sure that the original script, which is the original briefing of the project, matched what we needed to do. So we collected a character. We added the animation, we pulled it into Unreal Engine. We introduced those assets. And then once we had them, we associated the character and animation during the sequencing process, which was all around filming. So that was an interesting component to do and to achieve. So that was really, really exciting. Then dabbled in things like simple fog, the local and the global height fogs. So again, we could see what the fog does. It gives that sort of intensity and adds to the ambience of the entire scene, and, you know, it adds to the air of mystery and depth in the scene. So that was really, really cool. So we actually touched on that. We also went ahead and looked at various lighting aspects. We looked at lighting from CRI, atmospheric light, skylight, various light actors as well. And we saw how the lighting can change the mood, the emotion, and add to our storytelling. So we could see how the light and the ambience of the fog and the post process volume changes, together, how all of that works together in order to create a very interesting scene that we could film. And then came the act of filming, where we I looked at how the dance of the camera and the scene worked. We learned the intricate ballet of placing a camera within a sequence and patiently working our way through from one sequence to the next sequence, from one transformation location to the next transformation location. And all of that was very, very interesting and then how we were able to string it all together. And we also looked at why multiple cuts are very important. All of that gives you a lot of content. So when you do post production later on, you have a lot of material to work with. So your editing suit is now a treasure trove of cuts. That's how I like to say it. So when you've got a whole lot of carts, you can do a lot of things with your post production. When you have to go back and do another video or another sequence, it just tracks away from the post production process. The post production process is on its own, a process that can take some time and it's quite intense. So you have to think about music, sound effects, and also the visuals. So you don't want to detract and go back and do another filming. You want to basically do as much filming as you can. For these type of short films, 10-30 seconds is probably about right. Goes above 30 seconds, then you got to think about, okay, well, what am I doing here? Am I doing too much camera movement? Maybe I should stop that camera movement. Maybe I should do a different sequence to add to a different angle. My suggestion is always keep it under 60 seconds. But usually, a good place is 10-30 seconds. Keep it nice, short and sweet. Um, so this course may have concluded, but our journey has just begun. The virtual worlds are awaiting our touches and visions. So, guys, thank you for participating in this course. It was a thrill. I really hope that you were able to achieve an amazing project by the end of this. And I really hope you can send me a link and show me what you've done and how you've achieved all those little miracles along the way and what the end product looks like. So once again, thank you very much and bye for now. Bye. 22. Sample - Film Final Cut: Covered entry Log 2017 Sergeant Ricky Stenoski. In the dense underbrush of a war torn foreign jungle, the silence of the night was occasionally shattered by the distant thuds of artillery. It's not the bombs that worry me. There is something else. There is something different. The air was heavy thick and wet. Our covered hope had gone sideways, and now I found myself alone. I will put it forward, just not sure if it.