Unreal Engine 5: Open World Landscapes

1. Course Promo: Want to create breathtaking open world landscapes in Unreil Engine five. You're in the right place. No coating and no prior experience needed. Hi, I'm Greg Wondra, a game industry veteran with 12 years of experience, and I've been teaching Unreal Engine since 2016. Inside we'll cover how to build and sculpt landscapes from scratch. We'll learn how to paint textures like grass, rock, and snow onto that landscape. We'll add realistic foliage, rocks, and water. We'll create cinematic good rays for stunning visuals and so much more. This course is for everyone, whether you're just starting out or you're an experienced dev looking to refine your landscaping skills. Ready to bring your gaming worlds to life, we'll join the thousands of students who have already started their unreal engine journey with me. Let's create something incredible together. 2. Create Project: All right, we're going to go ahead and get started here, creating a brand new project from the Epic Games Launcher. So let's come under UnreL Engine along the left hand side. Along the top, we're going to choose Library. And as of today's date, we're going to create a project using Unreal Engine 5.5. Feel free to use the latest version of the engine. You can get new engine versions by clicking this plus button right up here. I'm going to click Launch. And after a bit of time, you will be presented with the unreal Project browser. Along the left hand side, let's go ahead and choose games. And for this project, we're going to be using the third person template. First person would probably be fine, as well, but let's go third person, and we are going to give our project a name, and that can be done in the lower right. So let's call this open world landscape. Open world landscape. It's not going to like white spaces here, and you get to choose a project location. Now, it's probably good practice to do it on one drive. My one drive sometimes has problems, so I'm going to save it on the desktop, and that'll be fine for me, but choose a location where you would like to save it. Then after that, go ahead, leave all these the same as they are by default. And let's go ahead and create. Now after what seems a little bit of a wait, you are presented with unreal engine. And let me just walk you through the interface a little bit here if you are new to this. In the upper right, you will see you have open world landscape. That's the name of your project right up there. Along the upper left, you've got various options. I'm going to come under window, and I'm going to load a layout right away. I'm going to do the UE four classic layout. This is the layout that I'm going to be rolling with for most of this project. I'm going to dismiss this new plugins available down here. We've got our view port right here. We are open automatically to the third person map down here. We've got our content browser, which is where we're going to be able to bring in various assets. And along the upper right, we've got our outliner panel. This lists all the various actors that make up our level. Whenever we select an object in our level, we have some details that we can change about it. Alright, so we've got our Unreal Engine project created. Now let's go about creating some landscapes. 3. Create Default Landscape: Welcome back. In this video, we are going to create our very first landscape. Actually, we're going to create two of them, and we're going to be creating and working on a variety of landscapes here just to show you some various options available to you. Currently, we are in this default third person map. I'm going to direct you to the File option right up here in the upper left. Clicking on File. We want to create a brand new level. Hot key for this is Control plus N. And when we click on that, it's going to give us the option to create a new level. Now, one of the options here that I will select is this open world option. So with that selected, go ahead and click Create. And you are going to find that you are given a landscape, along with a sky right from the get go here, which is pretty great. Now, this map is currently untitled. If I go to save it, I can give it a name and choose where I would like to save it down in my content browser. Soon as I click on that little save icon, it says, Okay, you'd like to save this level. Where would you like to save it? I'm going to save it in my starter content Maps folder and I'm going to give this a name right away, and I'm just going to call this default landscape. And I'll go ahead and save that. And you'll see that once I say that that's going to change the name of this file right up in the upper left to default landscape. Now, if I want to ensure that this is the landscape that I see, the next time I close out of my engine and then open it back up, I can go under settings, project settings. And I'm just going to dock my project settings along the top. If I go under maps in modes and I go to Editor Startup Map, I can change that from a third person map to my default landscape map, which I see right here in my listing. So I'll just change it to that. That'll ensure that the next time I open up unreal, it'll open it up to this map. Now, while we are here, I also want to point this out that because we created our project using a third person template here in our project settings, maps and modes, if I expand out my default game mode and selected game mode, when I go to play my game, I will be controlling this default pawn class. That is my BP third person character, just to show you where all this content lives in my content browser. If you click any of these folders right here and I'll click right here for my third person character. That'll show you that this third person content has been added to my content browser because that was my default project that I wanted to start, a third person project. And so this is a character that I will be controlling when I click Play. And when I click Play, I will spawn in right here at this player start actor. I'm not going to see this icon at all, but let's go ahead and give that a try just so you can see how this works. So I've just click Play. You can see how I've spawned into this landscape here and I can use the WAS and D keys to move around. And if I press Escape, I'll gain control of my mouse once again. I will have exited out. And just so you know, you can click Play right here, but these three dots right here, you can change your playback settings. Right now, I'm choosing to play in the selected Viewport. You can choose to play in a new Editor window as well, which I often like. So that's what that looks like. Alright? I'm going to go ahead and out here. Okay, so this is one way to go about creating a landscape. And if you look over in your outliner, you'll notice that we have a landscape asset. And if I click open this drop down triangle, this landscape asset consists of all these landscape streaming proxies. These are basically the parts of the landscape, and I just double clicked on one of that make up the entirety of the landscape. So if I'm holding down my right mouse button here in the Viewport, you can use WAS and D to fly around, score wheel in and out to change how fast you're flying around your level. So again, if I double click any of these landscape streaming proxies, you can see which section of the landscape that is referring to. We'll talk about these more in a little bit, but just know that you've got a landscape actor that consists of all these landscape streaming proxies. You'll also notice that we have a nice sky. When you create a brand new level, choosing this open world option, you automatically have these guys a directional light actor. I'm going to double click on that. That's going to act like your sunlight in the level. All of these icons right here are stacked atop one another. Let me just bring out my directional light actor. That's going to act like the sunlight, and you can see the sun right back there. If I hold down the Control and key, I can actually move my mouse around to control the sun back there, the angle of the sun you dip it below, it's going to be eternal darkness. Alternatively, if you rotate this actor, I'm just going to press the space bar to toggle between movement mode. It doesn't matter where you place this in the level. Rotate. And scaling mode, which isn't really going to matter here, you can rotate the direction of the sun as well. So control in L will allow you to control the angle of your sun here or tapping that space bar or the W E in arches, or any of these along the viewport will allow you to modify the location, rotation, and scale of a given actor. So that's the directional light actor. We've got an exponential height fog actor right here as well. You got some parameters that we can play around with that as well. Sky Atmosphere, skylight, sky sphere, volumetric Cloud. These all come along for the ride when you create a landscape, choosing the file new level open world option. Now again, we'll talk a little bit more about these later on, but this is one way you can go about creating a landscape. Now, in the next video, we're going to show how you can create a landscape from scratch. We'll see you there. 4. Create New Landscape: In this video, we are going to be creating a landscape from scratch, but I also wanted to show how we could dive back into our project once we have closed out of the Unreal editor. And so between videos here, I did close out of the editor by clicking on the X button in the far upper right of the Unreal Engine. Here in the Epic Games Launcher, I've got Unreal engine selected along the left. Selecting library along the top. Here is my open world Landscape project. Now, I'm seeing this preview because prior to recording this video, I was diving and doing a test run for what we're about to do here. You probably see a different image. That's fine. But there is my project. I'm going to double click on this to open it back up. And now you can see, once Unreal Engine is back open, it automatically opened my default landscape map asset. And the reason it did this is because in our project settings, I went to maps and modes, and it automatically opened up whatever I had slotted as my editor startup map here, the default landscape. And by the way, if I click on this folder, it'll show that this is an actual level asset that lives in this Maps folder here in the content browser. Okay, so I showed how we could create a map by coming under file, new level, and choosing this open world option. That's what this world is back here right now. But what if we really wanted to start from scratch? What if we chose this empty open world option? So let's go ahead and do this and then click Create. And now all we see is a black void, and we have, once again, an untitled level. Well, what we need to do here is under our modes menu in the far upper left, we need to check and open up the landscape mode, which is shift into to get into that. Now, landscape mode does consist of several tabs here. We've got a managed tab, a sculpt tab, and a paint tab, and we will be talking about all these. But by default, it's going to open it to manage, and it's going to be prompting us to create a brand new level. Now, we've got two different ways that we can create a landscape, create new and import from file. We will be doing an import from file in the next video, but for this one, we are going to be creating brand new. We're going to leave these options as default here at the top, enable edit layers. Yes. Keep that checked. For material, this is going to be the default surface type, if you will, that we want on our landscape. Now, there is a material in our starter content. If I go under materials, these are like the coat of paint that you can apply to surfaces. And I like this ground grass. So if I select this, I can drag and drop this right up here into this slot. Alternatively, I could have clicked right here and found it by searching for. But let's go ahead and populate our initial landscape here with grass. We've got some scale settings that we're going to leave alone right now, and now we've got these other settings here known as section size, section per component, number of components, et cetera. Now, if I zoom way on back, I see a preview of what we're about to create. Now if you change some of these options, you'll see essentially what they are set up to do, and I'm zoomed way out. Now, as you can see, number of components, eight by eight, you can see one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight squares by eight squares. That refers to this number of components right here. Sections per component, one by one, and you've got two by two different ways to kind of divvy up how you're going to create your landscape, number of components. You know, you could change one to be bigger than the other, so you could have a really long landscape like this. I'm going to go with all the default options right here. And then I'm going to go ahead and click Create. Now, once I do that, I have transitioned out of this landscape managed mode into landscape sculpt mode. Now, in a few videos time here, we are going to talk about sculpting mode in ways we can terraform our landscape. But I want to deal with the next thing here, which is how do we add a sky to our level? Currently, all I see in my outliner is a landscape. We just added one. And if I click this dropdown triangle, you can see I've got these landscape streaming proxies, and if I double click on them, it shows where these various landscape streaming proxies exist here in the landscape asset itself. But now let's go ahead and address how do we get a sky out here? Well, the quickest way to do that is to come under a window, and we've got this option for ENV Light Mixer. That stands for environment Light Mixer. And if we just bring on this window, it's real simple. We've got some buttons right here to create a skylight, directional light sky atmosphere, volumetric cloud and height fog. So we can just click on each of these, one, two, three, four and five. And now you can see, we've got a sky. You can choose to leave this panel on or not. Sometimes I like to dock it down next to my content browser. And now for each of these various actors, a directional light, skylight, et cetera, you can see that they are now all added here in my outliner, and I can adjust various parameters about them here in my Environment Light Mixer. I'm not going to do that now. We can do another video on that later on. But you'll notice that right now, these are grade out here in my outliner, and that's because I am currently in landscape mode. If I did want to double click on them and select them, I would have to transition out of landscape mode back into selection mode, which is shift in one. That is our default mode here. So if I do that, then I could say, double click on one of these actors. Let's double click on my directional light actor. And these are all stacked atop one another. Let me just lift it up into the air by left clicking on it. And so there you can see, once again, I could tap the space bar to rotate it. There's my sun. Or, once again, Control and L and moving my mouse is a more elegant way to move that sunlight around. Alright, great. So this is a second way to create a landscape and a way to create one from scratch. Let's go ahead and save this level. So I'll click this save button in the far upper left right up here. I'll save it in that same maps folder, and I'm going to call this created landscape. And go ahead and click Save here as well. Right? In this video, we created a landscape and Sky from scratch. In the next video, I will show how we can go about importing a landscape from somewhere in the world. Before we finish out this video, however, let's show how we can save our project. If you come under file in the far upper left. Choosing to save all Control Shift and S is something I like to get students in a habit of doing. So make sure you go ahead and do that and we'll see you all in the next video. 5. Import Landscape: Welcome back. In this video, our goal is to create and import a height map to instantly recreate the contours of a real world landscape. Now, this is a good, sort of cheaty way to get a quick start on creating a landscape, a realistic looking one. And to facilitate this discussion, we need to talk about what the heck a height map is that I just referenced earlier. Well, a height map is something that looks like this. This may look familiar to you. Australia a height map is simply a gray scale image which is used to generate three D terrain, and it uses the pixel colors to determine the topography. So the way this works is when you import an image such as this into unreal, the whiter the pixel, the higher the elevation. So these would be the high parts of Australia. The blacker the pixel, the lower the elevation. So you can see the surrounding area of the ocean would be the lowest portion. Now you've got some various shades of gray in between, so the whiter the white, the higher the high, the blacker the black, the lower the low. Now, instead of importing in this one, we're going to actually sample a real portion of the world, so you get to customize this a little bit. Let me go ahead and minimize this. And for this, I like to use a website called tan Gram Height Mapper. Using your left mouse button, you can pan around, scroll wheel to Zoom on up and we're going to sample a real world section of the globe. Now I live in the United States, so I'm going to come somewhere in the southern California region where I'm at right now, and I live somewhere around here in Bakersfield, California. And here's the Mount Whitney area, the highest of high area in the United States. And I live in the central Valley in the smog Valley so that'll be the lows of low. Now to sample this, and this is a pretty good section, get some highs, some lows. All we need to do is export this image. So there's an Export button right over here. Click on that, and as soon as we click on that, it's going to download that. And I can navigate to where this is on my computer by simply clicking on this folder. And let me just bring that on, and so my image should look like this. You'll notice this is a PNG file. Double clicking on this. You can see my sampling that it just exported. Alright, so now let's bring this into Unreal. G to out here real quickly. Move this off to the side, bring on Unreal. And I'll create a brand new map here, so file new level, go to go to empty open world and create and to get to landscape mode, we're going to come under selection mode. Landscape, shifting two would get you there. And before we had created a new landscape by having this selected. This time we're going to ensure that under landscape managed new, we're going to import from file right here. Now I'm going to clear out the sample image that I had prior to recording this. And I'm going to slot in. I'm going to search for that file that I just exported from Tangram clicking on these three dots. There is my height Map. And I'll leave everything here the same as before. However, I am going to be customizing the scale. Now, by default, this scale is 100. Prior to shooting this video, I did a dry run. I want to set this to 20 because I found that when I import some images like this, a Z height that is scaled to 100 is rather extreme, way too extreme. So I'm going to set this to 20. I'll leave the material as ground grass. Everything else here I'm going to leave the same. I'll automatically generate a height resolution there for you, go ahead and click Import. Now it's going to ask me to save this, so I will call this California. That's going to be my map name in the Maps folder. And it's going to take a moment here to import this height Map. Now, as soon as that's finished, we can't see anything here for a couple of reasons. First, being, we don't have any light. So using our environment Light Mixer, and if you don't have this tab open from earlier in the course, come under Window Environment Light Mixer to turn that panel on. I'm going to add my skylight, my directional light, sky atmosphere cloud and fog I still don't see anything, though, and that's because over in my outliner, if I expand out that landscape that I had just imported, all of my landscape streaming proxies here are unloaded. So I'm going to jump temporarily out of landscape mode, go back into selection mode. So that way, I can select my very first streaming proxy here in the outliner, select that, scroll on down, hold down the Shift key, and then I'm going to select this last one. All these are listed as unloaded. So now all I need to do is right click and I'm going to force load. And now you can see what the train roughly looks like. Again, this isn't going to be perfect. It's going to need a little bit of massaging, if you will. But this is essentially what I have just imported. Let me just click off of here so you can see that a little bit better. And I'll kind of compare this with that image that I just sampled. Not Australia, but rather let me bring this off. So there you go. You can see the low spots right here, the Central Valley of California, that is expressed right here, and the higher mountain range, the Sierra Nevadas, that is expressed right here in my map. So does a pretty good job. Once again, this is just meant to serve as a starting point. But you'll also find some flaws here as well. You'll see some stuff such as this. We can get rid of that, and we will do so in an upcoming video or two here, but it's not a bad starting point. Now, just to show you how you can re scale this, if I was to go ahead and select in my outliner, the landscape itself, you see here, we've got our scale setting set to 20. If I had left that at 100, let me just set that to 100 and press Enter. You're going to get something that looks way too extreme. So I find that playing with that Z setting will give you a much more accurate depiction of what this would actually look like. Play around with that to get the terrain as bumpy or is not as you'd like. And so there you have it. We have just imported in a height map to help us get started in creating a landscape. Not a bad sort of cheaty way to get a head start. Now, there's going to be one final way I'm going to show you how you can get a working landscape going for you in Unreal. But before we get to that video, we need to talk about world Ptition in the next one. We'll see you there. 6. World Partition: Welcome. Before I show you one more way to get in and working with a landscape in Unreal, I thought it would be appropriate to talk about world partition and its role with landscapes in Unreal Engine. Now, those of you that are a little bit more astute may have noticed in the last video that I had a couple of tabs over on the right hand side next to my details panel here, a world settings tab and a world partition tab. We're going to be diving into these a little bit in this video, but I want to show how to get these panels on since this is going to be the focus of this video. So to find a world partition and world settings tab, couple of ways you can get your world settings tab, you can either come under settings and choose world settings right from here in the upper right alternatively, if you come in the upper left under Window, you can find world settings right there. You can see it's checked on, meaning, it is in our editor here. And the world partition tab that we're going to be working with a little bit here, you can get that by coming under world Partition world partition Editor. Now, once you've got a layout for your editor here that you're really happy with, by the way, you can save your layout by saving your layout as, and then the next time you come into Unreal, you could load your layout. So I saved one as Greg's layout. And so whenever I come in and I want to load my layout, just come under here. Reg's layout. So there's a nice little tidbit of information. Alright. So world Partition is the automatic data management and distance based level streaming system in Unreal. And the way this system works is it stores our world in a single persistent level file. And then it subdivides the space into streamable grid cells. Now, to really show this off, I'm going to jump into a new level that we created earlier, the California level that we left off last video. And I can actually jump to that by coming under file recent levels, and there's my California level. It's a brand new day, so I jump back into this default level by start. So here I am in California, my imported landscape, if you will, and I don't see anything. So the first thing to point out here is when you come into a level such as this and you don't see anything, come under your outliner. Look at your landscape. There it is. Let's break out this into its subdivided components. So these are the landscape streaming proxies. These are all these sections of landscape that it automatically divided our landscape into. And you can see that they are all unloaded. Now, if I come under world partition, I can see that I've got these two landscape region actors. These are these landscape region actors right here. Now, in world partition, I can hold down the right mouse button to kind of pan around like this, scroll wheel in and out. And an easy way to get all these landscape streaming proxies to load in so that we see something is you can left click and drag right here in your world partition window, left click and drag around everything and then simply right click and do Load region from selection. And as soon as you do that, Boom, all your landscape streaming proxies now appear. Now, if you're wondering where each of these landscape streaming proxies actually exist in the greater context of your landscape, in your outliner, if you simply come along the left hand side next to each streaming proxy, you can click this eyeball icon, toggle it on or off to see where exactly that exists. Like so. Like, so. What I really want to show off in this video is how these landscape streaming proxies stream in or out based upon your distance from them. So I'm going to use the right mouse button and W A S and D, and I'm going to scroll wheel up while I'm doing this so I fly faster. Scroll wheeling back will make you fly slower. It changes that value in the upper right, by the way, while you're doing that. I'm coming to a far end of my landscape here. Now, if I was to simulate my game and I can do that right here, Alton S will simulate it as well. You can see how only this section of the landscape is in. And as I kind of fly on down here, new sections, new patches of my landscape appear, and they appear as I get closer to them. So that's how the streaming system works. Now, why does it work this way? Well, for this, we're going to dive into our project settings. Let me quit out of here really quickly. If I go under my project settings, you can access that by coming under Window, sorry, rather edit project settings. And we come under maps and modes. Now, the pawn, the character that we are controlling in our level, if we were to play, is this third person character. And the player controller that is associated with that is right here, this player controller right here. Now, player controller blueprints attach themselves to a player pawn, just as a player pawn, you could think of, like, a puppet. Think of the player controller class as the puppet strings that's attached to it. Inside of this blueprint, there are some checkboxes related to this whole world partition setup. And just to show this off further, I'm going to go into the player class and section here and I'm going to create a new player controller, clicking on this plus button. And I will store this, I guess, in my third person Blueprints folder, and I'm just going to call this PC for player Controller. Underscore my player Controller. And press Save. And inside of this player controller class blueprint, let me just dock this along the top. If I've got class defaults selected right here and I simply type in world at the very top, we can see that this player controller by default is enabled as a streaming source. So once again, think of the player controller as the puppet strings that control your pawn, your character. So it is automatically associated and connected to your character. So wherever your character goes, this comes along for the ride, even though you don't see anything visually. So this serves as our streaming source. That box is checked. So wherever our character goes, that's essentially our streaming source for what sections of the landscape are going to be streamed in or out based upon our character's proximity to them. Go ahead and say this quickly. And inside of our project settings, we can see this player controller now associated with our project. Let me go back into my level. And now I want to show how we can manipulate the range at which we see some patches of our landscape here, the various landscape streaming proxies. Now, for this, you can come under the world Settings tab. And inside of here, we've got a whole section for world partition setup. And as you can see, enabled streaming is turned on, as it is when you create a landscape or import a landscape. It will be by default. Now, we've got this show grid preview checkbox right down here. Let's go ahead and turn this on and down below, you can set a debug color. So let me set it to something very bright, like a bright green, something like that, and click Okay. If I fly up high here, I'm going to go a bird's eview. See that white dot? That is essentially right below where my camera is here. And if I flying up, you see a couple of things. That halo, there is my range. It's a little bit tough to see, but I'm trying to circle it with my mouse cursor here. So that is my loading range right here. So whatever that touches, it's going to stream in those sections, those landscape streaming proxies. So whatever it touches. So you can see it barely touches this patch right here, but it will load that in as it will for this, but it doesn't quite touch that, so it's not going to load that in. Now, if I fly on down, and I go ahead and simulate my game. I could play it as well, but simulating is a little bit easier to see this. I should see that I see up to this portion where my mouse cursor is of my landscape. And anything beyond here I should not see. It should be streamed out. So here we go. And you can see it actually touched a little bit of the corner right there. Anything beyond that line right there is streamed out. And as I kind of fly forward, new sections will stream in as I get in proximity to them. Now, you can change this range, obviously. So if you wanted to make it so that things load in from a further range, just increase this loading range right down here. You can put your mouse cursor down here and expand it out like so. Or you can simply punch in a new number so I could punch in a number like 80,000 right down there. And now you can see if I simulate my game. It's got a little bit more distance before that lands streams in or out. Now, this is good for keeping your game running performantly. So that begs the question, how performant is our game running? Well, I'm going to go ahead and stop the game here. You can actually show your frames per second by clicking right up here in your viewport, and you've got this show FPS. Let's go ahead and turn that on. And when that's on in our Viewport, you can see your frames per second right here. I like to have that on. When you simulate your game, you can see how it's affecting things. Go ahead and stop here. Now, what do you do about those landmarks that you want to appear no matter what? I mean, what if I had some giant tower, like in Breath of the Wild that I didn't want it to stream out? What could I do about a situation like that? Well, I'm gonna place an actor way over on this other end of my landscape right now. Let me just bring in a basic shape. Gonna go with a basic cube. Let me just drop this on down here. And with that selected, right now, it's super tiny, I'm going to hit the R key on my keyboard to bring on my scaling tool, and I'm just gonna make it super big. And Super Tom just gonna grab that handle. And I will tap the W K back up here and put this way up high. So now you can see my streaming range, that greenish area, if you will, doesn't reach as far as that tower. So if I was to simulate, that tower streams out, as well. How can I make it so that that tower is immune to this loading range? Well, there is a way to do that. Go ahead and click Stop here. If I have that actor selected, cube, and I go to my details panel and I type in load I can uncheck This is spatially loaded. Now, by default, whenever you place an actor in any of these landscape streaming proxies, it'll stream in or out based upon if the landscape streaming proxy it is on is streamed in or out. I can have this ignore it by unchecking this. And now what'll happen is if I simulate my game, that'll appear, even though the landscape streaming proxy itself beneath it has disappeared because it's not streamed in yet. Now, if I was to check this box, it is spatially loaded, I turn that back on again and simulate my game. I can see it disappears. Check it back out, Simulate. I reappears. So that's essentially the basics of world partition and how the streaming system works. Your playable character has a player controller blueprint associated with that. And this association with this enabled streaming source is basically going to load in those sections of landscape based upon if you are within range of those. And again, you can set your range right here from the world settings. Show that grid and set your range. Now, a few more things here about world partition before we end this video, I'm going to go ahead and click on his tab once again. Your arrow right down here. See that arrow right there. That represents you as you fly around. So this is good to know. As you can see, it's going to pivot around as you fly around your map. It's good to know. If you were to right click in any section of your map here, you could play from here or move your camera here. Play from here. I'll play from that exact spot. You can see over in your world partition tab over there, I've now turned into an orange arrow as I'm pivoting my camera around. You can click, double left click anywhere to jump immediately to that section of your world. And I also want to point out here that in my world partition, if I had something like that cube selected, I could click on this button to focus on that selection. I'll jump right where it is. You've also got some other options here, like a show button where you can show grid coordinates. I don't find this super useful, but it labels different coordinates in your level. These don't actually associate with these numbers. You can also show your mouse coordinates, which I do find handy once in a while. And you've also got this build option right here. Build World Partition Editor Minimap is a nice thing to do, and I will do it to end this video. Now the reason I save this for last is because this can take a little bit of time. And what it does is instead of this sort of ugly looking view, it'll actually make this into a nice looking minimap that reflects your landscape here. So I'll finish the video off here. Go ahead and do that, as well, and that will finish up our discussion on world partition. See you all in the next video. 7. Pre Built Landscape: Alright, welcome back. Up to this point in the course, I've shown a few different ways that we can go about creating a landscape. We had the file new level option, and we created an open world, and that's our default landscape that you see in the background here. We also went and created a landscape by going into landscape mode, and we explored the two ways in here in landscape manage mode. Under the new option, you can create new. And that was our created landscape level right here. And we also imported one from a file, and that was our California level. Go back and view those videos if you want to see those methods on how to create a landscape. In this video, we're going to show off one more way to create a landscape. And really, I shouldn't say create because we're going to be cheating a little bit by using a pre existing one, and that's fine, especially when you're getting used to all the landscape and foliage tools. So we're going to be adding a content pack to show you how you can work with a pre built landscape and here in our content browser, we want to open up something called the fab tab. Now, you see this here in my content browser. If you don't see this little button right down here, what you want to do is come under Edit, plugins, and you want to search for fab now, fab plugin is where you can go to add all kinds of additional content to your projects. So with this checked, if it's not already, you can check it, and down here, it may prompt you to restart it. If it's already checked and it's not prompting you for a restart, you're good to go. But if it's not checked, check it and restart your engine. What that'll do is it will add this fab button to your content browser. And when you click on that, it'll open up a brand new tab. Now, within this tab, we're going to be searching for a content pack, and the name of this is going to be MW Landscape and I'll search for that. And it's gonna be this guy right here. It's gonna be called MW Landscape Auto Material. And I can just zoom on that a little bit, so if you want to see the name of it, that's what it's going to be called right there. So what I'm going to be showing you in this video is how to work with a preexisting landscape. Now, if this content pack is not available at the time of your viewing this, I'm sure there will be other content packs that will do similar to what we're going to be demonstrating right here. Now, once you have added this content pack or found this content pack within fab, the way you get this into your content browser is by clicking on it, you can click on add to Project. And then in doing so, it'll begin to add those project files to your content browser. You should see a little progress bar appear in the lower right. So I'll go ahead and initiate this now. And you can see it's starting to add this to this project. I have this added to another project, and I'll rejoin you after this is completed. Okay, with that now completed back in my content browser, I can see that I've got this MW landscape automateial folder, and inside of this, there's going to be more folders. I'm going to jump to the map folder inside of here, and here are some preexisting levels that you can use as a starting point for your own landscape. You've got a mountain range, an island and a desert, and I'll just go inside of the mountain range, double clicking on this. I'm not going to save any of what I've got here going on my default landscape. I didn't really make any changes. Okay, we can see that the map has finished loading up in the background. I'm just going to clear out of this error message for now, so clicking on this X button. Now, let's just poke around and see what we've got here. I'm just going to peel this down holding down the right mouse button. I'm going to press the E key on the keyboard just to rise up. And as you can see, it's quite a beautiful looking landscape right out of the box. Now, I want to point out how this is constructed and some things you need to know about if you want to work with this as your base landscape. For starters, note that in the outliner, we have currently just one landscape actor, and it's selected right here and you can see it outlined there in yellow. And you may be wondering, well, what the heck is all those mountains I'm seeing beyond that patch of highlighted yellow right there? Well, these are actually static meshes right up above. And so if I was to click on each of those individually, you can see how these have been placed individually, and they've been sort of melded into the scene to create a sort of seamless look. And so if we were to hide all of these static meshes, let me just hold down Shift and left click. And hide them by clicking on these eyeball icons. You can see that the only actual landscape actor itself is this guy right in the middle. All the rest are kind of meant as background scenery. Now, that is going to be really handy information to know when we start talking about landscape, sculpting and painting. Because these are static mesh actors, we cannot sculpt or paint these particular actors, at least not using the landscape tools. And for that, we're going to be working with just this section right in here. So just note that static mesh actors, they are different from landscape actors. The landscape actors, which this course is focused on, we can do things to this that we cannot do with these static mesh actors that are used mainly just for background ambience. Now, one thing that is similar to the other landscapes that we have built thus far, as simple as they may be, is that this uses the lighting system here in Unreal. We've got a directional light actor, exponential height fog, we've got sky atmosphere, skylight, volumetric cloud, all the things you can find in your environment light mixer tab. And once again, the way we got that with our other landscapes was clicking under Window Environment Light Mixer, then those were simply buttons that you clicked to add to your level. Now, one thing you may notice that is different about this landscape versus the other ones thus far is we don't have any landscape streaming proxies underneath it. In fact, if you look under the world partition tab, it says, World Partition is disabled for this map. So how do we turn this into a world partition? Well, if I come under tools here in the far upper left, in the tools Dropdown, we've got at the very bottom Convert level. So if we click on this, we need to search for that map inside of our MW Landscape Auto material folder. Under Maps, there's my Landscape Mountain Range example. Click Open. And then in this dialog that pops up, let's just say convert in place. Check that box and click Okay, and then save. And so after having done that convert level, my engine crashed, and as I got back into my level editor here, I went back into file recent levels and got back into my Mountain Range example. Now I can see World Partition has some stuff down here, but a lot of it is unloaded right now. So let's go ahead and load this in, including all of our landscape streaming proxies. So I'm going to select this first one. Hold down Shift and select the bottom one, right click on that, and I'm going to force load. Right. And now I've got a landscape subdivided into streaming proxies. Now my mountain static meshes are currently unloaded, so I'm going to try to load those in as well, select, hold down ship and choose that one. Then I'll right click and try to force load these as well. And if you see anything else here, you can force load those in once again. I've got a color checker here, which I'm not even sure what that is. But that's another way. Alternatively, down here in World Partition, what we could have done is just zoomed on back, left clicked, dragged. And then we could have done a load region from selection. I'm going to go ahead and say this right away by coming under file, and I like to save all Control, Shift and S is the hot key for doing that. Get to know that guy right there. Control Shift ins. And one thing I will do between videos here is I am going to come under World partition and build, and I want to build that minimap because I like to see something a little bit more graphic. But now, before I end this video, I actually want to jump out to my file recent levels, my California level, where I did build that minimap in between some videos, and I'm not sure if I showed you the result of that, so I'm just going to hop back into there quickly. And I can see what this minimap currently looks like. Now, this is a pretty boring looking minimap simply because we don't have a whole lot of character to this minimap outside of let me just double click here. So undulations right there. Like, we've got very little color variety in here. But that's to come in the upcoming videos where we are going to start to get into sculpting our landscape and painting our landscape. Before we do that, we've got one more video here on working with landscape creation, adding and deleting sections. So we'll see you over in the next video. 8. Add & Delete Sections: Welcome back. In this video, I'm going to show how you can add or delete sections of your landscape. And for this one, I'm going to be working inside of my California level, my imported landscape, although this lesson will apply to any created landscape that you have. So here's the deal. You've imported in a landscape such as this, and maybe you've got some unsightly areas such as this over here. Doesn't look like much. How can you get rid of this? Well, you can get rid of this by coming into landscape mode. Right up in the upper left clicking on this drop down or shift and two will get you into landscape mode. And the reason I'm throwing this lesson here is because we've been talking about landscape creation and all that's done under the managed tab. And in this managed tab, we also have the ability to add or delete sections of our landscape. I'm going to start off with delete here. So by selecting this, if I now mouse over on top of my landscape, you can see how I have this orangish square. Deleting it's easy, simply left click. Left click. Left click Delete. Now, you can actually make your brush size here a little bit bigger in the details. It says my brush size is one. But if I was to set this to say two, press Enter. It makes it a little bit bigger so you can delete out larger sections. Now, it doesn't have to be over the entirety of the landscape. You can have part your brush size over the landscape. Like, right now, I've got half of it. Left click, it'll delete out sections like so. So adding is done in much the same way. So instead of deleting, just click Add, and you can alter your brush size to be bigger or smaller. This is done in squares sections. I usually like to keep this at a brush size of one. And as you kind of go over the edge of your landscape, you'll see this green preview up here, all you got to do is just left click to add to your landscape. You'll notice that I need to be next to an existing section of landscape. I can't just kind of come out in the empty void here, so it's got to connect to something. And again, you can set your landscape brush size here for your add to be a little bit bigger to add many sections at once if you like. And there you have it. There is adding and subtracting sections of your landscape. Just be sure to save after you've done so. That'll do it all for this one, guys. See you in the next one. 9. Sculpting Overview: Welcome. In this video, we are briefly going to talk about sculpting mode within the Unreal Engine Landscape toolset. Now to do this, I obviously need to be in landscape mode. So here we go. Shift two will get you in there if you forgot how to kick the engine into landscape mode. And within landscape mode, we are presented with three different tabs up at the top here. We've got a managed tab where we have created landscapes and added and deleted sections. Sculpting tab is where you want to go to find various tools to terraform your landscape. That is to raise and lower it, to create mountains, valleys, that kind of thing. Although I should say these sculpting tools are not great for creating mountains. Hills are a much better use of these sculpting tools. Now, we'll demonstrate some of these sculpting tools in greater depth in the next video, but this is going to give a quick overview of how this essentially works. So let me just back up here. It's worth pointing out that these landscape sculpting tools, these will only work on a landscape actor, any of these landscape streaming proxies. Once again, this landscape auto material, this mountain range, this consists of a landscape with landscape streaming proxies right here in the middle, and it's surrounded by these various mountaine static mesh actors, these guys on the perimeter. So these landscape sculpting tools cannot affect these static mesh actors. Now, we've only got one landscape actor in our level here, and thus it knows that this is the landscape that we are looking to sculpt. If we had a second or a third landscape out here, you would see another option here for which landscape actor you're looking to sculpt. But here's your various tools. Your base one is the sculpting tool. And the way this works is you've got this little spotlight icon, if you will, and this represents your sculpting brush. And to raise the landscape, all you need to do is hold down your left mouse button. And you can vary how quickly it raises the landscape here by adjusting your tool strength in the left hand column over here. Bigger numbers equal greater results. And while I'm here, I also want to point out that we've got a brush size. You can see the size of my spotlight right there was rather small. You can actually increase this as well by sliding this over to the right. Now, it looks like this is the maximum size. And again, I'm just holding down the left mouse button to raise a terrain. However, you can actually punch in a bigger number. In fact, if I was to click in this field, I could put in a value. I always go with 70,000, then press Enter, and that shows you the actual maximum size of your brush, something rather huge. So if you left click, you can raise up a whole section of terrain at one time. Not very much recommended. I'll just do Control Z to undo that little bit of sculpting there. And I'm going to set my brush size back down smaller. Now, you see I'm clicking in this brush size field over on the left hand side, and I'm sliding it to the left and right. You've also got some hot keys that will do this as well. So let me just kind of spotlight my brush right here and show you that if you hold down any of the bracket keys, these are the bracket keys directly to the right of the P key on your keyboard, you can increase or decrease the size of your brush. Now with this sculpting brush, holding down the left mouse button raises the terrain and holding down shift and left clicking will lower the terrain. You're going to find that holding down the left mouse button and then holding down shift and left mouse buttoning with these various tools do the opposite kinds of things. Now, one more thing I wanted to talk about briefly here before I ended this video, all these various tools have a tool strength and a brush size. Let's talk about this brush fall off, as well. Now, what we've got here with my brush is two different circles, the inner circle and the outer circle. The inner circle is where the brush will do its effect to 100% of what it's meant to do. In this case, if I hold down the left mouse button, it's going to raise the terrain. From the edge of the inner circle to the edge of the outer circle, that effect is going to taper off. So if I just hold down the left mouse button right here, you can see how it raises the terrain right there in the middle, but how it fell off towards the perimeter. Now, you can change this fall off effect by once again clicking in here and dragging you can see if you go with the value of like 0.9, now you've got a very small center of full effect and a large fall off. So holding down left mouse button, you've got a little bit more gentle of a slope. Like so. Whereas, if I come to some other terrain right here, I'm going to change my brush fall off to be much smaller. In fact, I'll make it so that there's none at all. When there's none at all, essentially the circles overlap, and now if I left click, you can see it's got a very drastic effect going all the way to the edge. I don't necessarily recommend that. Setting these back to their default value is as simple as clicking on these back buttons here, and that is a quick primer of sculpting mode within unreal. In the next video, we'll talk more specifically about what each of these various tools can do. We'll see you there. 10. Sculpting Tools: Alright, welcome back. In this video, we are going to be talking about the various sculpting tools available to you here in landscape mode. Now, it is a different day from when I last recorded the previous video. And when I went back into Unreal, I got this message here in my landscape auto material level. If you get something like this error message like this, the way you can fix this is simply by clicking on this save modified landscape link, and you will get a pop up such as this thing like, Yeah, do you want to save this? Say save selected? And then you should be good to go. So let's go ahead and exit out of here. Now, I'm going to be doing most of my demonstrations here in my landscape automial Mountain Range world. And I'm simply gonna be doing this because as I sculpt the landscape, it's going to make it look kind of cool because this landscape has a specialized material associated with it. Now, we haven't gotten to landscape materials yet, and we will but know that as we are sculpting this landscape, because of the material associated with this landscape, and I'll just show you this briefly. This is the landscape material applied to this. That's the coat of paint on our landscape. It's automatically going to apply rock, snow, grass, that kind of thing, depending on the slope, the height, that sort of thing. All we are focused upon within this video is simply how to terraform our landscape. That is to raise and lower the landscape, the various tools associated with that. Now, if I jump back out of landscape mode and go into selection mode before I get started here, it is worth mentioning that, again, this whole level does not consist of a landscape actor. I cannot sculpt this entire level. And once again, you can see this by selecting your landscape here in your outliner and all the streaming proxies. And I'm in selection mode, so I'm going to hold down Shift left click. And now you can see the sculptb portion of this level. All the rest of this level consists of static mesh actors. These mountains, the ones that are highlighted here in yellow, and they kind of blend together, I cannot sculpt. Only this middle portion here. Okay, so jumping back into landscape mode, I'll do Shift and two to jump directly back into that right there. And I'm going to start off with my flattened tool first. I'm going to go a little bit out of order. So that's going to be this guy right up here. Flatten tool. Let's go ahead and select that guy. And with this tool, wherever you initially click in the landscape, it will flatten it to that level. So if I was to left click on top of this snowy plateau, and let me just increase the size of my brush by pressing the bracket keys, the right bracket key on my keyboard, you can see I increase my brush size. If I begin left clicking right here and I hold down left click using the default tool strength, it is going to automatically flatten all the terrain around it. If I was to sample a lower section of the landscape, like, say, down in this valley here and hold down left click, it'll flatten it to that landscape. Now, the reason it is showing water is because the way this material is designed at a certain level, when you flatten the terrain, it'll automatically turn it into water. I'll reveal more the details about how that works when we get to talking about landscape materials. So a couple of other wrinkles that you'll want to know about when working with the flattened tool, you can actually specify height that you flattened to by checking this box for flattened target and then specifying a height in unreal units that you'd like to flatten towards. So if I type in a value like 5,000 here, press Enter. Now as I mouse over my landscape here, you see this little cloud up above it. And if you look really closely, let me just zoom on up right there, you can see that that is the preview of the height that I would flatten to. So with that flattened target, if I left click right now, you're going to see it's going to automatically flatten to that value height. Okay, now I'm going to uncheck that. Another little wrinkle that I like to use here is use slope flatten. So if I check this, and I was to find a slope that I would like to sample, I can flatten to that slope angle. So if I come over here something like this and I left click right about here at that slope angle, you can see how it's going to flatten it to that angle, which is pretty nice, indeed, if you want to have a little bit of a mountain ridge. Okay, the next tool I'm going to jump to here is the noise tool right here. And this is a great tool to use if you just want to add some random undulations to your landscape. Now I'm going to make my brush size bigger than what is seemingly the max value here, even though it looks like that is the maximum value that I can put in for the brush size, if you were to punch in a number like, say, 50,000, then press Enter, and I will 50,000. It'll actually make it that size. Now, with the noise tool, you get to decide how much strength that you want with this. The bigger the strength, the more the noise. And this is going to add some random undulations. If we have noise mode as both, it'll randomly undulate it up and down. You can also noise it up, which is add or subtract, which is down. So I'm going to do both here. Try to find a spot kind of in the middle here and simply left click one time. And you can see how it wrinkled it up there a little bit, random undulations. And if you go a lot more extreme, let me crank up my tool strength here to one and left click a couple times. You can see that you get some really wacky results very quickly. Now, you can do Control Z if you don't like what you just did with your last brush stroke or two here. Once again, the noise tool is great for adding some random undulations. Now, if the undulations are too extreme, you can bring on your smooth tool right up here. And I like to set most of these tools to their default value, so I will 0.3. And let me just set my brush size down to something much smaller like that. This is great for smoothing out rough areas. It's a little bit too jaggy. So fuse to left click right about here and smooth this out, you can see it is going to smooth out the entire landscape. And again, you can have more or less of an effect if you increase or decrease that tool strength. Okay, the next tool I'm going to jump to here is going to be this hydro erosion tool. Let me bring on an image here to show you what the hydro erosion tool can do for you. This is a picture of a real world landscape, and you can see that this mountain is carved with water over many, many, many years, rain falling atop it, and then draining down, filtering down through these channels, cutting these grooves into the side of a mountain. Now, that's essentially what the hydro erosion tool can do here in Unreal. Now, you won't see much of an effect using this particular brush. If you try to use it over relatively flat terrain, I like to say that this tool is good for accentuating the cuts, the grooves that already exist inside of your mountain. I like to say that this tool exists to accentuate the grooves that are already cut into the side of your landscape. So let me just try to find an area of my landscape here that has some undulations, some grooves and whatnot. And with my hydro erosion tool selected, and most of these are pretty much their default values. Let me just shrink down the brush size a little bit. I'm actually going to increase the tool strength here, maybe just a little bit more. And now if I was to hold down the left mouse button, you can see how it's cutting in these channels, these grooves into the side of the mountain. Now, you've got a few other settings here that are meant to increase the amount of simulated rain that falls on the landscape and whatnot, the iterations, all meant to accentuate the amount of rain that is falling on the mountain and creating these channels. But I find the default settings pretty good outside of the tool strength. That's the only one you ever really seem to need to use. Now, you can overdo it a little bit with this brush, so I try not to use it too much because it can make your landscape a little hard for a character to navigate, but it is there to be used if you like. Next, I'm going to come over to the erosion tool and I'm going to set my tool strength back to its default value there. Now, this is really good for transferring a higher portion of your landscape to the lower portions of your landscape. However, you get to decide how exactly it is transferred. You've got this noise mode setting underneath your erosion tool and you've got the option to lower rays or both. I usually like both when I'm transferring some soil, if you will, some ground from one area to another. So again, with this tool, imagine you just have a bulldozer and you've got a upper section like this, and you just kind of want to start moving it on down into this value. So again, with your brush size, I'm going to go right about here at this ridge. I'm going to hold down the left mouse button. You can see how it's kind of transferring the upper portions to the lower portions of my landscape. Now, I find this pretty good for creating a sort of flattish mountain range. And for getting rid of these very drastic slopes. Now, when you do this, and it's a little bit tough to see, given this landscape material applied to this landscape, it can leave these sort of weird circular ridges all over. You're starting to see a few of them appear back here. Now, how do you deal with that? Because sure you like the transfer of land from upper area to lower area. But if you want to get rid of some of these weird patterns and whatnot, this is where the smooth tool can be used in conjunction with the erosion tool. And if I smooth this out a little bit, you can get rid of that weird sort of artifacting happening right there. All right, next, I'm going to jump to the Ramp tool, and this is kind of fun to use. With the Ramp tool selected, you can create a ramp that goes from one area of your landscape to another. Now, with it selected to use it, all you simply need to do is left click to create the start of your ramp, as denoted by this Mountaine icon right there. And then you need to click again to determine where your ramp should end. So I'm going to click right about here and boom. I see a little ramp preview here, and you can move these little mountain icons around to determine where exactly you'd like your ramp to go. Like so. Now, you see some lines here. The inner line is where the ramp is going to be completely flat. And then it's going to be completely flat from about here. And this is your fall off area right there and right there, where it's going to taper off. Now, you can control this over in the details panel with your ramp width, like so. And your side fall off, making that skinnier or more narrow. Now, when you're happy with all this, all you need to do is click this add ramp button and it'll fill in the landscape and create that ramp. And I can even leave these two mountain icons out here and move them around and say I want a ramp from there to there, add another ramp, et cetera, I'll fill it in. However, if you want to start over fresh, simply click Reset, and then you get to start the process all over again. Left click to set one ramp point, my starting point, and then left click again to add your ending point, add Ramp. Now going back into our list of tools, I'm going to choose the sculpting tool that you saw me demonstrate a little bit in the last video. This is kind of like your default sculpting brush. And just to demonstrate, once again, holding down the left mouse button, I can raise a train, shift and holding down the left mouse button, I can lower the terrain. Again, you can control Z to undo any action that you just did. That's a pretty good brush to reach for when you're just looking to create some undulations in your landscape. And I always like to tell students usually your goal isn't to try to create realistic looking mountain ranges with your landscape actor. In fact, for most nrungin games that I've seen, let me just bring on an image here. This is from Star Ocean the Divine Force on PS five. Uses Unreal engine. This is an open world landscape. And really, when I'm looking at an image like this, the area that I'm kind of mousing over right here, this is all the landscape actor that has been terraformed from one end to the other gentle rolling hills. That's typically what you're shooting for with these landscape sculpting tools. Things like these spires, these are static meshes added to the landscape. Then your trees and grass, that's the foliage. We'll be talking about how to add that later on in the course. And if you see some of these rock formations along the side right here, those are static meshes, as well. So don't try to make the tools do things that they're not great at doing. I always like to tell students try to make the landscape actually just have some undulating terrain. Don't try to force making mountains. Although with this landscape material, trying to make realistic looking mountains is actually kind of possible. With the other levels that we've created here, it's going to be much more difficult, but we will explore those options as well. Now, I do want to end this video talking about these options right up here, the brush type and brush fall off that are available for a lot of these different sculpting tools. I'm talking about these guys right here. Now, when it pertains to sculpting your landscape, really, I only ever use this one. When we get to landscape painting. I will use that guy, the Alpha Brush right here. These other two rarely ever find any use for those. Now, your brush fall off, you can think of this as a marker tip. By default, it's sort of this rounded tip, but you can choose some of these other options. I encourage you to experiment with those as well. And with that guys, that's going to wrap up our discussion on the sculpting tools in Unreal Engine. We'll see you in the next one. 11. Alpha Brush Sculpting: Wouldn't it be cool if sculpting your landscape was as simple as holding down your left mouse button, and then something like that would appear a night's mountain range? If you said yes to that, then Alpha Brush Sculpting may be for you. Now, to make use of sculpting your landscape with this cool technique, we are simply making use of this Alpha Brush option over in the Landscape sculpting tools. I got my sculpting brush. Before we were sculpting with a simple circular brush, in this lesson, we're going to learn how to use an Alpha brush. Now, how we got a result like this, like a mountain range, that's going to be all down to whatever texture and imported height map texture such as this that you utilize. This is essentially a black and white texture that can be used to sculpt your landscape. White areas represent higher areas. The black areas represent lower areas. And the various shades of gray in between, those indicate the areas between the low and high spots, depending on how white or black that pixel is. Now, where do you get these nice textures? Well, attached to this course, I have some samples that you can try out. Now, I've already imported them into my content browser, and I imported them into this directory, my MW Landscape auto material Textures folder right there. That's the one right there. And once again, you can find some sample textures in the course materials. I have them in this folder right now. When I downloaded them, they're sculpt one, two, and three. If you hold down control, you can select all those, and then left click and drag and drop those into a folder of your choosing. Now, these other two, this Alpha brush one and two, these are going to come later on in the course when we get to Alpha Brush Painting. But once you have these added to your content browser, it is as simple as saving them. Click Save all after you've imported them. Then with your sculpting, brush selected, Sculpting, make sure you've got Alpha Brush selected. And then go ahead and slot in a texture of your choosing. Now, I've got my brush eyes cranked up to 20,000. Once again, if you click in this field, you can override the supposed max limit of 81 92, I believe, is the limit. 20,000, I find is pretty good. You don't need to change a texture channel, and a tool strength I find of 0.1 is pretty good because if I was to set this much higher and then hold down the left mouse button, it just raises it up a little bit too fast for my liking. So I like something like 0.1, although Dealers Choice on that. Now, one little foible that you probably should know about as you look at this texture right here, and you see the white spots are the areas that are going to create high pixels. Here with my preview here in my landscape, those white areas turn out to be black. Little confusing. I know, but that's just the way it is. Now, you'll note that as I'm moving my mouse cursor around, this is not rotating at all. I could hold down the left mouse button and do something like this as I drag it across my landscape. You could also do this where you check this box for auto rotate. And then as you're moving your mouse throughout your landscape, you can see how it's kind of adjusting. It's auto rotating your brush. So I'm just holding down left click, releasing, holding down left, click, releasing. So you can do something like that, hit Control Z here a few times. Now, you can slot these into plays here by either dragging and dropping them from here in your content browser up to the details. Alternatively, with one selected, you can click right here to use that selected asset from the content browser, so I could change that out like so. Or in the drop down right here, you could click on this and you could search for it. There's sculpt 03, my third one. And there you go. You can also use this in reverse. So if I hold down Shift and Left Click, I can create a little depression. That looks quite nice, indeed. So know that you can kind of mix and match. Once again, Left Click is to raise up, hold down Shift and left click to push down. And you can obviously combine these various brushes to create interesting results that can kind of blend into one another, if you will. Here's number one, et cetera. And, guys, that's gonna do it all for this one. Alpha Brush Sculpting. We'll see you in the next one. 12. Landscape Layers: Welcome back, everyone. In this video, we are going to be talking about landscape layers, and this is a good time to be having this discussion because the whole concept of landscape layers affects both landscape sculpting, which is what we've just had a couple of videos on, as well as landscape painting, which is what we're going to just be talking about here in a few videos times. Now, I'm currently within my landscape of California. This was an imported landscape. And you may remember when I created this particular landscape or rather when I imported it, we had done this importing from File, and this checkbox Enable Edit Layers was checked. Now, this is important to note because if I go to our sculpting tab right up here, down below, I see an edit layers section, and we've got this layer that we can sculpt on. When we are sculpting our landscape, this is the layer that we are sculpting upon. And just to show this quickly, I'm going to increase the size of my sculpting brush here, kind of go down to this flattish section. If I just hold down the left mouse button, you can see I'm raising that terrain. Now if you are familiar with the concept of layers from other programs like Photoshop, this should be second nature to you. I'm going to go ahead and add another layer to our landscape here. Clicking on this plus button is how I can do this. From this pop up box, let's just choose the landscape edit layer. We'll talk about layer splines later on in the course. I'll click Select here. This is good to name it layer one. If you right click on this, you can rename it to something else. You can delete it, et cetera. But now, note that this is our highlighted layer. This is the layer that if we sculpt, we'll be sculpting. So if I was to hold down the Shift key and left click and sculpt, I'm kind of flattening this terrain right here. But note, the effects of this are applied to layer one. If I was to hide this layer by clicking this eyeball icon, you can see that the mountains that I had erased reappear. So let me unhide this. Essentially, what I'm seeing right now, this was sculpted in my base layer here. This was sculpted here with layer one is a combination of the two layers. You can see that if I hide my first layer here, the default layer by clicking on that eyeball icon, everything goes away because everything was originally sculpted or rather imported with that layer. Let me just turn that back on. Now, you've got these Alpha values here, which is essentially how much as a percentage you want to see this particular effect. So 1.0 means 100%, so you could click in here and kind of drag this to the left. And as I'm doing this, it's kind of stuttering a little bit. You can see how if I change this all the way down to let me just put it down to zero. It's stuttering quite badly here. And then press Enter it creates a flattish landscape. You can actually invert this. If I did a negative one and press Enter, it would show that effect of my imported the landscape only in the exact opposite direction, essentially mirrored. Okay, let me go ahead and set that back to a value of one once again. Likewise, I could take my layer one here, the one that I just added here and change the Alpha value of this, maybe to change to something like 0.5. And now you can see it lessens the effect right there. So from one to negative one, you can see different effects here. That is essentially 50% of what I currently had sculpted. Let me go ahead and set that back to one. And so what I'm seeing right now is a combination of the two layers. Now, it's really tricky when you're working with layers such as this to be accidentally sculpting or painting in a layer that you didn't mean to because whichever one you have selected here is the active layer. That's the one you're going to be effect. A way to ensure that you are working in a given layer is to lock that layer. So if I was to click this little lock icon right here, it says this layer is locked, and you must unlock it before you can work on this layer. That is a good way to prevent you from accidentally sculpting in layer that you didn't mean to. So you can see, right now, my particular brush is in red, meaning I cannot affect this particular layer. However, I can select this layer below it. It's unlocked, meaning I can affect it. And now I could just hold down the left mouse button and sculpt that up. So you can use these locks to prevent you from accidentally affecting a layer that you didn't mean to. Let me just go ahead and unlock this quickly. Now, this begs the question, why would we even want additional layers here? Well, it's a non destructive way to add some variation to your level, maybe to play around with some concepts and see how you like it. So for example, here in layer one, maybe I said to myself, back here, oh, you know, wouldn't a mountain be kind of cool? So you left click and you sculpt it, and you're like, Yeah, maybe a plateau, like that would look pretty cool. Now, because I applied that to layer one, I can see the results of this right here, but if I wanted to get rid of that, I could just hide this out and see what it would look like without that effect. This is with both layers combined. Yeah, I like that plateau or no, I don't. Now, while I am currently sculpting on these two different layers, when we get to landscape painting, which is applying a coat of paint, you know, grass, dirt, sand to these various landscape components, the same concept will apply, and I'll show you that when we get over to the landscape painting lessons. Just know that whichever layer you have selected, that is the one you will be sculpting or painting, you know, applying dirt, grass, sand, things like that. Now, you can actually reorder these layers if you just come over here. You can lift it up and drag one on top of the other, and you can see I just reordered them right there. In your right click menu, you can rename them or delete them out. You can hide them, as well. You've also got this little garbage can icon where you can delete the layer entirely. It will prompt you just to be sure. So go ahead and click here. And so now I'm back to just one layer. Now, once again, I did want to point out that when we created this particular landscape, we imported this one. We had this checkbox checked. Likewise, we had created an earlier map. If I come under File, recent levels, our created landscape, when we created that landscape, we did also have this enable Edit layers checked as well. So both of those would use the layers system. Right now, I'm going to jump to our landscape Automateial mountain range example, and I could either double click on this here to jump to it. Although I have this under File recent levels, there's my landscape automal mountain range example level. I'm not going to save any of the changes that I made here. And once again, if you come to a map such as this, and you're presented with some error messages, just go ahead and click this save modified, and we can save it right there. And once that's completed, I can clear this out. Now, let me just go ahead and hide all of the surrounding mountain range meshes that these guys right up here, holding down Shift. I'll hide them all. So we have just our landscape right here. And I'm going to do shift in two to jump into our landscape mode up here. Now one thing you will notice about these pre existing maps is that these were created without the layer system. We do not have the option to add another landscape layer here to sculpt the pond. In fact, when we go about painting this particular landscape, you'll see that how the painting works in this particular landscape is going to be different from the other few landscapes that we've created, our imported California landscape, as well as some of the other created landscapes that we already have going for once again, I just wanted to show you two different examples here. So just be aware that this one does not have the layer system going for it. So with that, we've given a quick rundown as to what landscape layers even are. They affect landscape sculpting and painting if, in fact, the enable Edit Layers option is turned on when you create or import a landscape. So with that, we have shown off landscape layers and how they work with Unreal. They can affect your sculpting layers as well as your painting layers, which we are going to get to in the next few videos. So we'll see you there. 13. Landscape Material: Welcome back, everyone. In this video, we are going to be talking about landscape materials. Now, landscape material is a specialized material that allows us to paint various textures onto our landscape, and it's going to serve as a replacement for this landscape material right down here in the details panel that is applied to all of our landscape streaming proxies. Now, you may have recalled that when we created a landscape, here in our managed table I just jump over to here. When we created and imported from File, we created a landscape that was using this default ground grass material found in the starter content pack as the tool tip shows. Now, this was just a placeholder just to get us started, but wouldn't it be nice if we could paint our landscape with some sand and some dirt and maybe even some cobblestone to create a pathway, that kind of thing. Well, in order to do that, we need to create a specialized material. Now, because doing this is a long arduous process, we're going to cheat a little bit here by copying some code and then pasting it into a material that we create here in the engine. So what type of code are we going to be copying? Well, I have this attached to the course files for you to access. There's a couple of different files here to locate one of these is going to be called Landscape no tiling. Another is going to be called M Landscape simple. These are two versions of essentially the same landscape material. Now, when you open this up, and I'll start with my landscape no tiling, I'm just going to double click on this text document to open it up. And once again, you should be able to find this attached to the course. This is going to look like a whole bunch of nonsense. Now, what this is is going to be the code that's going to be used to make our landscape material. How are we going to work this? Well, we're going to click anywhere in this text file. Click anywhere. Do Control A to highlight everything. Then Control C to copy. Next, I'm going to come down into our content browser here. And I will go into our material section here under the MW Landscape auto material. I'm going to right click in some empty space over in our content browser. We're going to create a brand new material right there, and I will call this Underscore Landscape. Underscore No tiling. Believe that's what I called it. No tiling. And then press Enter. Then we're going to double click on this material to open it up. Now, remember, let me just go ahead and dock this across the top here. Now, remember, back here in our text document, we highlighted all this code, and we copied it. Now, if we scroll wheel on back, that'll zoom us way out as we can see from the Zoom level. I'm going to hold down the right mouse button and kind of pan over to the side here. And then I'm just going to do Control V right about here to paste in all that code. Now, this looks highly intimidating, which is why we are taking a shortcut here. But we just need to wire in a few wires into our master material node, which is this guy right here. And then we will be good to go. So you're going to want to position this node right here, which is going to give us the final results for our material right here down into this position. Okay, first things first with our master material node selected here over in the details panel. We want to ensure that our material domain here is surface. However, we want to change our blend mode to masked. And the shading model should be default lid. If I just zoom zoom up on that, that's what we should have here. Okay, so make sure you've got that with your master material nodes selected. Then over here, I'm just going to zoom mine up a little bit. We've got a couple of landscape layer blend nodes. There's one up top, and then there's one at the bottom. This bottom one, we're going to plug into this normal input. These are textures that are going to give all of our various other textures some depth. These are normal maps. This landscape layer blend node, we're going to plug into base color. That's going to give color to all of our various surfaces. We've got things like mud and grass and dirt and stuff in there. Okay. And then you've got these three nodes right here. You can left click and highlight them all, like so and then move them around. And we're going to plug this top value of zero into metallic and specular. We're going to plug in this value of one into our roughness input. And this landscape visibility mask, this is going to allow us to poke some holes to create some caves into our landscape. We're going to be plugging this into this opacity mask input. Okay, and then with that, you shouldn't have to do anything else here. I'm just going to left click and drag and just move these over a little bit. These nodes will come into play later on in the course. Go ahead and click Save. Now, after you have saved this material, we need to apply it to our landscape. So I'm going to go back to our level here, my California level. And now I want to apply this to my landscape, my base landscape right up here. So I'm going to choose my base landscape, and all I need to do to apply this is drag and drop this right here where it says landscape material. Now, it's going to take a second. It's going to turn kind of this darkish color. A couple of things I want to point out here before we continue is with this material selected, we could have clicked this little arrow right here to slot in that landscape. Also, we could have found this particular material by clicking on this dropdown and searching for it here. So there's a few ways you could have gotten this into this slot. Now, you want to also make sure that this landscape material is slotted in for all your various landscape streaming proxies that make up your landscape actor. So if I was to choose this first proxy right here, you should see that it is automatically applied because we applied it to our base landscape. But a mistake sometimes the students make because they may have a streaming proxy selected, and then they just apply this to their landscape material right here. They essentially override the landscape material from their base landscape. So don't do that. So that is the process for making a landscape material, albeit a very cheaty kind of process. If I step on back here in our landscape material, you can see that this consists of a whole lot of nodes. Now, this process for creating this landscape, you can replicate by doing the same thing with this landscape simple I open this up, you can copy all this and paste it inside of another material that you've created. And in fact, I will do that between videos. It's the exact same process. But before we end this video, I want to jump to my level here. Jump out of my landscape manage mode. I am in landscape mode and I wanted to jump over to paint mode. And so for the next few videos, this is where we will be spending the majority of our time in landscape paint mode. We're going to end the video here, but between videos here, go ahead and see if you can't recreate another version of our landscape material only this time using the landscape simple code, using the same process as we just did with our landscape no tiling code. Alright, that'll do it all for this one, guys. We'll see you in the next one. 14. Landscape Painting: Welcome back. In this video, our goal is to utilize our applied landscape material to begin painting the surface of our landscape. Now, we left off in the last video with our M underscore landscape no tiling material applied to our landscape actor. And because we applied it to that actor, it did apply to all of our various landscape streaming proxies as well. Now, before we get to painting, I did want to point out that I did create that second material, that second landscape material, the simple version. Now, these are essentially identical in terms of the types of textures that we're going to be able to paint onto the surface of our landscape. However, I just wanted to open up both of these briefly just to show you how they differ. Here is my simple. It looks a little bit more simple in terms of the node setup. And in fact, the one main difference that this will have as opposed to this no tiling landscape one that we apply to our landscape is this one is set up to lessen the amount of tiling that you might see in your landscape when we start painting on these various textures. This one's a little bit simpler in terms of setup. But essentially, they are set up exactly the same way. Here's my simple one. You can see all the inputs from the layer blend nodes down here and up there are plugged into the same inputs. This is set to be masked, as well, and everything else here is set up the exact same way. Okay, so landscape painting. Let's jump back to my California level here. And the first thing I need to do under landscape paint is come right down here where it says, target layers. And we've got this small little button right here where it says, create layers from assigned materials. We're going to click on this, and when we do, we're going to see these various layers appear. We've got mud, grass, gravel path, rock, snow, cobblestone. Let me just zoom up on that so you can see those a little bit more clearly here. Now, these correspond to the actual named layers inside of our landscape material. And let me just jump into my landscape, no tiling material. Now, if I go up to my landscape blend node, you can see I've got mud, grass, gravel path, rock, et cetera. This corresponds right there, that corresponds to the named layers here in our target layer section of our painting section of the landscape tools. Okay, the next thing that we need to do before we can begin painting, mud, grass, or gravel or any of these other layers here is to click on each of these plus buttons, and I'm going to start off with my mud here. And I need to create a landscape info object. So I'm going to click Wit blended Layer, this top option right here. And it's going to ask me to save this newly created asset into a folder of my choosing, or it's going to auto create one here. So I'm going to leave this name mud layer info, and I'm going to click Save. Now, essentially what these assets are is they save the paint data for these various layers that we're going to be painting onto our landscape. And you can see as soon as we have this mud layer info object created, it automatically turned the rest of my landscape here into mud. I need to do this for each of these, so I'm going to do that quickly. Wight blended layer, save gravel, way blended layer. It's gonna be the same process for each and every one of these. If you want to fast forward the video here, you can be my guest. Save. Rock, save Snow, save and cobblestone. Wight blended layer, save. Now, if you look down below in our content browser, you can see that it has created all these landscape layer assets and put it in this directory. Let's go ahead and save these right away by clicking on this Save All button. And all my landscape streaming proxies need to be saved as well because now there's mud painted on all of them. Okay, now let's begin to paint our landscape. This is as simple as clicking on one of these layer thumbnails, such as grass. And then I'm going to zoom on up to my landscape here, holding down the WK WAS and D, and I'm scroll wheeling in and out to fly faster or slower. And now with my grass layer selected, if I simply left click, you're going to start to see this checkerboard pattern in the beginning when you start painting a brand new layer, that's normal. Don't freak out. You can see how holding down the left mouse button will paint that given layer. Now, if you want to erase this, all you need to do is simply hold down Shift and left click and you will erase that. So whatever you have selected here, left click to paint, hold down shift, and left click to erase. Now, just as before, you do have a brush size here that you can fiddle with, like so, and you can change your brush fall off as well. Maybe go something a little bit more like that I hire or fall off, so it sort of tapers off. So you can see now as I'm painting this, I'm just left clicking here gently and quickly. It's strong in the middle, but it starts to fade as it gets closer to the edge. Now, the strength setting is going to be how quickly it's going to apply that. So if I crank this all the way up here in left click, it adds it almost immediately with just one click, like so, and you can see how it fades as we get to the perimeter. You can paint this on your mountains as well. Now, this might be annoying to have to go around and paint everything in your landscape. Maybe you want to start off with grass. So is there a quick way to apply a given layer to the entire landscape? Well, yes, there is. If I was to right click on my grass right here, I could fill the entire layer. So let's go ahead and do that. And now everything is grass. Likewise, I could right click on this and clear the layer to rid it of grass. Now I'm back to my default state. Let's go ahead and add mud to our layer here. Let's fill it entirely with mud. And I'm going to go ahead and set my brush size back down a little bit smaller, maybe something closer to the 5,000 range and set my tool strength back to its default. Now, on students get in and start painting, they usually do something like this where maybe they'll start off with some grass and they'll kind of paint that in the valley here, like, so I'm just holding down the left mouse button. And then maybe they want to add some kind of a path through here, so they'll choose their cobblestone, and maybe they'll make a path right in the middle. Let me just reduce my brush size here. And, you know, they're kind of painting a path. And once again, whenever you start painting a new layer, it's going to do that thing where it turns everything gray for just a moment while it's preparing the shaders, as you can see in the lower right down there. And I'm going to actually up my tool strength here quite a bit. And so now if I fly on up, you can see, essentially what I've got cobblestone mixed in with a little grass. It's got a nice little fading effect there as well. Now, once again, in order to get this nice sort of transition fading from one layer grass to another cobblestone, you're really gonna want to play with this brush fall off as you're painting one of these alongside of another. Now let's go to our mountain range. You might go something like this where you're like, Well, mountains are made of rock, so I'm going to choose some rock here. I'm going to increase my brush size quite a bit. And once again, when you start painting, it's gonna turn this sort of checkerboardi sort of material before it then starts to apply the rocks. And, again, this doesn't look great right from the get go. In fact, my engine is stuttering. It's not just your camera when you start to paint this on, something like that. Then you say to yourself, well, you know, at the top of mountains, typically, there's some snow, so I'm going to go ahead and shoo some snow. I'm going to reduce my brush size here. I'm going to set my tool strength back to its default, and I'll just sprinkle some snow along the top. So you start to left click, turns that checkerboardi sort of material along the top while it's preparing the shaders down below until finally, it starts adding some snow along the top. Now, this is not great snow because if you've ever looked at a mountain range, snow is usually a little bit more patchy. And this is just kind of blobbing it on, not great. Now in the next video, we're going to make use of something called an Alpha brush where we can sort of splotch on snow in any one of these various layers in a more realistic looking manner. So with this particular brush that we're using right now, our circular brush, it's not great for instances like these where you're trying to sprinkle some snow on the top of a mountain range. No, not at all. It is good for things like this, maybe painting some grass down in your valley. Now, very recently, we had a video dedicated to talking about landscape layers. And if you notice, right now, I only have one landscape layer that I'm painting upon. However, I could create a brand new landscape layer here. Let me go ahead and click this plus button to add one. I'll choose landscape Edit layer, select. And I will call this new layer that was just applied. Let me just right click on it to rename it. I will call this my snow layer. And now note that this is currently the selected one. So let me go ahead and choose some snow here. Now, any painting that I do on this one is going to be applied to that layer. And it's not just your video, it's stuttering. Once again, because the shaders are being prepared down in the lower right, you can see how it's going to take a little moment before it can render this in okay. There we go. It's smoothed out. So now if I was to hide this layer, the snow would disappear, reveal it, and it will show once again. A value of 1.0 means show that in full effect. 100% it's normal effect. If I was to set to something like 0.2, and press Enter, you can see it's fading it out by essentially 80%. So this is a good non destructive way to experiment with some concepts and see if you like those additional results, those added results, these two layers combine with one another to see your final result. But once again, you can show or hide that by clicking on this little eyeball icon. Just make sure that you've got the layer selected that you actually want to be working within. So this is the very basics of painting your landscape. Now, once again, I have the no tiling landscape material applied to this. Go ahead and select my landscape here. This is the landscape, no tiling landscape material. And it's called that no tiling because you don't see too much tiling going on with my grass here or the cobblestone. There are some textures within that material that kind of break up any tiling that you might see. You can experiment with the landscape, simple material as well to see how they differ, but essentially they have the exact same layers. I'm going to go ahead and save this and I want to jump over to our landscape auto material mountain range example because this particular landscape does not have the same sort of landscape material applied to it. That one's going to work a little bit different. So let's jump over there quickly. Okay, so here we are in our landscape auto material level. I'm just going to go ahead and do Shift and two to jump into landscape mode. And here I am in paint mode. And as you can see, I do not have that same sort of setup over here in the layers section. Let me go ahead and select my landscape over here. That's the landscape folder. I need to select my landscape actor. Now, this has a completely different landscape material applied to it. Let me just double click on this little thumbnail icon right down here to open this up. I'll dock this across the top. And right over here in the details panel, I'm going to right click right where it says parameter groups. I'm going to expand all. And you can see that there are many different properties that make up this specially designed landscape material. Now, I want to come under the water section in particular because we've got this MW water Max world position of negative 3,000. And I'm pointing this one out specifically, let me just zoom up on it so you can see that in greater focus under the water section. This check box is checked on so that you can edit that property. It's currently at negative 3,000. If I was to go back to my landscape, and instead of painting but I go to sculpt, and then I choose my flatten tool. I'm going to set my flattened target right here to be negative 3,000, negative 3,000, like so. And then I'm going to zoom on down here a little bit. And maybe in this region right here, I'm going to left click and you can see, as I flatten things what is revealed, but a little water. A little bit of a glistening pond, if you will. Now, if I was to go a little bit lower than this, let's go negative 4,000. That effect is going to take place yet. Left click. Now we see it a little bit deeper, if you will. Essentially, what is happening with this particular landscape material is it is designed in such a way given the depth of something or the angle of something, it's going to automatically apply water or grass or dirt or rock, that kind of thing. So really, you don't have any control like you normally do here in your landscape paint mode under the layer section to determine which particular surface that you'd like to paint, rock, snow, that kind of thing. That is all driven by this particular landscape material itself, and it's specifically designed in such a way that given the height of something, the angle of something, et cetera, it's automatically going to apply snow, rock, et cetera. So essentially, when you sculpt and I'll just try to raise the terrain here a little bit by left clicking, it's automatically applying different surface types to it, depending on the height, the angle, et cetera. So this is a little bit more of a simple way to get a cool looking landscape going. It's going to decide based on other factors what particular surface should be applied to your landscape. Maybe that's the approach you want to go, or maybe you want to go more the customizable route like we had in our previous California level with our custom made landscape materials. Dealer's choice there, but I just wanted to point out those two differences. With that, we're going to wrap up our discussion about landscape painting. Once again, with this pre made landscape level here. This one is going to determine the surfaces based upon various factors. The other one our California level, the layer, the surface type, the snow, gravel, grass, that kind of thing is going to be up to you to paint. That'll do it all for this one, guys. We'll see you in the next one. 15. Alpha Brush Painting: In this video, we are going to explore Alpha brush painting our landscape. In the last video, we did get some painting of our landscape done, albeit with a circular brush. That is what this guy is at the very top. Of our paint mode. We're going to be exploring this one right here, that little star icon. That's Alpha brush painting. And what this is really good for is adding some variety to your landscape to make it look a little bit more realistic. Now, to help with this, we're going to import in a couple of textures. So let me go and raise up my content browser here. I'm going to be putting these textures inside of this textures folder inside of this MW Landscapes automateial folder. Dealer's choice where you would like to put this, but you should find this attached to the course. And these two files that I am talking about right here are Alpha brush one and Alpha Bush two. So you will find these resources attached to the course. I'm just going to drag and drop both of these down into my content browser. Let me go ahead and get this folder out of the way. Here they are. The asterisks mean they need to be saved, so I shall do so by clicking Save All. Save all. And I'm just going to bring my Alpha brush one into this texture slot for my brush settings. Let me just expand this out. I can drag and drop that up here. With that selected in the content browser, I could have clicked on that little arrow right there to use selected asset from the content browser. Alternatively, I could have clicked right there and sought it out via that drop down list, but this is just fine. Now, you'll notice when you look at my cursor inside of my landscape, it is sort of this rectangular shape. It's a little bit hard to see. And it is rotating automatically. Now, the reason it is rotating automatically is because I have this auto rotate option checked on. If I check that off, I would just be moving this steady square around the landscape. I like it on, however. Now, before I begin to paint here, I'm going to make sure that I've got my snow selected, and I'm also going to be painting this atop my snow layer. Now, the way that this particular brush works is if you've ever spray painted through a stencil, that's essentially what we're gonna be doing here. You can consider this texture as the piece of paper or cardboard that you're going to be spray painting through. And these as your various spray cans. In this case, I'm going to be spraying some white, some snow through this piece of paper or cardboard. So if I was to just simply left click and hold down my left mouse button, you can see how it's spray painting it on there, like so. Now it's doing a little faint right now. That's because my strength is turned down to 0.3. If I was to crank this up all the way to one, a simple click or two should sprinkle some of the snow onto my landscape. So I'm just going to give it one click here, bam, and you can see how sprinkling this onto our landscape, bam, bam, bam. Now notice I'm not changing my texture channel here. The red channel is just fine. I'm essentially spray painting that snow right there through the white areas of that texture that you're seeing right there, that little preview. Now, obviously this is good for something like the top of your mountain range right here. Bam, bam, bam, just kind of sprinkling it on, dusting it on. And if this is a little too splotchy for you, you can try your other Alpha brush that we have available. So let's try Alpha brush number two. I'm going to select it. And this time, I'm going to slot this in by clicking on this little tiny arrow that says use selected acid from the content browser. Boom. So with that slotted in and my tool strength at one, you can see how one click can kind of sprinkle that onto my landscape. Now, I usually don't like to leave that tool strength too high. Usually, I like to kind of dust it on a little bit at a time, but you can see, as I'm kind of going into this more top down bird's eye view, how it's auto rotating. And so think of those little black areas as these sort of holes that you are spray painting through. Very nice indeed. Alright, so that is how you can use an Alpha brush to paint your landscape. And once again, this will work for anything that you got here. I find it really good for things like snow. That'll do it all for this one, guys. We'll see you in the next one. 16. Caves: Welcome back, everyone. In this video, we are going to learn how to make caves in our landscape. Now, it's not going to be a full fledged cave. In fact, caves require a good bit of work, but rather, we're going to be talking about how to poke a hole in our landscape in which we can make a cave. Now, in order to do this, we actually are going to be in our sculpting tools, which then begs the question, why didn't we cover this when we were talking about landscape sculpting. The reason for that is because in order to poke a hole in our landscape, we actually had to set up our landscape material first. Now, if you remember, right, here with our landscape selected over in the Details panel, we have our landscape material set to landscape no tiling, right down there. And if you double click on that thumbnail icon, why don't you just go ahead and jump in there so I can show you what is going on inside of here that's going to enable us to poke a hole in our landscape. Now, I've got this landscape material open along the top here. You might remember this monstrosity. If I zoom up on our master material node here, note that over in the details panel, we had the blend mode set to mask. And we had this landscape visibility node plugged into this opacity mask. Now, the reason I'm mentioning this is because this setup right here is what's going to enable us to poke a hole in our landscape. That setup right there. So jumping back to my California level, we're going to jump into the landscape sculpting tools, and this time, we're going to be focused on this visibility tool. This is going to be the one that's going to allow us to poke a hole in our landscape, and it simply works by left clicking, and it's going to turn gray and checkerboardi when we first start this. And that's how you can poke a hole into your landscape. It's not just your video stuttering. It's stuttering because it's preparing the shader down in the lower right. And now that may look a little unsightly. So if you want to fill in the hole, just hold down Shift and left click, and then you can fill that right back in. Now, your fall off is not really going to matter at all for this. Left click pokes in the hole, shift in left click, fills it back in. If you're going to be creating a cave, it probably helps to have a little bit of a smooth surface. So I would do something like this first where I'd bring on my smooth tool, maybe smooth out my mountainside here a little bit. And this is just conceptually what I would do. Okay? Then I would go to my visibility tool right here. Once again, that is the one you want to choose the visibility tool to poke a hole in your landscape in the sculpting tool section. And then you can left click to start poking that hole in. Now, this is where it's going to take a little bit of work for you to create a nice looking cave. And we'll flesh this out a little bit further as we get deeper into the course. But obviously, that does not look like a cave at all. So we'd probably want to populate this with some rocks around the outside. And we'll get to doing that when we talk about our foliage tools coming up. And you also want to have something for the player to navigate on so that they don't fall through the world. Because if I was to right click right here and play from here, there's my character. And unfortunately, I can run them right off the map, which is not a great landscape. So what you'd want to do for something like this is to create some sort of an entryway into your landscape. So jumping out of landscape mode, sorry, not into my landscape, but into the cave, I'm just going to bring on a simple basic shape right over here. I got my Place Actors panel. If you don't see this place actors panel, you can click on this box right here, go to Place Actors panel. I've got my shapes. I'm going to bring in a cube, and then you can just shape it accordingly. This is my movement tool. If I just tap the space bar a couple times, I can go to scale mode. You can scale this up like so. You can rotate it like so, and you can see how you could just kind of position something to serve as a sort of entryway into your tunnel. Now, this obviously would require a good deal of work, and I'm not going to waste your time with that right now, but conceptually, this is how you could go about creating the beginnings of a cave. Visibility tool. Once again, you can find it under landscape sculpting right there at the visibility tool. This will only work if your landscape material, that guy right there assigned to your landscape has this landscape visibility mask plugged into your opacity mask. Alright, guys, that's going to do it all for this one. We will see you in the next one. 17. Foliage Mode Overview: Alright. In this section of the course, we're going to learn how to use foliage mode so that we can populate our landscape with things like trees or maybe some grass or maybe some flowers or maybe some rocks. Pretty much any mesh that you can think of. Now, there is a lot of nuance to cover here, so let's dive right in. 18. Foliage Assets: Alright, to aid us significantly in this discussion of how to use foliage mode, it would be really helpful if we had some nice looking assets to place inside of our landscape. And for that, we're going to be headed to fab, where you can see it right down here in my content browser. You can find the fab button right here. Go ahead and click on that, and that should open up a brand new tab for you all. The fab tab is where you want to go to add content to your project. Inside of here, once you've clicked on that fab button, you can find different categories of assets. If I was to click on this little hamburger icon right here, I could discover all sorts of different categories of content. However, I'm just going to search for Landscape Pro because I am seeking out this particular content pack called Landscape Pro two point oh. I've used this before, and I find this to be a really good one to use when we're talking about foliage. As you can see, it's got some nice pine trees, some grass, some rocks, some flowers, that kind of thing that we can utilize in our landscape up here. So to add this to our project, all we need to do is click on this blue add to project button. And if you get a pop up such as this, asset not compatible with the most recent version of the engine, that's fine. Just click on this drop down and choose the most recent version. And then go ahead and click Add to Project. On the lower right, you're going to see this starting to get added to your project. And eventually, this is going to add some new folders to our content browser. Now, before I pause the video, because this is going to take a little while, I just wanted to mention that if you wanted to add various other content packs to your project now, that would be a good time to do so. Once again, upon your viewing of this video whenever that may be LanscpP two point oh, maybe it's pulled from Fab. Maybe it's not. I have no idea what the future holds. But you want to look for a content pack that has something like this. And if you are searching, you probably want some free content. So just use the filters over on the right, just set your price to free. And then you can seek out some various content packs that have some trees, bushes, those kinds of meshes. Alright, with that, I'm going to pause the video here and wait for this to download, and I'll resume once that is finished. All right. Excellent. So now this content has been added to our content browser, and I can see it by jumping over to our content browser. It is in this folder called STF, and if I was to expand this folder out, you can see it has a lot of subfolders. I'm also going to recommend that going forward here, you bring on a couple of filters to help with placing some assets into our foliage mode, which we'll be doing in the next few videos here. Make sure that you have on by clicking on this little filter button right here. Your static mesh filter on, and you can see I've got that right here, as well as under the foliage category, static mesh foliage. And you can see I've got that right here as well. I'm just going to go ahead and with my STF folder selected, make sure that I am filtering by static meshes. So this is going to find any static mesh assets that live in this folder or any of the folders that exist underneath it. So you can see we've got some rocks, some trees, some grass, bushes, ferns, flowers, things of that sort. Alright, so we're in a good position for the next video, so we'll end this video right now. That is how you can grab some content from fab to make use of in foliage mode. See you in the next one. 19. Foliage Palette: Alright, our next step in the process here is to populate our foliage palette with various assets that we would like to paint into our landscape. Now, it says drop foliage here, and what it's really looking for is a static mesh foliage asset, and I'll show you where you can add those in just a bit. However, I just wanted to point out that you can create the needed static mesh foliage assets by simply dragging and dropping a static mesh asset into this area. I'm going to demonstrate this by simply grabbing this SM Bush oh one right here, and you could really choose any of these static meshes. So I'm just going to left click and drag this into this area where it now says foliage type. Now, as soon as I try to drop a static mesh into this area, it's going to say, Hey, what you actually wanted to add was a static mesh foliage asset. Let's go ahead and create one of these for you. So that's what it's going to be doing, and it's going to be looking to save this created static mesh foliage asset into a given directory. I'm going to say it's fine to put it in that directory and click Save right here. And if I mouse over this, I can see that that is the name of the new asset. And by the way, if I was to right click on this thumbnail, I could show where this lives now that asset in the content browser so I could click on that. And there it is SM Bush oh one foliage type. And I also wanted to point out here that if I was to right click on this, I could simply remove this as well. So I could remove that from my list, and I could get it back by simply clicking on this plus button or by dragging and dropping this static mesh foliage into here. So let's go ahead and explore that. I'll drag and drop this right in there. It knows it is a static mesh foliage. So, boom, it adds it in there. However, if I was to remove this, I could simply find it by clicking on this plus foliage, typing in Bush 01, and there I can add it back again. Now, you'll notice that when I mouse over this thumbnail image, it is checked, meaning if I was to paint this out in my level, this is my paint bubble brush, if you will. Left clicking will add it. Holding down shipped and left clicking will remove it. And it would paint it because this foliage is checked. Now, if I had this unchecked and I tried to paint this in my landscape by holding down the left mouse button, it would not paint it. In fact, because this is the only bit of foliage in my palette area, it recognizes that there's nothing I can paint, and so I don't even see a bubble brush. Let me just turn this back on. Additionally, I could right click on this and deactivate that, and that's the same thing as unchecking it. So checking it activates it. Unchecking it deactivates it. Now, you'll notice that with this foliage actor selected down below are a bunch of details associated with it. I'm going to break this out into several videos in the upcoming portion of the course. So just ignore that for now. We're just going to be focusing on this foliage palette for now. Next, I just want to add a few more foliages to my list here. So with my STF folder selected, I'm going to filter by static mesh foliage. And once again, these are static mesh foliage actors that are already created, so I don't have to drag and drop static mesh in here to create them already. And I'm gonna look for a pine tree. How about pine 02? That's gonna be good. Just gonna drag that up here. Let's get some grass, as well. There's some grass group 01. Sure. We'll drag and drop that up there, as well. And let's see. I want to add a flower, as well. There's one right there. Yeah, that will do. We'll add a flower. And how about a rock? Maybe this cliff Rock 03. Alright, so now we've got several foliages if you will, in my palette area. And you can see they all have their own thumbnail image. As we select any one of these, there will be some details down below that we'll be able to fiddle with. And again, I'm going to break that out into separate videos of themselves. But note, all of these are checked. Well, actually, none of these are checked except for my bush. Meaning if I was to paint this into my landscape, that would be the only foliage that would get painted. Anything that is not checked would not get painted. So I could actually paint multiples of these at a time by checking them all on. Now, typically, I do not like this thumbnail view because I can only see that check if I am mousing over it. I typically like to put my palette area here into List View. But before I do that, I just wanted to point out that you can change the scale of your thumbnail images with that gear icon right there. However, I'm going to kick it into List view right now, and this is the view that I vastly prefer because it allows me to see every foliage type that I have checked on. Meaning that if I were to paint it, it would paint that foliage type. Lastly, we've got this button right here. Where I can hide details for these selected foliage types. So right now I've got my flower group foliage type selected, and you can see all the details down below related to that. I could hide that out by simply clicking on that or showing it. That's like an on and off button. This count value next to each foliage type, we'll keep track of how many instances that is how many copies of each of these foliages is painted into your landscape. We'll explore that more in the next video. But for now, guys, that's going to do it for the foliage palette and how to get some assets right in there. See you guys in the next one. 20. Paint Tool: Alright, we are now in a position to paint some foliage in our landscape. Before I do, I want to kick out this foliage type Pine oh two because having some problems getting this one to paint into my level. So I'm gonna kick that one out right away, remove it. And I'm actually going to go into my content browser, do a search for my static meshes, and I'm going to create a whole new foliage type out of Pine oh two. There is Pine oh two. So I'm just going to left click and drag, and I'm going to create a brand new foliage type for that guy because that is the foliage that I would like to experiment with first. Alright, to paint these foliages within your landscape, first of all, make sure you have it checked. However, I am going to uncheck everything except my pine trees. And with my pines selected, I'm going to immediately change my density down from 100 to a value of two. Now, I will be exploring all these parameters in greater detail upcoming. However, I wanted to do this right now because a value of 100, it's going to be a very thick covering of trees, and I don't want to kill this system here. So let's set that down right away. What you see once again in your level editor here is your bubble brush. The size of this is dictated right up here in the brush options. You can move that slider to the right or left. Like, so. Alternatively, by holding down the bracket keys, those are the keys directly to the right of the P key on your keyboard. Left bracket will reduce the size of your brush by 5%. Right bracket will increase it by 5%. To paint this in your landscape, all you got to do is hold down the left mouse button and drag it around like this, release. And there you go. You got some trees. And here in your palette area, it'll show you how many instances you currently have. I've got 679 right now. Simple enough, right? To delete my trees here if I did not like them. All I would need to do is hold down the Shift key and then left click. Like so. Now you can see left click and drag to paint. As soon as I hold down the Shift key, it immediately goes from paint to erase, paint to erase. I'm just toggling the shift key on and off. Next, we will focus our discussion about what are these two guys right here, my paint and erase density right below my brush size in the brush options. Well, paint density is sort of like a master control density for whichever foliage types you have selected here. Let me show you what I mean with just my pines painted out here. So let me go ahead and delete these right away. Like, so I'm down to zero instances. Okay, I've got this value, too. If I was to set this to one, that is, like, an additional density setting on top of my initial pine density setting. So now if I was to hold down the left mouse button and drag and then release, you can see it's got a thicker smattering of pine trees. Let me just delete right here. If I was to set this to a value of like 0.1 and then left click drag and release, you can see it is a sparse smattering. Ease density is a similar concept. When this is set to zero, when you hold down Shift and then left click and erase, you're going to erase everything that your bubble brush covers. However, let me just undo that. And I'm going to paint some more on here. However, left click drag. If I was to set my eras density to something like, I don't know, 0.7, you're basically saying, I don't want to erase them all. In fact, leave a decent number of them out here. So now if I hold down Shift and left click and try to erase, it's only erasing a few. So personally, I like to leave the erase density at zero, and paint density of 0.5 is usually fine for me as a master density setting. I usually like to control how many instances I'm painting down here by adjusting the density setting for each particular foliage type that I have checked on. Okay, so I've just been painting pine trees so far just to show that you can paint multiples of these at a given time. I'm going to reduce my brush size right here. I'll turn on grass and flowers and bushes, as well. I'll leave my cliff rock unchecked. And now, if I was to zoom up on an area right over here and left click and drag, you will see I will not only be painting pine trees but also bushes and grass, and there's probably some flowers down there as well. Indeed, there are. So that is how you can paint multiple foliage types at once. Now, something to be aware of with this particular level, and again, I'm using this landscape auto material mountain range example is this particular landscape already had some grasses and rocks out here to begin with. So don't get confused between what you are painting and what already came on the landscape. And note that we did paint some bushes, flowers, grass, and pine on this landscape. Alright, so that's the very basics for using the paint tool. Left click to paint on whatever foliage types you have checked. Hold down Shift and left click to erase whatever foliage types you have checked. Guys, I'll do it all for this one. See you win the next one. 21. Foliage Painting Settings: In this video, we are going to be focused on talking about the various parameters under the painting category for a given selected foliage type here in foliage mode. That's going to be this collection of parameters right here. And for this discussion, I'm going to keep it to just one mesh. So know that I've got a pine tree selected here in my foliage panel, I'm going to go with a brush size of 5,000. Now, you saw me in a previous video ready fiddle with the density setting here. So currently my pine density setting right down here is set to two. And what that's going to mean is when I paint with my bubble brush by holding down the left mouse button, once I release, it's gonna appear. I'm going to get a density, something like that. That's still pretty dense. If I was to increase this to say 50, it's going to give me a much more concentrated smattering of trees. So left click and drag. And you can see I've got many, many more trees. Now, no matter your density, you can end up with a situation where you've got some trees that are too close together for your liking. In fact, if you zoom in down here, you get some trees that are really close together. Navigating a character through spaces like that is probably not feasible. So what you can do here is when you're painting on your foliage is specify a radius in which another tree cannot violate. Let me show you what I mean. I'm going to go back and erase all these trees here, at least some of them. So holding down shift, I'm gonna hold down left mouse but and erase a bunch. I'm going to set my density to something like ten, and I'm going to set my radius to something like I'll say something big, like 800. So a density of ten is a pretty dense concentration of trees here, but with a radius of 800, I'm ensuring that no tree is within 800 unreal units of another tree. So if I was to left click and drag, you can see I'm getting some trees out here, but none of them are too close together. There is good spacing between these all. In fact, there's at least 800 unreal units between trees. Kind of nice. Okay, the other parameter here that I wanted to talk about here in the painting settings is the scale setting. Now, currently, our scaling is set to be uniform, which is nice. And what that's going to allow us to do is specify a men and a max range. Now, currently, this is set to one and one, meaning that every tree is going to be 100%. You can think of these like percentage. Of their usual mesh size. Now, obviously, trees, when you find them in real life, they're not all exactly the same size as a tree, unless it's like a Christmas tree farm or something like that. So what you can do is specify a range that you would like your trees to be in when you were spraying them all around your landscape here. And it's going to do that uniformly, meaning it's going to scale it uniformly in the X, Y, and Z dimensions. Note that under this scaling setting, instead of scaling this uniformly, you could scale this in any given axes right here, like just X and Y, X, Z, et cetera Uniform, I like to do. Free is if you want to have them random in the X, Y, and Z scales. But again, I like to usually go uniform. So with that, set to uniform, I'm going to set my min value to something like 0.5 and my max value to something like 2.5, so half the usual size and up to 2.5 times its usual size. And now, if I was to paint trees with these same density and radius settings over here, left click and drag, you can see I get a variety of sizes, which looks a lot more realistic. Alright, and if you don't like any of your settings here and you want to go back to the defaults, you can always click on these back buttons right here, and then I'll set you back to the default values. Alright, guys, that's going to do it for our discussion on the painting settings. See you in the next one. 22. Foliage Placement Settings: Alright, next, we're going to be focused on talking about these placement settings for a given foliage type here in foliage mode. And just like with the painting settings right up above, these placement settings determine the rules for how this foliage appears within the landscape. Now, in this category, we've got these various parameters to fiddle with. And I'm going to start with this aligned to normal. This is checked on by default. And what this means is that with it checked on, your foliage meshes are going to grow essentially perpendicular out of the surface that they were placed upon. In fact, I can see a tree right over here that is respecting that rule. You see this tree growing perpendicular out of the surface that it was placed upon? Same with these trees right here. Once again, that is because of that aligned to normal. If you don't want that, what you can do is uncheck that, and I usually like to leave that unchecked. And you can see with a checked on, we get an aligned max angle that is available to you. With a checked off, that goes away. Once again, I usually like to have this checked off because most foliage reaches straight up for the sky. And also with that checked off, I usually like to set a random pitch angle. Now, I'll get to that in just a moment, but let me show you with a line normal off. If I was to then put some trees on this side of the landscape, let me just decrease my brush size here quite a bit. And I'll set my density to something like two. And now if I was to left click and drag, you can see that these trees are not growing perpendicular out of the landscape. They're growing a little bit more realistically, reaching straight up for the sky. Now, you probably don't want them all tilted and aiming straight up for the sky. So that's where this random pitch angle comes in. So I usually like to set this to something like 15. But just to show you exactly what this does, I'm going to set it to something kind of severe at first, something like 45. And what I'm basically specifying here is that trees can be angled up to 45 degrees in any direction. So let me try to place this on somewhat flat ground over here. And so if I was to left click and drag, you can see some trees are going straight, but some of them are quite bent, up to a maximum angle of 45 degrees. So random means random. It means up to 45 degrees. Okay, let me go ahead and set that back to something more regular. Ten. Now, this random yaw essentially means that each tree is going to be twisted from a top down angle in a given direction, a different direction. With this unchecked, if I was to smatter on some trees, like so, you can see that they're all angled the exact same way. Doesn't look super realistic. Let me just control Z that. With that checked on, it'll all be twisted facing different angles. Something a little bit more realistic. So I usually like to have that checked on. Now, this ground slope angle, this specifies the steepness of slope that your trees are eligible to be painted upon. What this is currently saying is that any angle between zero degrees and 45 degrees, yes, this can be painted upon. However, if any slope gets greater than 45 degrees, even if you try to paint this on that slope, it won't do it. So let me come over to the side of one of these mountains over here, and this gets pretty steep right in here. So you can see if I kind of lead up to that steep slope, and try to paint up there, okay? So I'm gonna hold down the left mouse button and it's painting some trees. Let me just increase the density here a little bit, too. Not that crazy. Something like 20. So left click and drag. And then as soon as I get up to the side of this mountain, there are spots where it's relatively flat, and it actually does find some flat spots up to 45 degrees. But anything steeper, it will not. And once again, it will find some spots here and there. So if I try to paint this on the side, you can see it won't do it on that really steep spot, but on these flatter areas, it will do it. So if you do want to have, you know, some really ridiculous trees growing out of the side of your mount, you could set this max ground slope angle up to 90 and that would allow you to place it up onto a vertical surface, including stuff as ridiculous as that. So left clicking right there, you can see, indeed, it will actually grow it out of the side. Once again, not ideal. Now, that's going to lead me to talk about our next set of parameters right here, our Z offset. This is essentially, how much do you want to offset your given meshes up or down? Now, this is currently set to a range of zero, zero, and it gives you this range so that you can have some randomness here. But this is useful for if you want your trees, in this case, to be buried in the ground a little bit more or with a little variation. So let me show you what I mean. If I was to set our Z offset here to something like negative 50 to positive 50, let me also reduce my concentration of trees from 20 down to something like two. Now if I was to left click and drag and kind of zoom up on some of these, you can see that this tree is actually floating a little bit because I have an offset set to a maximum of 50, meaning it can be up in the Z axis up to 50 unreal units. Conversely, it could be buried up to 50 unreal units as well. Just to go a little bit more extreme with that, let me do negative 200 to positive 200. And left click. And you can see some of these trees are buried a little bit deeper into the ground. Which again, maybe is what you're going for if you want, like, trees that look like they're buried in an avalanche or something like that. Maybe you paint a snowy surface onto the ground. Some of those are a little bit deeper into the ground. So again, you can have some variation as to how deep your tree trunks are buried. Alright. The next set of parameters I'm going to be talking about here in the last set of parameters is going to be this height parameter. Again, you've got a min and a max range, and it is very generous. Essentially, what this specifies is a height range in unreal units where, in this case, these tree meshes are eligible to be painted. So not only do you have an angle eligibility for your trees, but you also have a height, an elevation eligibility. So this allows us to paint trees in very low valleys and very high mountaintops. But once again, this is a depth or in elevation in unreal units. Now, if I was to jump out of foliage mode here quickly, go back to selection mode and select my landscape actor right here, it's talking about this Z location. So by default, my landscape actor itself is set to that height, a height of 100 unreal units. Negate these. Now, once again, your landscape here can have some undulations some mountaintops, some valleys, et cetera. So if you ever find yourself painting and you're wondering, Hey, why am I trying to paint these trees and they're just not showing up? It could be because you are violating that placement height setting for your given selected mesh. I have found a lot of confusion with students when it comes to that. Sometimes they try painting it, and it just won't show up because they're violating their height setting. Now, this is really useful for painting something like a tree line. In nature, there are tree lines in which trees will grow up to a certain elevation but no higher. So if you want to ensure that, in this case, say, pine trees can only go up to this point on the mountain, well, you can set a maximum height eligibility where it'll automatically cut you off. Alright, so that's going to wrap up our discussion about the placement rules for a given foliage type. For trees, I usually like to do a min and a max of, like, negative 50 and positive 50. I usually like to have a line to normal off, a random pitch angle of about ten random yaw on. And usually for my ground slope angle, at least for trees, I usually like to go between zero and about 30 degrees, something like that. Guys, that'll do it off for this one. See you in the next one. 23. Foliage Instance Settings: Alright, welcome back. In this video, we are going to be talking about the instance category of settings as it relates to painting a particular foliage type. Once again, I'm using my pine foliage type, and we're talking about this category of settings right down here, the instant settings. And in particular, in this video, we're going to be talking about call distance shadows and collisions. So let's get right to it. Let's talk about an easy one here, our cast shadow checkbox with a checked on. Obviously, the foliage type does cast a shadow in your environment. You'll probably want this checked on for something like a pine tree that's nice and tall and obviously cast shadow. With this checked off, then obviously it will not cast a shadow. Now, as you can see this cast shadow checkbox, if it's turned off, it's going to gray out all the parameters underneath it. This is like your master shadow control. Now, this is not a discussion talking about lighting. But essentially, you've got different types of shadows that can be cast from dynamic to static. Dynamic shadows cast when there are moving lights like your sun, static shadows are shadows from when you have static lights in your level. I'm going to turn this back on. But now, why would you ever want to have this turned off? Well, for performance reasons. Let's just say you have a few million instances of your flowers or grass groups out in your environment. Well, that can impact your performance, your frame rate. So for your smaller foliage types, you probably want to have shadows turned off because you wouldn't even really notice that they're casting a shadow for larger foliage types such as this, you will want it turned on. We'll hone in on this a little bit more when we talk about optimization. We've got a full video dedicated to that in just a few videos time here. Next, let's talk about this parameter called cull distance. Currently, it is set to a men in a max range of zero and zero. What this essentially does is it allows you to specify a distance at which a given foliage type will no longer be rendered in. Now, once again, this is another performance technique and you see this in games like Breath of the Wild in which Link is moving about a landscape. And if you're paying attention in a game like Breath of the Wild, tiny grass instances will appear close to Link. But as you move throughout the landscape, the edge of that grass cuts off and that's due to a cull distance setting. Now, to show this in full effect here in my level, I'm going to change to some other value than zero for the max value. When this is set to a min and a max value of zero and zero, that means you're going to see these instances no matter how far away. They may exist in your landscape. Now I'm going to zoom on down here a little bit and watch what happens to these instances as I specify a max call distance that's very close by to me. If I set a max value of something like 50 and press Enter, suddenly, all of them seem to disappear. Essentially, what I'm stating here is only render in these pine trees if they are within 50 unreal units of my camera here, which obviously is nothing. Now, let me go ahead and set this to a value of 500 and see if any are within 500. No, not yet. How about 1,000? Press Enter. 2000. Press Enter again. And I see one appearing off to the side here. How about 5,000? Some more. And you can see if I start to fly forward or drive forward a little bit here, Instances will start appearing when they get within 5,000 unreal units of my camera. Let me just raise up the camera a little bit here and also back it up. 5,000, anything that gets beyond 5,000 is going to disappear. Now, once again, you probably don't want to do this effect for larger pieces of foliage like trees, but for grass, flowers, absolutely, 'cause you don't need to render in grass or flowers when it's, like, you know, 50,000 unreal units away from your camera. Let me set this to a value of like 10,000 max value. And there you go. As I mouse wheel forward a little bit, they start to appear. For a call distance, I usually always leave the minimum distance at zero, and the max value is what I tend to adjust. Okay, the last one I want to hone in on is this collision preset. Now, currently, it is set to no collision. I want to just scroll up here briefly. In my mesh category, I collapse a couple of the categories right here. I'm going to double click on my thumbnail for my SM pine two. What that's going to do is it's going to open up my static mesh editor. That's my pine tree. And if I come under this show button right here, I can show simple collision and this green outline shows me the collision that is surrounding my tree. And if I scroll down in the details panel here, I can see under the collision preset right here that here the collision is set to block all, meaning, yes, this tree should block my player character. Now I'm going to jump into my level really quickly here. And as you can see, with my pine foliage type here selected, it is referencing that mesh, but down below here in my instant settings, the collision preset is set to no collision. Now, what I'm going to do is I'm going to temporarily hop out of my foliage mode, go to selection mode. I'm going to right click right about here and I'm going to choose to play from here. Now, there is my default third person character, and what you can see is that right now, I go right through that tree. It is ignoring the collision set on the mesh itself because it's set to block all and it's respecting the collision setting I have for this. Let me do shift in three in foliage mode. Under the instant setting, my pine tree, even though it's referencing that mesh, the collision preset is set to no collision. Now, if I go ahead and change this from no collision to block all, then I need to jump out of foliage mode, once again, go back to selection mode so that I can right click and play from here. Now, if I try to run through that tree, you can see that it blocks me just fine. Those are the three main settings that I wanted to cover here in foliage mode under the instance settings. You've got shadow for toggling on and off the shadow. You got call distance to specify a distance at which you will see this given foliage type. Once again, zero, zero means you will see it from any distance. Currently, my pine trees are set to be called out at a distance beyond 10,000 unreal units. And last but not least, you've got this collision setting to turn on or off collision for a given foliage type. You probably want to have no collision for things like grass and flowers, but for trees, obviously, you do want to collide with those. Guys, that'll do it all for this one, we will see you in the next one. 24. Single Instance Mode: Welcome back in. This video, we are going to be talking about single instance mode here in our foliage mode. Now, currently, up to this point, we've been focused on our paint brush here. This one, we're going to be focused on this guy right here, single instance mode. Now, you can get to it by clicking on this box right here. However, you could also get to it by clicking on that box right there. So you uncheck it in one spot. I'll unselected there. You got two ways to get into single instance mode. Now what the heck is single instance mode? Well, it changes your paint bubble brush into this tiny, tiny, tiny, little green brush, if you will. And what it'll do is it will give you a single instance of whatever you have selected here. And this is great for just smattering on a single instance of whatever you want. So if I wanted a pine tree here, just bam, boom, you got a pine tree. Pine tree there. Bam. Got a pine tree. Now, once again, you got to be careful of your various settings that you have here, placement settings in particular. And in particular, your ground slope angle and your height, because if I try to single instance this on a steep slope such as this, I'm left clicking, can't do it. However, if I was to go somewhere right here, a little flatter, bam, bam, bam, bam. And once again, it's going to look directly where the slope angle is right beneath it. So I'm trying to click in certain spots right here, it's not going to do it. If I find something a little flatter, Bam, I'll place it just fine. Now, a little bit of nuance here with single instance mode that you should know about. Here in our painting settings, you've got a couple of settings related to single instance mode. You've got this single instance mode override radius. That is currently checked off. And once you check this on, you will turn on single instance mode radius. So let's go ahead and explore that. But for that, I'm going to want to kind of come to some flat ground here. So as you can see, with single instance mode on, I could play some trees really close to one another. I could go bam right there, and then maybe, like, bam right there, bam right there. With this single instance mode override radius checked on, you can then specify a radius. Let me go something like 200 so that you can see my single instance bubble brush getting a little bit bigger. That shows the radius which will surround my single instance and in which I cannot place another instance. If I was to click here, bam, a tree is going to appear right in the middle of it. If I go a little bit over to the side, you can see my green bubble brush is overlapping that. I'm trying to left click. I can't add one. However, if I was to go outside of the bounds of that Boom, it's allowing me to add another one. So just know that that is a thing. Another bit of nuance here to understand is way up above where we've got single instance mode checked on right here where it says, All selected. We have the option to go through all selected or cycle through selected. Now, in order to see this in full effect, I need to check on my different foliage types here. So check, check, check. I've got four different types here selected, bush, flower, grass, and pine. I'm going to set my single instance mode override radius here. I'm going to set that toggle that back off. And so with all selected, if I was to find an empty spot, maybe right over here, if I was to left click, it's going to put everything overlapping each other at once, so I can see some grass there. So tree, there's flour. No super attractive, but if you wanted to have multiple things painted at once, I mean, you could do that. If you change this to something like cycle through selected, what that'll do is every time you click, this time I get a bush, this time, I got a flower, tiny flower, but there it is. The next time, some grass and then my pine tree. Bush, flower, grass, pine tree. Now, what is this useful for? Well, let's just say that you were wanting to just, you know, smatter some trees all around your landscape. You could have in your palette area maybe five different versions of trees. And if you had those five different trees selected, if you had cycle through selected here selected under single instance mode, you could do, like, tree one, tree two, tree three, tree four, et cetera. Very nice for that kind of variety. Now, I really wanted to show this single instance mode off. Here in my California level, you remember where I ripped that hole into my landscape. For a cave, this is a great use of single instance mode. Currently in my foliage palette, I've got four different rocks. I've got my ground slope angle set to a max of 90 degrees. I've got some scaling variety for my rocks, set to a min of one and a max of 2.5. So give me some different rock sizes. I have a line to normal, checked off, got random yaw checked on. I am going to be doing single instance cycle through selected, so it's going to go one, two, three, four, et cetera. And now to create the mouth of a cave, all we need to do in single instance mode is just click around until I've got a whole bunch of rocks around the mouth of this cave. And it obscures this weird tearing that I've got going on. I probably should have scaled up my rocks a little bit more here. But you can see how you can kind of start creating the mouth of a cave, obscuring that weird tear that occurs when you're tearing through the landscape itself. Guys, that's how you do it. Single instance mode, super useful. And also combining it with how you can create the mouth of a cave, something like this. Guys, that'll do it all for this one. We'll see you in the next one. 25. Foliage Mode Filters: In this video, we are going to be talking about foliage mode filters right here within foliage mode. Now, conceptually, these are pretty easy to understand. You've got a series of checkboxes, and they essentially determine what you are able and eligible to paint foliage upon. Now, let's explore these all one by one. We've got landscape, static mesh, BSP, and foliage. I'm going to ignore translucent because these four are the big ones. First of all, we've got landscape checked, meaning that we are able to paint foliage a top of a landscape actor. Now, I'm currently in single mode. I've got my pine tree selected as the one to place an instance upon. This is a landscape actor right below me, so if I was just simply left click, I would see a pine tree appear. No problem. With this unchecked, if I tried to place a pine tree, I'm left clicking, nothing happens. Okay. Next, let's test this out with a static mesh actor. I'm going to turn a landscape back on before I forget. This log I found within my content drawer right here, my STF folder. By the way, a content drawer can be accessed by holding down Control and space bar, toggle that on and off. That works just like the content browser. I found this SM dead tree right there in that pathway that you see at the top of the tool tip. It's in the STF folder. Now, I did not paint this in as foliage. Instead, I dragged and dropped this static mesh asset into my level. Now, currently, in my filters area right up here, it says, Yes, I can paint, in my case, this pine foliage atop that static mesh. So let's go ahead and give us a try. I'm going to try to place it right on top of the log there, left click and bam, you get a tree. Now, if I try to paint on the side of this log right here, it's not doing it, and that's because my slope angle is too steep. If I continue to left click, left click, left click, left click, left click, suddenly it flattens out enough where I can place a pine tree on top of that static mesh. Now, of course, even if I have this checked off for static meshes, if I was to click right about here and try to paint one, I cannot do so. So static meshes, yes or no, can you paint foliage atop of them? Let me turn that back on. Now, BSP, what this is is this actor I've got sticking out of my cliff side right here. I'm going to jump temporarily out of foliage mode because this can be a little bit confusing if you're not familiar with working with the engine. BSP refers to these geometry actors that you can place in your level. And you can find these under the Place Actors panel, which if you didn't know, you can turn that on by clicking this little plus button right here. You got Place Actors panel right there. Additionally, if you come under window, you can turn on or off your place actors panel right there. With geometry selected, you've got different geometry brushes that you can add to your level. This is a geometry box brush that I've sized up. And if I select it here, I can see it is considered a box brush. It's a geometry brush. And this is considered BSP geometry here in foliage mode. So if you see this BSP checkbox, what's that talking about? Well, it's talking about these geometry brushes. So once again, with that checked on, I've got my pine tree selected right here. If I was to click on this, I can paint trees atop that with this clicked off. Now if I try to click on it, nothing appears. That's what that's referring to. Next, note that between some videos here, I did add a few cliff rock foliage types to my level, one, two, and three. Now I've got my foliage type pine selected. Currently, my filters right up here, I have foliage unchecked. Am I allowed to paint one foliage type, in this case, a pine tree on top of a rock? Because this cliff rock is in and of itself a foliage type. Well, currently, it is unchecked, meaning I shouldn't be able to do it, right? Well, if I left click right about here on top of my rock, but wait, something a little weird has occurred. It looks like my tree is inside the rock, and that is because it is. It kind of ignored my click on the surface of the rock here and went down to the landscape, and that is what is actually placed upon. So it's going to look a little bit weird there. Now, if I was to turn on this filter for foliage, I'm basically saying, yes, I can place one foliage type, in this case, a pine tree on top of a cliff rock foliage type. So now if I was to left click right about here, and you can see my single instance little bubble brush up here. Now if I was to left click, that trees actually going to be atop the rock. So with this unchecked, if I left click on the rock here, it's going to go right through it down to the landscape right below. But with this checked, I can place it right atop that cliff rock foliage type. So there you have it the foliage mode filters that you need to know about landscape, static mesh, BSP, which is these geometry brushes right up here, and foliage types themselves. And these check boxes simply act as yes and no checkboxes. Are you eligible to paint upon them or not? Guys, that'll do it all for this video, see you in the next one. 26. Fill Tool: Welcome back, everyone. In this video, we are going to explore the fill tool here in foliage mode. So let's jump out of our paint tool and into the fill tool. And as you can see from the tool tip there, it says that this will fill the selected target with foliage, that fill tool right up there. So let's go ahead and choose it. Now, as soon as I did that, you'll notice, going from paint mode to film mode that all of these brush options are going to go away. So here we go in film mode. And also I want to point out that for this demonstration, I've got my flower group selected. I did change my density here with my flower group selected to be 500. I've also adjusted my scaling just a little bit here. I left the uniform scaling in place. Min of one, a max of two, just to add a little flower variety. Also, I did want to point out before I clicked on my landscape that I did set the ground slope angle rules as such. Up to a maximum angle of 15 degrees. So note that those are my rules in place. With all that set, all I need to do is just click on my landscape one time. And suddenly, I've added 241,000 instances of this flower group to my landscape. And as you can see, I've got a little bit of flower scale variety, a little bit, some taller than others. And also, it did respect that ground slope angle. You don't see the flowers growing on this steeper slope. So that's a real quick and easy way to fill your landscape with a selected foliage type. Alright, guys, that'll do it all for this one. See you in the next one. 27. Reapply Tool: All right. Welcome back. In this video, we are going to be talking about the reapply tool right up here in foliage mode. Now, the reapply tool can be used to reapply some settings for a given foliage type without erasing the foliage type outright and then replacing it. It's a way to just say, Hey, I like my foliage type placements, but I just want to set some new settings for it. So take a look at my pine trees out here. They're all roughly the same size, and I've got this one growing out of the side here perpendicular. That one looks like it is aligned to normal. Let's just say I wanted to adjust some of the parameters associated with this pine tree. So what I'd want to do here is reach for that reapply tool. So I'm going to select it right now. And what this is going to do with my selected foliage type, you see down here in the settings, you've got various parameters all grade out with checkboxes right next to them. Now, what you want to do here is check on any setting that you want to set new settings or parameters for. And then with our paintbrush, we can paint over that existing foliage and reapply the updated setting. So let me show you what I mean. The most obvious here is going to be scale, so I'm going to check this scale setting on right here. I'm going to leave it at uniform, but it exposes this scale X. I'm going to set my min value to be 0.5 and my max value to be three. So I'm basically saying I want some tree variety. Even though it says uniform scaling, know that the only scale value that it presents to you is scale X. It's going to apply this to the Y and Z scale of our trees as well. Okay, so I want to apply that to all my trees. I also do want to ensure that my align to normal right here is checked off for every instance of my pine trees. It looks like that one was placed while that was checked on. So I want to ensure that that is off. And now, just with those two settings, I can now use my bubble brush holding down left click, and I can reapply these settings to the existing instances of these trees. So as you can see, I'm just holding down the left mouse button, and as I'm mousing over the various instances of the tree, it is scaling it randomly. Any of these trees that are growing perpendicular, maybe out of the side of the mountain here, left clicking, I'm just holding down left click, left click. I'm holding down left click, et cetera. Now, I wouldn't have to rub my brush over the landscape like I'm doing now. I could just size up my brush size to be super big to make this happen instantly, but I just want you to see that as I'm holding down the left mouse button. It is scaling. It's reapplying those updated settings to every instance here of my tree. 28. Save Foliage Settings: If I was to right click on a given foliage type here, I can browse to this in the content browser. I've got my pine 02. Okay. Now if I was to double click on this static mesh foliage asset to open it up, let me just dock it across the top here. Actually, let me not dock it across the top so that I can compare the two. You can see that my settings here in the foliage type asset match the settings here found in the foliage mode itself. Let me just jump out of the reapply mode just to the basic paint mode. You can see I've got a density of two set here in foliage mode. That corresponds to the density here in the foliage type asset itself. And here in the foliage type asset itself, if I was to change it to something like three and press Enter, you can see how it updated it here within foliage mode itself. And maybe here in foliage mode itself, I could change that density type to say five and press Enter. I updated not only here, but in the foliage type asset itself. So you change it in one place, it's going to change it in the other place. So if I was to save it here in the foliage type asset, it's going to show that that is now saved down here. Let me go ahead and set this back to two here in foliage mode two. You can see that change reflected here. And if I click here to save this foliage asset, you'll notice that this ends up saved as well. That asterisk will go away. Alright, and there you have it. Changing the parameters in one area, in this case, foliage mode will change it in the other, in the foliage type. Guys, that'll do it off for this one. We'll see you in the next one. 29. Selection Tools: Welcome. In this video, we are going to be talking about the various selection tools at the top of foliage mode. And I'm going to start things off by selecting this select button right up at the top. And what this allows me to do is simply select any instance of my foliage here in my level, and I'm going to choose this pine tree that I've strategically bent over. And with that selected, you can see I bring on the translation widget. And so what this might be used for is something like this where maybe you've got some piece of foliage in your level that you want to correct, and you don't even need to have it selected in your palette panel right here, but simply click on it with the Select tool. And then with this, I could hit the space bar, bring on my rotational tools, and I could rotate it that way or this way and stand it. Back up. Maybe I want to bury it in the ground a little bit, something like that. So that is a reason you may want to use the Select tool. Next, we've got this all selector right here. It selects all foliage. So if I click on this, you can see that every foliage type in my level is selected. Now, this can be useful if you wanted to mass delete everything in your level. That's maybe a case where you might want to use it. Simply tap the delete key. And everything goes away, let me just do controlled Z to bring it all back. And to get out of this, I could simply choose this D select all foliage instances right up at the top. Next, we've got this in valid button right up here, and this will select any what are labeled as invalid foliage instances. Now, what in the heck would this be useful for? If the original mesh upon which a foliage type is based upon has been deleted, for example, say this pine tree mesh was deleted from our project well, then that would label this foliage type as invalid. And so a way that you could quickly identify any invalid foliage types in your level would be to simply click on this invalid button right up here. Another case where a foliage type could be considered invalid is if you place that foliage type on a section of landscape that no longer exists. Remember, through your landscape manage tools, you can add or delete out sections of your landscape. Let's assume that you added a section of landscape, maybe painted some of these pine trees atop them, and then you decided to delete out that section of landscape. Well, in that case, the pine tree that was existing on that now deleted section of landscape, would be considered invalid. Next, let's talk about this Lasso tool, and this is probably the most useful out of all the various selection tools that we've talked about right up here. With this, you will have a bubble brush present in your level so long as you have one of your foliage types here selected. There I've got pine trees selected. What this allows you to do is Lasso. That is essentially label any given foliage types that you would like to select. So if I simply hold down the left mouse button, you can see that I am selecting whatever tree instances that I'm touching with my bubble brush. And then with those selected, you can see I've got this translation widget right out here. I could simply move them all up into the air. Maybe I wanted to rotate them. I'm just going to do Control Z to set that back. Maybe I'd want to scale them all up in size, just those few. Maybe I just want to delete all those. Those are all uses for the Lasso tool. Let me just do Control Z to bring that back. So out of all these selection tools, the Lasso one is probably the one you're gonna get the most mileage out of. It's great for just rounding up a selection of foliage and maybe scaling them up in size, maybe moving them, that sort of thing. Alright, guys, that's gonna do it all for this one. See you in the next one. 30. Grass Types: In this video, we are going to show off another way to populate your landscape with foliage using something called grass types. Now, conceptually, the way this works is you paint on one of your various layers here in landscape painting mode. And then depending on the layer that you painted, in my case, it's going to be grass. It's going to automatically populate any area that I painted with grass with various meshes that I set up via a grass type asset. So let's explore how this works. Now for this, I'm in my created landscape level, and between videos here, I did associate my landscape no tiling material as my landscape material associated with my landscape. You can see that setup right over here with my landscape selected. Right there is my landscape material. Now, you're going to want to go ahead and double click on this guy to open it up because we're going to be exploring how to set up grass types. In fact, most of the work's already been done for you. Alright, so with that landscape material open, and I have it open right across the top, we're going to ignore the majority of this monstrosity before you and instead focus our attention on this node setup right here. We've got this landscape grass node, and in it are three landscape layer sample nodes, and they're all labeled grass, path, and mud. And that corresponds to grass, path and mud that I can paint on my landscape. Now, going back to my landscape material, what I want to do in order to associate some meshes with a given painted on layer is with this landscape grass note selected. Over in the details panel, if I zoom on up, each of these has an associated grass type asset that we can slot and associate with them. Now, currently, this is set to none because we haven't created any yet. So we're going to click on this little drop down right here in order to create a grass type. So right here under Grass type, clicking on this little dropdown. At the top of this dropdown list is going to be a landscape Grass type creation option. I'm going to go ahead and click on that. It's going to ask me to save this new asset into a folder of our choosing. I'm going to right click on my MW landscape auto material, and I'm going to create a new folder called Grass types. And with that created, I'm going to give this a name of GT Underscore Grass. And then I'll go ahead and save this. You see that asset now populating our grass type asset right here. However, this asset is empty, so we need to open it up. Now, I could open it up by simply double clicking on that thumbnail right there. However, if I click right there, I can browse to where this asset is in the content browser. There it is. And if I double click on it or just tap the space bar, I will open it up. There it is. Currently, this is an empty asset. So we're going to associate three meshes with this. The way that we can do that is clicking on this tiny plus button right here to add an element to our grass Array, one, two, and three. I'm going to right click right next to where it says grass varieties right up at the top right here to expand all selections. And now you can see for each entry into this grass varieties array, we can add a grass mesh. Now, this is a little misleading because this does not have to be grass. It can be any static mesh of your choosing. However, I will slot in the following meshes for Index zero here, I'm going to type in grass, and I'm going to associate Grass group. Grass group 01 with that. I'm going to set my grass density right away to a value like 2000 2000, something like that. Oh, it's gonna cap me at thousand. That's fine. I'm also going to set my call distance. My call distance to something like 20,000 I'm going to have some random scaling here so you can see you can set some properties associated with each of these. I'm going to set uniform scaling, but the min scale is going to be two, and the max scale will set to be three, so some tall grass. I do have random rotation checked on aligned to surface for grass. Yeah, I'll leave that on. That's fine. For Index one, I'm going to add some flowers. So let's go ahead and search for some flowers. Flower flower group. I'll do this first flower group right there, SM flower group 01. Let me zoom up on that so you can see the name a little bit clear if you like. I'm going to set the grass density down a little bit. So something like 100 for that. And again, scaling, I'll set it between a value of 0.5 to two. And I will leave random rotation in line to surface checked, as well. Then down below for this grass mesh, index two. I'm going to set this to pine. I'll do pine 02. And here for the grass density, it should essentially be called mesh density because that's what you're specifying here. I'm going to set this to something low like 0.5. I'm gonna also set the cull distance for these trees to be something like 50,000 because I don't want these to cull out until we get our camera very far away from it. Scaling, I'm going to set the scale to be one. And actually, let me set it to be 0.5 to two. And for this, I'm going to say random rotation, although I do not want it to align to surface, otherwise, we're gonna have trees growing perpendicularly out of the side of our mountainsides right there. So I'm gonna leave that unchecked for the trees. And yeah, I like that for scaling for trees. That seems to be a pretty good range. Now, I think I did forget to set a culling distance for my flowers up here. So for my flowers, I'm going to set the end call distance. Again, I'm not changing the start. I'll change the end to something like 30,000. Alright. With that, you can play around with those settings. I'm just going to click Save right up at the top. And now I can see in my material that grass type is associated with my grass paint layer. You can see that right there. However, if I go to my created landscape, I don't see anything. I don't see any meshes whatsoever. What's going on. Well, that's because I have not updated my material. So clicking back on my material, I can update it by clicking this Apply button right up at the top. However, I'm going to click Save right up here because that's going to not only apply the changes to this material, but also save it as well. So let's go ahead and do a two for one. Save this asset right away. And after I do that, returning to my created landscape, now I can see foliage populating wherever I have painted grass into this landscape. Isn't that quite nice? Now, just to show you how this works when I paint this on, because I had this landscape already consisting of grass. I'm going to right click on my grass paint layer right here and I'm going to clear the layer but now I've got nothing painted onto my landscape. What I'm going to do now is select my mud. I'm going to right click on my mud, and I'm going to fill the entire landscape with a mud coating. And now I'm going to go ahead and select my grass once again. I'm going to set my brush size to be a little bit bigger, and I'll check this out. Wherever I paint grass in my landscape, I'm just holding down the left mouse button. It'll populate that section with the grass type associated with it within the landscape material, which I think is pretty awesome. So once again, wherever I paint grass, it is going to associate that grass with this grass type and thus put on those meshes. So now you can see you can follow a similar process here with currently our path layer as well as our mud layer. Now, I called this field because in a few videos time here, I'm going to set up what looks to be a field on top of our mud layer by creating a grass type, but that one's going to be set up a little bit different. But know that you can extend this process to our path layer here, as well. That's all set up for you. So now a question you may be asking yourself is, what's the right process for adding foliage or meshes into your landscape? Should you use foliage mode or should you use grass types instead? And I suppose the right answer there is, A, either whatever you prefer and or B, combination of the two. I typically like to have a grass type for something like my grass layer just to kind of give me a base smattering of foliage wherever, in my case, I have grass. And then I go into foliage mode, and I can add some meshes using foliage mode that are different than the standard grass, trees, flowers, et cetera. So a combination of the two I find to be quite nice. But experiment and find out what works best for you. Guys, that'll do it all for this one. See you in the next one. 31. Fields: In this video, we are going to learn how to make fields, and this will be as simple as creating a grass type like we did in the last video and associating it with a paint layer of our choosing so that when we paint on that layer of our choosing, walla we get a field of whatever mesh type we like. Alright, to create our field here, just a quick reminder that our landscape actor up here in the outliner has this M landscape, no tiling landscape material associated with it. And once again, this is going to be important because we need to dive inside of here to create that grass type needed to create this field. So if you double click on that, you can open this up. Got to open across the top. And once again, we are focused on these nodes right here. In the last video, we created a grass type, and we associated it with our grass layer. In this video, we are once again going to be creating another grass type, although we are going to be associating it with our mud layer. Now with this landscape grass node selected, note that I have it saying field right down here. Now, I have it saying field down here because I'm going to be creating a grass type that's going to resemble a field. And here with this landscape layer sample, note that I do have this labeled as the mud layer. I'm saying that when I paint mud, I wanted to have this grass type associated with my field right here. I could have easily have called this mud, as well. This is just a label. It doesn't really matter what you call this. I could call it hamburgers if I really wanted to. Okay, let's create this grass type. Go to click right down here and we're going to create a landscape grass type. And once again, we will put this in my grass types folder that I created in the previous video. I will call this GT underscore field and press Enter to say that. I could simply double click on that thumbnail image there to open up this grass type. There it is. And I'm going to add one element to this grass type. So clicking on this plus button one time, I'm going to open up this indice. And for my grass mesh, and again, it's a little bit misleading because this does not have to be grass. There is an asset that I'm thinking of this Sarge plant. This is in that STF series of folders. I'm going to go with that guy right there. However, you can create a field of any static mesh that you want. Heck, you could have a field of chairs or statues if you really wanted to, any static mesh of your choosing. But that's the one I'm going to choose. This SM large plant. Now, I'm going to adjust the scale of this really quickly. So scale down here. I'm going to change the min and the max. I'll set them to be five and five. This is a pretty small plant. So I do want these all to be uniform in size, five and five. I don't even want any scale variety. I am not going to align to surface to ensure that these are going straight up into the air. I'll set my end call distance for these to be something like, I don't know, 30,000, something like that. And the density, you can play around with this, but I find that a density of something like 50 creates a pretty realistic looking field. Of course, you can come back in here and fiddle around with that. Now, the key for making this look like a field is this placement jitter. By default, this is at one. If we set this down to zero, that is going to be what you want in order to make this look like a field. Having use grid checked on, which it already is, and then placement jitter set to zero. With this, I'm going to go ahead and save. Once again, to review our density here is 50. Use grid is checked on. Placement jitter is zero. I've got my end call distance at 30,000. I've unchecked a line to surface. And with that saved, if I look in my landscape, I've got mud covering everywhere, but once again, whoops, Control Z accidentally painted there. I don't see any field populating my mud layer at all. And once again, the reason for that is because back in my M landscape, no tiling I have not updated this material. I've got this GT field now associated with my mud paint layer. I need to simply click Save right here. And now, if I go back to my created landscape, we can see I've got a field of those large plants covering everywhere in my landscape. And once again, it cuts off back there because I've got my call distance set to 30,000. But that looks pretty good, right? Now, in order to demonstrate that we can paint mud fresh on our landscapes, and then our GT field grass type will immediately populate it with a field of plants, I went ahead and I cleared my entire landscape here of mud by right clicking on it and cleared the layer. I also did the same with my grass layer here as well, by right clicking and clearing the layer. Then I right clicked on my path right here and filled the layer. Right now, my entire level here is filled with this path layer. Also, sometimes you might find some wonkiness where even after you do that, your field or one of your other grass types will still remain. In order to deal with that, sometimes here in your landscape material, you just simply have to clear out the grass type and re slot it back in. I just did that between cuts here. I'm going to associate my GT field. With my mud layer once again. So with this node selected, I just associated that GT field with this field label, and that is associated with my mud painting layer. I'm going to go ahead and save. Now, back here in my created landscape, if I choose mud, I'll zoom on down a little bit. If I simply left click, you'll get that gray checkerboard for just a moment. I'm holding down my left click as soon as I release you can see it will put that field wherever I have painted in the mud and that looks pretty nice. Now, if you find those crops too close together, you can come into your field type or your grass type field and just change the grass density. If I want something like ten instead and click Save back in my landscape, you can see how it spreads them out a little bit further. So play around with those parameters. I like that a lot, guys. Great job. Alright, that'll do it all for this one. See you in the next one. 32. Foliage Optimization: Now, we all like games that run at a very high and smooth frame rate. But it's all too easy when working with landscapes and placing a lot of foliage out in your landscapes that suddenly your frame rate starts to tank. In this video, we're going to be talking about ways that you can improve the performance of your open world landscape. And to help facilitate this discussion, I'm going to direct you down to Fab right away. And if you forgot how to get there, here in the content browser, there is your fab button. Click on that and it'll open up this fab tab. There's a constant pack in here. I'd like you to go ahead and grab right from the get go because we're going to be exploring some trees and maybe some other foliage inside of it to help tank our frame rate. The one that I'm talking about here is going to be called Procedural Nature Pack. And it is this guy right here. That guy right there. So with that discovered in Fab, it is a free pack, by the way. Search for free, why, don't you? I'm going to click on that. And then here I am going to add to Project. Now, once I do this, it's going to ask me to select the most recent compatible version. And so from this drop down list, I will choose 5.4, and I'm going to add to Project. Now, this is going to take a moment to download, so I'm going to pause video here and rejoin you when this is finished. Alright, so that nature pack has finished getting added to my content browser. Now the reason I sought this one out is because I was aware that there is a static mesh inside of this nature pack called Large Tree With Roots. Now, check this out. You can see it in the tool tip. This particular mesh consists of a whole lot of polygons. And if you add too many of these to your scene, it can absolutely tank your frame rate. So let's prove this out. I'm going to bring on my frame rate display here in my Viewport, and I can do that by clicking on this hamburger icon in the upper left. And I've got this show FPS option, Control Shift and H. We'll also bring that on. So with that checked on, over along the right here in my view port, you can see it displayed right up there. Let me zoom up on it or actually freeze it. You've got two numbers. The top number is your FPS at your frames per second, which most of you are familiar with. The bottom number is your time in milliseconds. That is the time between frames being rendered. But for most of you, that top number is the most important one. So I'm currently running this landscape auto material level at about 76 77 frames per second. Not too bad. Now, what I've done here is I have taken my large tree with roots, and I've made a foliage type out of it here in foliage mode. So let's go ahead and paint some of these in here. With this tree selected, my brush is relatively small. I'll put my density down to something like 20. This is still going to be a pretty high concentration, just one click here. And you can see that I've only added 45, and my frame rate is already down to 42. Let me just go ahead and click again. And now I'm down to 29 frames per second. And that's only with 92 of these in my level. And you can see and understand that as I click more and more, it's just tanking my frame rate. So, what if I really like this tree, and what if I want to have a lot of them in my landscape? How do I get around this? And how do I get some performance back? Well, for this, we can turn on something called Nanite for this particular tree mesh down here. In Layman's Serum, Nant is a special system in unreal that lets you use super detailed three D models without slowing down your game. And so what we can do here is turn on Nanite for this particular three D model. And the way that we can check if it's on or off for a given mesh, and again, we want to do this on the mesh itself, not the foliage type, is you can RClick on it. And in your Right Click menu, at the very top, you've got this Nanite option. This checkbox tells you if it is on or off, and this is where we can enable it or disable it. So currently it is disabled. So what I'm going to do is right click on that, go to Nanite and I am going to enable it. And then I'll go ahead and save that right away, Control S to save that. And I'll check this out. I immediately but my frames per second back up to almost 50 frames per second. And also check this out. If I now mouse over this static mesh for my large tree, you can see that that triangle count is now greatly reduced. Now it's down to 17,000 per tree, which is still a lot, but it's a lot less than the 100,000 plus count. Alright? And so there you have it, guys. That's a real quick and easy way to get some performance back in your landscape level if you're working with foliage that is not very performant. 33. Water Plugin: All right. So in this section of the course, we're going to be exploring some of the optional water tools that we can add to our project. However, before I add this water plug in, I just wanted to point out and clarify once again that here in this landscape automateial mountain range example, we are using this landscape material. And if I double click on this one, this was the one that already came on this level. So if I double click on this, I've got it opened up over here. The water in this level is going to work a little bit differently than the water plug in that we're about to add. Once again, with this particular landscape material, water showing up is a product of these settings within this water material. And you can play around with some of these. But essentially, when you flatten the landscape to a given height, and I'm just going to flatten this current water level right here using my landscape sculpting tools, we will get more water. Like so. Now, the water tools that we're about to use in our other maps, they're going to work a little bit differently. So let's go ahead and add those tools. Right up at the top, under our edit option, we've got the option to bring on the plugins menu and inside of here, do a search for water. And what we are seeking out are these experimental water tools. So I'm going to check this on. As soon as I check this, it's going to give us a little bit of a warning here. Are you sure you want to enable to plug in? We will say yes. And it will prompt you to restart the unreal editor. So go ahead and do that by clicking this Restart now in the lower right. I'll save all those changes that I made to my level here. And after our editor restarts, I went to my California level because this is where I'd like to demonstrate my water tools. Up here in my Place Actors panel, if I do a search for water, we will now find that we have access to these actors that we did not have before. Now, if you cannot find your Place actors panel, I suggest you come right here under this plus button. You can bring on your Place Actors panel right there. Or if you come up to the top where it says window, you can toggle on or off your Place Actors panel right from there. Alright, we're in a good position for our next video. Water plugin is now enabled. We'll see you there. 34. Oceans: All right. And so with the water plug in added to our project, I'm going to go ahead and add a water body ocean to my California level. It's as simple as dragging and dropping from the place actor panel. And as soon as I do this, you're going to notice that my level's going to start looking a little bit funny, and this is where a lot of students start to freak out, so just relax. We'll fix it all up here in time. But before we do that, take note over here in the outliner, as we added, actually, more than just the water body ocean actor. We also added this water zone actor right below it. Now, the water zone actor is a key component of the water system. It defines how the water's going to interact with the environment, and it acts as a global volume that controls water related effects. For one, it's going to define the water areas. Two, it's also going to control some water interaction. That's going to be the blending between things like rivers and lakes and oceans, all that kind of thing. And the third thing that it does is it also helps optimize performance by limiting the amount of water calculations to only what is within the water zone. Know that it does some important stuff that you don't really need to worry about for right now. Alright, we're going to go ahead and select our water body ocean and attempt to make my landscape come on back because right now it looks pretty ugly. So with that selected, over in the Details panel, I'd like to draw your attention to this parameter right down here. It's called effect Landscapes. And by default, it is checked on. And note that if we were to uncheck it, and I'll uncheck it right now, that a lot of our landscape seems to come on back, and you're like, Well, that's better. Why don't we just leave it that way? Well, we're actually going to check it back on and then affect our water body ocean here a little bit more to sort of fine tune how this ocean is going to look when surrounding our landscape here. Now note right away that with this checked off down here in the details panel, we also have grade out some parameters here in this terrain section. Now, I'm going to want to have access to some of these. So in order to get these to come back on, I need to make sure that this is checked. So I'm going to go ahead and check this back on. Once again, our landscape is going to look temporarily horrible, but bear with me. Alright, so the first thing I guess I'll mention here is with this water body ocean selected over in the Details panel, know that you can move the location around, including the up and down, the Z location. So if you do want to move this up or down in your level, and I'll just grab that blue handle right now, drag it up, and then I'll do Control Z to undo that. You can affect that that I'm just dragging it down. Control Z to undo that. Yes, you can. However, I am going to leave it. Now, also with this water body ocean actor selected, you'll notice that from a 10,000 foot view here, you see some of these white dots right there, right there, and right there. And there's another one right up here, which is a little bit tough to see. These defined, there it is, are spline points. Essentially, the points that make up are water body ocean. And we can move these around, as I will do with this one selected, moving it around, like so. And you can see, as we're starting to move it around, some of our landscape comes back. That one's a little bit tough to grab here. Let me go ahead and grab this one. But we can also add more of these because by default, you're given four of these. What I like to do is I try to essentially shape this around the area of the landscape that I would like to be displayed. Okay, so now I've got kind of a wider swath here of points kind of pointing out. If I wanted to add another one here, all I would need to do is with a spine point selected, hold down the Alt key. Alt, left click and drag, add another one. And so you can kind of do something like this where you could boat in maybe a little bit right there, like so, move this around. And maybe I want to add another spine point. So again, Alt left key, left click, not left key and drag. You can create all kinds of interesting shapes. So go ahead and do that now. I'm just going to kind of fast forward through this process as I do this with my own landscape. Mm. Alright, so we're not going to worry about being perfect, but generally speaking, you want to shape your ocean so that it surrounds your landscape, something like this. Now note that I do have a spine point selected down here, and with a spine point selected, down in the details panel, I am seeing spine related parameters. Now, I actually just want to have my water body component selected, and this is one that I want to focus on right now. And I want to come under the terrain section and note that when I've got effects landscape checked on, I also have access to these water height map setting. So I'm going to dig inside of here. Now, with these open and available, I'm going to explore this effect under the effects category. So water height map settings, effects. And then we've got this blurring category. And you've got this blur shaped checkbox. By default, it is checked on. And with it checked off, let me get a little bit closer to my shoreline right down here. With it checked off, can see how it sort of blends that more gradually into the landscape. So that's probably one of the first settings that you want to go to with it checked on, it's going to have a sharp drop off with it checked off, you're going to have a smoother transition. Okay, the next set of parameters I would like to send you to are under the water height map settings, curl noise. We're going to expand that out. And what this can do is it can add a little character to your shoreline so that it's not so flat and boring here. So wrinkles, if you will. Now you've got this curl amount of one and two. All you really need to do is fiddle around with curl one amount, and just a small setting we'll do here. I'll set it to something like 0.5. Press Enter, and you can see it's going to add some character to our shoreline. If you go from a 10,000 foot view, you can see what that does. If I go to something like 0.1, it's just going to add a little bit of character along the side, which actually think subtle is better. If you went and set a value of something like two, it's going to get a lot more crazy. So experiment with that. This one, small values will have pretty big changes. So I think I'm going to go something like 0.1. Just adds a few little in and outs to my shoreline there. Okay, the next area I'd like to head to is this curve setting area under terrain. Let's expand this out. And some parameters you may want to play around with are the channel edge offset currently at negative 1,000, a value of negative 2000. If I set that you can see how it sort of offsets the edge here from my spine point a little bit further out. I'll reset that back to zero. If I go back to where it was negative 1,000. You can see where that's at. Channel depth currently at 2000, if I was to set it to something like 20 you can see how suddenly there is no depth right there. If I set it to something like 5,000, it sets it to a steeper drop off, if you will. So I'm going to go back to something like 2000 so that it is a more gradual drop off from the shoreline. And then curve ramp with if I was to simply go in here and pull this to the left and right, once again, you can add some character to your shoreline as well by specifying how much of a ramp or drop off you're going to get from your shoreline. Into the water itself. So those are the basics of working with a water body ocean. Now, if you get this warning in the upper right, you can simply click on this Mark dirty and it'll bring it up to date, and that'll go away. Play around with some more of those parameters to get the character that you want. But once again, after you bring in a water body ocean, click on these spine points. Hold down to left click and drag to drag out a few more spine points so that you can sort of specify a shoreline for your ocean. Alright, guys, that's going to do it all for this one. See you in the next one. 35. Lakes: All right. Now that we've got an ocean in place, let's go ahead and explore adding a lake next. So in our place Actors panel, searching for water, let's drag and drop a water body lake into our level. And I guess I'll place it right about here on top of these mountains and notice that when I do, it will flatten those mountains, and that is because with this lake actor selected, over in the details panel, I do have that effects landscape checkbox checked on as it is by default. Now, once again, maybe this is not what you wanted to have happen. So if you uncheck it, you will see that you are essentially wrapping some lake water around the mountains. So dealer's choice on how you want to manage that. But for the majority of this video, I will have it checked on. Now, before we get to adding some spline points to our lake here, I just wanted to point out that with this water body lake selected, you can move it up. You can move it down, et cetera. So if you wanted to place this into a little indentation that you sculpted into your landscape, you could certainly do that. But now I'm going to check this box on for Effects Landscape. Once again, you're going to see it flatten those mountains right there and automatically terraform the land around it. Let me add a few spine points. So once again, holding down the Alt key with one of these spine points selected, go to hold down Alt, left click and drag. You can see we can add more points to our lake like so. Select Spine point, Alt, left click and drag. Now, I did want to point out that with any of these spine points selected, you do have these tangent handles right here and right here that you can pull on, and they're a little bit tricky, and there I've got one. So you can kind of move those around to shape the lake to your liking a little bit more, sort of fine tuning those curves. Also, if you regret any of your spine point decisions, let me just add another one here, and you decide, You know what? I don't like that spine point. With it selected, you can hit that delete key and get rid of it. Okay, let's go over to the details panel once again. Now note I've got my water lake actor selected. However, I've got one of the spine points, it's self selected. So I'm seeing spline specific settings. I'm going to choose the water body component itself. And I want to come back under the terrain setting so that we can fill around with some of these water height map settings. Let's go ahead and expand this out under the effects. Let's expand that out. Let's expand out the fall off settings because we're going to be playing with some of those in a little bit. But I want to start off in water height map settings, effects blurring, just like we did with our ocean. I'm going to zoom on up to this point right about here in our lake, you can see this sharp cut off right here. Now, if I unchecked blur shape, you can see how it adds a little padding around it. Also, if I kind of zoom on back here, it's sort of flattened everything else out around it so it can fit in a little bit neater. So with that checked on, with it checked off. So I'm going to leave this checked off. And then I'm also going to take my lake here, and I'm just going to set it on down here a little bit lower, something like that, maybe. Okay, so now I've got Blur shape off. Next under the fall off settings, note that we've got two different fall off modes. We've got angle, and we've got width. So with angle, it's currently set to a fall off angle of 45 degrees. And what that is essentially specifying right here. Let's go ahead and play with this fall off angle. So if I left click in here and drag it out, let's go to something like 15. You can see how it's going to flatten this angle a lot more to 15 degrees. If I wanted it a little bit steeper, I could set it the opposite way to something like almost 70. So that allows you to fine tune essentially the angle sloping into your landscape. Alright, I'm going to go ahead and set that back to 45. In fact, let me set it to something like 15. So that's the angle fall off mode. Now, you can change this up. So instead of fall off mode being angle, you could set it to be width. As soon as I change it to width, this fall off angle is going to be grade out because that's specific to the angle fall off mode, and fall off width becomes active. With this, if we can set this bigger or smaller, you can see how it's sort of flattening out the landscape. It's adding more width to the landscape. I was set this to something like 50, it's gonna be a lot tighter on the edge of my lake, which obviously doesn't look good. If I set the fall off with something bigger, I'll set it to something like 3,000. You'd get something like that, which I think looks pretty nice. The edge offset has to do with this offset around the spine points itself. If I was to set this to something like 50 and press Enter, you can see how it's tighter along the spine points right here, something bigger, like 1,000. You can see how it pushes it back out. I actually kind of liked it at that 50 value, so I will do just that. Next, you can experiment with your curl noise settings right here under the effects category. And once again, this can add a little bit of character to your shoreline and your lake in general can sort of reshape it in interesting ways. Smaller values is probably better. So if I was to set this to a value like 0.15 and press Enter, it just kind of reshapes it here a little bit. You can also play around with this curl one tiling. You can see if you left click in here and sort of drag around and then release, you can get some really interesting looking settings like that. I tend to not go too crazy with this, so I'm going to set this all back to essentially where it was at, and I'll just keep it a basic shape such as this. Something to note with this water is in the rendering section of your water body lake, you do have something known as an underwater post process material. So if your character ever navigates this landscape and goes underwater, it will have this tinge of blue, and that's going to be due to this underwater post process material. I also sometimes have some students that like to change the color of the water itself. Maybe they don't want this color of blue. You can change that by coming into the water material, this water material lake associated with this water body lake. Just double click on this thumbnail. And this will bring you to this water body lake material. A lot of parameters here to play around with to expand them all, I'm just going to right click right here and expand all. And in order to adjust any of these parameters, you've got some foam parameters, for example, that you can play with some fluid parameters, et cetera. You simply need to check it on to enable it, and then you can plug in some new values. So you can see there's a whole ton of stuff here to play around with, like so. Now, if you did want to mess with the color of your water here, come under global vector parameter values where we've got this absorption. I'm going to turn this on. And what you can do is click on this little color bar right here, and I'm going to save this as the default color. So if I was to left click and drag right here, I can save that color. However, I'm going to pick a new one for right now and say, maybe I wanted some greenish water or something like that. I'm just moving that color wheel down there, clicking Okay. Click and Save. And with that new color now saved, if we were to go back to our level, we now have Green Lake Water. So, guys, that is the basics of working with the water lake. Go ahead and add as many of those as you like to your level. That'll do it all for this one. We'll see you in the next one. 36. Rivers: Alright. In this video, we're going to add a water body River, and I'm going to connect it from our lake to our ocean back there. And these are pretty great because they blend in pretty seamlessly. So here, my place actors panel, Water Body River, go ahead and left click and drag one of these out. You can see the preview, that spline line right there. And that point right there that I'm grabbing onto, I'm going to place that right around the base of my lake right here. And what I want to do is turn this river around. So I'm going to angle it right away by bringing on my rotational tool, tapping the space bar one time. I'm just going to left click and drag. Now, it is worth pointing out here that that river starts out at wherever this river icon is. So once again, if you're looking to join your lake and your river, place your first spine point of your river, kind of butting up against your lake, something like that. And you can see that water blends in fairly nicely. Now, just like the ocean and the lake, this water body river is affecting the landscape, as we can see down here in our details panel. Before I get to any of that, however, I do want to add some more spline points here so that I can snake our river all the way to the ocean. I could grab any one of these spine points once again and move it around to where I like. But to add more spline points, and for this, I'm going to add them to the end of the river. I'm going to kind of go to the top down view like this. I'm going to select that, and I'm going to hold down Alt, left click and drag. And you can bend these to snake it into the ocean. Alt, left click and drag. Alt, left click and drag. I'm just moving that one a little bit, and I will do Alt left click and drag, Alt, left click and drag. And for each of these new spine points, I'm releasing the Alt key so that I can set a new one, move that one right here a little bit. And then I'll do one more Alt left click and drag out into my ocean, something like that. There we go. Now, the cool thing about this river is for one, this does not have to act like a realistic river. You could actually have this going uphill. So if I was to grab this spine point right here, I could technically lift it up into the air, and the landscape will fill in underneath it like so. And you can have something ridiculous like that, but let me just do Control Z to undo that. Now, I'm actually going to start off here talking about these spine points because for this river, you have some interesting spine point settings that you can set unique to each point, each spine point in your river. So I've got this one selected right here. And now let's look over in the details panel. Underneath the selected point area, we've got this water drop down. If you click this open, you've got some real interesting settings. You can set the depth, the width, and the velocity of your river. These are the three main ones I like to play with. So let's go with River width first. That's going to set the width of the river at that point. So if you want it wider at this point, maybe set it to something like 5,000. If you want it narrower, maybe something like 500, you can see how each point along the river can be set to be narrower or wider. Okay, I'm going to set that to a value of, like, maybe 3,000 right there. Now, also, you're seeing the water flowing here from right to left. That is dictated by this velocity parameter, and you can set this per spine point. Now, currently, they're all set to 128, but if I wanted this point of the river to appear like it's flowing faster, I could set it to be something like 500, and you'll notice that it's flowing faster. I could even set this in reverse, negative 500 pressing Enter. So you could have some real interesting effects where it's flowing backwards at that spine point and then flowing forward from the other spine point, and in the middle, just kind of stands still. So just know that that is a thing and you can make that happen. I'll set that back to 128. You've also got the ability to set the river depth at any point, so I could set this to something like 1,000, and you can see the water at this point is going to be deeper, apparently. If I was to set this to something like ten and press Enter, suddenly, it's a lot shallower. So, yes, you can set your depth at each spine point. And again, these can be set per spine point. Now, if you'd like to mast set them, I'll set this is something like 200, all you need to do is hold down Control and then select multiple spine points. So you can have in my case, I've got three spine points selected, and then you could set them all to be similar values. So if I wanted the velocity, all those three points to be 300, that's the way that I can set them to be all at 300. Okay, next, I'm going to select my water body component, as opposed to a spine component for my water body river. So that's the entire river itself. Now, once again, with that selected, under the rendering category, you could double click on your water material here to change the color of your river water if you wanted to. And as you saw before, when I kind of flew into the river, it's got this post process going on as well. This right here, this post process underwater material. This is what's setting the bluish tint when you're underwater. Now, what I want to do is come on down here. Scrolling down to the terrain settings. These are going to start looking very familiar. Once again. You've got effect landscape. By default, it's on. You can turn that on or off. I usually, once again, like to start off in water height map settings under effects. Blurring. I usually like to turn blur shape off. Kind of creates a smoother transition. And, of course, you've got your curl noise settings that you can play around with. I usually don't play around with these too much when it's pertaining to a river. You've got some fall off settings here, like we had with our lake that you could play around with, setting a fall off mode by width or by angle. Play around with those to your liking. And yeah, so that is a good way to add a river to your level. The basics are placing it in your level, adding some spline points, moving it around, and then joining bodies of water together like a lake to an ocean. Alright, guys, that's going to do it off for this one. We'll see you in the next one. 37. Waterfalls: Okay, next, I thought it would be cool to add a waterfall to our level here. So I'm going to head down to our content browser and access fab. And inside of our fab tab, I have a content pack in mind that I'd like to add to get started here. In the search bar, I'm simply going to do a search for water materials and press Enter. And this is the pack that I am looking for right here. Now, depending on when you're viewing this particular course, this may be here, maybe it's not. And if it's not, that's fine. You could seek out a similar pack. But this is the one that I'm going to be using for this demonstration on how to add a waterfall. So this water materials pack, I'm going to click on this. I'm going to click Add to Project right here. And as soon as I do, it's going to say asset is not compatible, but choose the closest alternate version. So I will choose the most recent version of the engine 5.4. And I will click Add to Project. Once again, this will take a little bit of time to add, so I will pause the video here and rejoin when this is finished. All right. And with the water materials pack added, we can aim to build something like this, a nice waterfall flowing into a pond. Now, I did do a considerable amount of work here between cuts. So I'm just going to show you essentially the process for creating this waterfall. And obviously, you don't have to do it exactly as I do it. But here's just one way to go about it. For starters, I'd like to draw your attention down into the water materials folder. It consists of subfolders, and I'm in the mesh folder. You've got a couple of waterfall meshes here, and I'm currently using this SM waterfall base right in front of you in this perspective viewport. Now, yours probably isn't colored as light of a tint of blue, but all I did is I essentially pulled one of these in, and I sized it up accordingly. And then with the material associated with this waterfall, I double clicked on that material, and I changed out the color associated with this waterfall by clicking on this node right here for color. It's plugged into base color. And then as a value, I plugged in those as my R, G, B, and a value. So if you'd like to play along, that's how I got that color of water right there. Now, as for my setup here back in my level, I did use the landscape sculpting tools to sculpt a flat elevated area, and then I placed a river spline right on top of it. You can see this is a water body river and I simply had it starting here in no man's land, if you will, and I just shaped it to occupy this area leading up into my waterfall mesh. Now, I did actually accelerate the velocity of this last spine point for my river, so it looks like the river accelerates into it. Then I went about placing some of these rocks using foliage mode. Went into foliage mode. And with some cliff rocks here selected, I went into single instance mode, and here I'm combining techniques here, and I placed some of these rocks around to sort of obscure some of these rough edges, including this transition from my river spline to the waterfall mesh itself. Now down below here, you're going to see a water splashing sort of effect. Now, this is achieved through some of the particle effects in this water materials folder. If you go down to particles, you've got these water splashes and this water foam. Now, I'm just going to tap the G key on my keyboard. The G key toggles on and off the editor icons. And you can see, I've got Oops, I am in foliage mode right here. Let me go into selection mode. You can see I've got various of these particles placed around. I've got one of these foam. This is sort of the radiating foaming effect that you're seeing. I just size it up accordingly. And then I've got a bunch of these smaller. They're a little bit tricky to select water splash particle effects. And I did size these up and placed them all around, et cetera. Now, something I did want to point out as you're working with something like this, like your waterfall is if you're having a hard time selecting this, if you come under settings in the far upper right, you've got this allow translucent selection. And the hot key for this is the T key. And again, you can find that under settings. Allow translucent selection. That is the T key. And currently, I have it on. If I press the Tiki and toggle it off and let me just select off of here for a moment. And then I try to select my waterfall, I can't select it because it's translucent. However, you can see that right now because I did tap the Tiki. If I tap the Tiki again, turn that back on, as I have right now, it does make those meshes with water based on them easier to select. Now, down below here, all I did is I sculpted it. I used my landscape. Sculpting tools to sculpt down a depression in my landscape. I literally held down the shift key using the sculpting tool and just kind of indented the landscape right here. And then for my lake here, I'm actually using a different method to create a lake than this lake over here. And I just wanted to show that you can use different methods for creating a lake. For this particular lake, in selection mode, in my place actors panel, I place one of these geometry box brushes into my level. I'm just going to go ahead and select this. It is a box brush, as you can see in my outliner, right up here. And then what I did is I place this M water ocean material onto it. And that I found in the stared content materials folder, there is an ocean material right in here, right there. And then I just size this up. You can see this box brush has been sized, and it's actually occupying this entire area of my landscape. I sort of lowered this down into the indentation that I sculpted out using my landscape sculpting tools. Now, it's worth noting that for whatever material you have on a box brush such as this, you can adjust the scale of your material. You can also rotate it and you can also pan it in one direction or another. And I also want to point out here for this box brush, I didn't actually scale up the actor itself. Instead, I went under the brush settings and sized up my box brush by setting in some X, Y, and Z dimensions. So you can see, using a variety of techniques here, you can create a nice looking waterfall such as this. It takes a little bit of time, but here I did use my landscape sculpting. I did some landscape painting all around, painting on some grass and a little rock along the side. I use a foliage tool to place some of these rocks all around. I play some particles at the base here to sell the effect of this waterfall mesh dropping down into a lake. Note that this lake I created differently. I use a geometry brush and placed a material on it. Now, it's worth noting that if I fly in here, this does not have that bluish underwater effect that this lake over here has. So just wanted to show off some different techniques here without boring you with the process of going through that myself. Guys, hopefully that accurately conveys how to add a waterfall to your level. You've got different waterfall meshes here to choose from, a thicker one, and a thinner one. You've also got a variety of other messages that you can use to create a river, a lake, that sort of thing. And you've got a whole bunch of different water materials that you can play around with inside of here. And if you don't like the color of any of these waters, you can usually dig inside the material and change out the color of your water through nodes, typically looking something like that. Alright, guys, that's gonna do all for this one. We'll see you in the next one. 38. Floating Objects: In this video, we're going to make it so that we have some objects that can float in the water and even float down the stream and be carried away by the current or crowned ashore. Let's get right to it. To get started here, we're going to access our fab tab from the content browser. Click on that fab button right there. And in the fab tab, we're going to seek out a pack called the Advanced Village Pack. Press Enter on that. And the one I'm going to be seeking out for this video and videos come is this guy right here, Advanced Village Pack. Click on that. Thumbnail image is going to look something like this. Now, again, depending on when you're viewing this, maybe this will be available, maybe not. If it's not available, don't freak out. You can try out other content packs. I'm simply seeking out a static mesh, in this case, a barrel from this pack. And in future videos, I'm going to be seeking a fence piece here to create a landscape spline fence. But for now, let's go ahead and grab this, add the project, and go ahead and agree, sign your life away for Epi games. Click that button, say accept and if you see asset not compatible, you can still make it compatible. It's just saying it's not compatible with my latest version of the engine, but if you choose the most recent compatible version, that should add it just fine to your project. Once again, if this is not available at the time of your viewing, try another content pack. We simply need a static mesh asset to get this object to float. This is going to take a moment to download here, so I will resume once this is finished. Alright, that Advanced Village Pack is finished adding to my content browser, as we can see here. See it consists of other folders inside of there. Now I'm going to be seeking out a static mesh inside of here. So with my static mesh filter turned on, you can see it is turned on right there. I'm going to turn on this filter. The barrel is what I'm going to use inside of an asset that I'm about to create, known as an actor class blueprint. And because it is going to be a blueprint, I am going to add it to this blueprints folder inside of the Advanced Village Pack. Go ahead and navigate here, and we're going to uncheck our static mesh filter. And I'm going to right click in some empty space, go to Blueprint class, and I want to create an actor class Blueprint, because this floating actor is going to be one that I'm going to be placing into the world. So this top one right here, it's an actor. It's going to prompt me to give it a name. I'll call it BP Underscore floating underscore barrel, because mine's going to be a barrel. Let's double click on this asset to open it. I will dock it right across the top here. Now, this course obviously is not focused on blueprints, so just gave a very quick overview. A blueprint can consist of some components. If we were building a car, a car would consist of wheels, headlight, to steering wheel, et cetera. You could view those components right here. And then the event graph is where you can put script related to your blueprint. Although we're not going to be worried about that in this one. There's my five second primer. Okay, we're going to add a couple of components here in our Viewport. The first one that we are going to add is a static mesh. So click on this Add button right up at the top. We're going to add a static mesh component. I will simply rename it Barrel because it's going to be a barrel. And over on the right hand side, it asks for us to slot in a static mesh. I'm going to click on this drop down, type in Barrel. And I can find that SM barrel asset that lives inside of that advanced Village folder. There it is. Zooming on back here in the viewport a little bit. The next thing that I'm going to do in order to make this actor float like we wanted to, I'm actually going to drag and drop this on top of this default scene root. The default scene root is nothing more than the place, the point in space here that any other components are attached to. I'm going to make this barrel the root by left clicking, dragging on top of the default scene root like this, and it's going to be the lone root right up here. So that's all we've got at this point. Very important that we get that step done in order to make this actor float like we want it to. Next, in our components panel, I'm going to add one more component. I'm going to type in boyo for Ban C. I want to add a Boy and C component. This is critical to make this barrel float. Now, we are going to do some work with this buoyanc component selected just a little bit, but go ahead and select your barrel one more time. I forgot one very important thing. I need to make sure that with this barrel component, this static mesh selected, that we check this box for simulate physics. Very important you do that so that this barrel can bob inside of a watery body. Simulating physics, so to speak. Okay, next, check your Boy and C component right here. Go ahead and select that. And over in the Details panel, we are going to click on this plus button where it says Buoyanc Data pontoons. So click this plus button. That's like adding an inflatable to this component, making it float. We're adding floaties, if you will, to this barrel to help it float. Next, let's check open this ind Dex zero. This is kind of the location where we would like to place this floaty relative to our barrel. Now, currently, the relative location is zero, zero, zero, so it would essentially place it at the location of that barrel right there. Let me go back and select my buoyancy right here. But if you want to offset the location of this invisible inflatable, you could. And also, you can make the size of this inflatable that you can't see here bigger or smaller, depending on that radius size. That is in unreal units. Okay, just wanted to show that off quickly. Next, we need to make sure that we've got some checkboxes checked over in the details panel. And the ones we need to make sure that we have checked are apply drag forces in water, check, apply river forces that is already checked. Down here, we've got three of them I want to check. Always allow lateral push, allow current when moving fast upstream, check and apply downstream angular rotation. Check, check, and check. And then last but not least, make sure that we've got this Auto activate checkbox checked. Very important you have that one checked, as well. With all that completed, go ahead and click, Compile and save right up here. And then next, what we're going to do is we're going to return back to our level here, and I like to simulate these in a river. You could do this lake here as well, and by the way, this is worth pointing out. It's got to be a water body lake or a water body ocean or a water body river using that water system to test this out, do not try to place this barrel above this sort of quasi lake that we placed over here. It will not work. So make sure that we go ahead and place this kind of where we want it in a river. We're going to watch this thing float down the stream, which I think is going to be kind of cool. So go ahead and drag this in, and we want to drag this above a little bit like this. And then if we go ahead and simulate our game by clicking right up here to simulate this, we can see Uh oh. Things don't seem to work. Now, why is that? Let's go ahead and stop the game here. Now, if you're finding this to be the case, the first thing you should do is check the collision of, in this case, your water body, so I'm going to select my river here. And over in the details panel, I'm going to scroll on down under the collision settings. And currently, I've got collision preset set to block A. Uh oh. Can't have that, can we? Let's go ahead and set this to overlap all. Whoops. I checked the wrong checkbox there. Collision presets currently set to custom. Let's set that to overlap all dynamic. That's going to make it so that any other object type here, such as my barrel, let me go ahead and select my barrel, come under the collision settings. The collision settings for my barrel, this is labeled as a physics body. So here with my water body River, my physics body is set to overlap this. And now if I was to simulate my game by clicking this simulate button, you can see that it is now floating and moving throughout the river. Like so. Now, a few things that we can aim to adjust here. Let's go back into our floating barrel blueprint. And now let's select our buoyancy and let's adjust the position of our pontoon here. Let's raise it up 50 unreal units. Like so. Also, with my barrel selected, we can simulate this and make it seem lighter by overriding our mass in Kg. With it unchecked, it'll try to figure out what the kilogram size or the kilograms should be based on the mass of this object. But we can override this so I could check this and make it seem lighter. I'll set that to 50, as well. Go ahead. We'll compile and save this. Go back into our level, and we'll simulate once again. Simulate. And now you can see it floats a little bit higher, if you will. And that barrel seems a little bit lighter. Now, also to show this off in an even cooler light, I'm going to change the velocity of my river here. And once again, to change the velocity of your river, you want to select your river spline points. There's one, and I'll just up the velocity to be 500 right at that point in the river. So you're seeing it flowing a little bit more quickly there. And let me go ahead and move this down the river just a little bit. And I'll go ahead and duplicate this, as well. Alt, left click and drag. I will simulate this. Now we've got two barrels gonna be floating on down the river here. And you can see they start to pick up the paste there a little bit, and that one might get grounded ashore just a little bit. But there you go. There you have a very quick primer on how you can make things float in your water river bodies and your water lake and your water ocean body, as well. Our simple setup here is to add a static mesh, make it the root, add a buoyancy component, and then fiddle with your buoyanc components so that you're happy with an offset with a pontoon or two or three. You could add multiples and that you check those relevant boxes. Guys, that's gonna do it off for this one, we will see you in the next one. 39. Spline Road: In this video, we're going to learn how to create something called a landscape spine and then populate it with some meshes in order to create something like this, a roadway that bends and curves and goes up and down within your landscape. Alright, to get started here, we are going to head into fab, and we're going to add another content pack. In fab, do a search for rural Australia. The reason I'm seeking this one out is because it has a nice section of road. Here it is that I would like to use to make a nice roadway. There it is rural Australia. Now, once again, at the time of your viewing this, maybe this pack is available, maybe not. If not, fear not because there are other packs that you could use that have a section of roadway within them. And if not, we can explore using something from our starter content to help us out, as well. Okay, let's go ahead and add to project. Once again, sign your life away to Epic Games. Never fear, except choose the most recent compatible version for you. If you get this pop up, I'm going to choose 5.4. That's the most recent for me. Choose the most recent for you. I will click Add to Project. This will now get these downloading and adding them to my content browser. So I'm going to pause video here and rejoin you when this is finished. Okay, that rural Australia pack has now been added to my content browser. You can see that if you click it open here, it contains some subfolders. With this rural Australia folder selected, I'm going to filter by static mesh here. And with this right here, I'm going to type in the word road. Now, I've got a couple of road meshes here, but I'm going to be specifically using this one to create our spine road. So before we even get to that, let's define what a spline even is. In computer graphics, a spline is a smooth curve that runs through a series of given points. Now, in order to add this spline to our landscape, we need to jump into landscape mode. So right up here in our mode selector, we can go to landscape. Shift and two will get you there as well. So I'll head there right now. And in our managed tab, you're going to want to make sure you've got this splines button here selected. Now, before I even jump over into creating a spline, I want to point out that I am in my landscape automateial mountain range example. This was the pre existing landscape, if you will. I'm going to be adding one to this map, but I'll also add one to my California map as well, because I want to point out some differences here. Here, with this given level, this landscape automal mountain range example, if I was to go into the sculpt tab, you don't see anything here for the various layers. You'll remember back from my California level that I created, you can create multiple layers here. We don't have that going on here in this map. Now, just log that away in your brain right now because we're going to come back to that when I create one of these inside of our California level. The reason I even mentioned that is because oftentimes when you create a landscape, you reserve splines in their own layer. Once again, this doesn't have that going on, so we're just going to skip over that for now. We're going to head to our Manage tab, and with our splines selected right here, I'm going to come to sort of an overhead type view, something like this. And I'm going to create a very basic road. And the way I can do this is by holding down the Control key, and I'm going to left click. And when I do that, I'm going to add this sort of the mountainee type icon right there. That's the start of my roadway, the start of my spine. And the way this works is continuing to hold down control, I can add more spline points. So I'm holding down control and just left clicking. Don't worry about it kind of clipping through the mountainside right there, holding down control, left clicking, holding down control and left clicking. I'll kind of snake this around. Like, so and you might want to have a little bit more of an overhead type view like this, control, control, control. And I'll create a very simple kind of loop here. Control, control, control. And you usually don't want to be too sharp with your benz. You can select these spline points and reposition them, if you will. But I'm going to make a circle here, and I can do that by clicking back on this beginning spline point to close the loop. So that mountain icon right there, holding down Control, left click. And I've just closed the loop. Now, just to show that you can move around any of these given points, you can select any of these mountain icons, like so, and you can move it around, like so. Now, this green preview is just that. It is a preview. It is not the road itself. If I was to drop in and play my level, I would not see that. Now, a little bit of terminology here. These different mountain icons here, these are referred to as spline control points. So right up here on the left where you see control points, select all control points or segments. Those mountain icons, those are the control points. Now, the segments, they are the section between the control points. So segment would be from essentially here to here. So control points, right there. Segments are these areas right here in between the areas between the control points. Now, in order for me to populate this spine with meshes, what I'm going to do is over in the left hand side where I've got my landscape spine control points selected. I've got it selected right there. I could individually select a section as well. Doesn't matter. I want to do is select all segments, not control points, all segments. So it doesn't really matter right now if I've got a segment or a control point selected, I can select all segments. So I'm going to do that. Now, you can see if I kind of get an overhead preview. Everything is highlighted, my entire spine, all segments of my spine. And what I'm going to do is right here under landscape spl meshes, I've got this plus button. This is where I can add a spline mesh to populate this entire spine. So I'm going to click on this plus button to add an indice. And you can add multiple indices to have multiple meshes occupy your spine here. And inside of here, where I've got this mesh, I'm going to find that road mesh that I got from the Australia Pack. And specifically, I'm going to use this SModSpineO. So as soon as I click on this, give the engine a moment here to prepare the shaders, and you can already see that this is beginning to populate the entire spline with these sections of road. Now, as you can see, we've got a few problems going on at the moment. One of them being that we've got foliage popping through our roadway, which is not as desired. So how you would fix that up would be to go into your foliage mode and you just erase that given foliage type popping through. So I can see I've got some flowers right there. So if I was to select my flower group, and I was to get out of single instance mode. There's my bubble brush. I can hold down Shift Left click, and I can clear the roadway that's one way you can deal with issues such as that. Next, I'm going to jump back into landscape mode here. And I just want to point out that you can select your various spine control points here and you can move them around, lift it up and down so that it doesn't intersect through the landscape like this. You can't even rotate them, hit the space bar, you can rotate it like this, as well. But for this particular landscape, because we don't have various landscape layers here, and I'm just jumping over to sculpting tab right now. You're going to need to fine tune the sculpting of your landscape in order to make it so you don't have these weird gaps. So if you need to raise or lower the landscape or raise and lower and angle the spine itself to match the landscape, you're going to have to do that manually, which kind of sucks. You may have noticed that, you've got in this managed tab, you've got this splines option that, we've got this option here to deform the landscapes to spine. So it should automatically deform it, right? So if I click this, it should just automatically fill it in. Well, no, that's not going to do it here. That's going to be demonstrated here in our next demonstration in our California level. So I just want to point that out here in this particular landscape auto material level. If you do want to have a road spine like this, you can certainly do it, and you can certainly add this road spine. Just going to take a little bit more work for you, given how this is originally constructed in terms of sculpting your landscape and then pivoting your landscape spine points so that they don't intersect weird like that. Okay, I'm just going to say this out quickly, and we're going to jump over to my California level. Okay, here I am back in my California level where I've got my water system, my floating barrels, waterfall, cave, et cetera. Let's go ahead and add in a landscape spline from here. So let me jump into landscape mode. And you can see this particular level that we created this landscape that we created is using the layers system. And once again, we were using this to have things like a distinct snow layer where we could paint just snow on that layer, and then we could toggle it off and on. You can see it off in the distance there so that it layers on that layer without destroying the layer. It's kind of like, Hey, what does this look like with snow without snow, et cetera? I'm going to be adding a brand new layer here by clicking on this plus button. It's going to ask you to pick a landscape edit layer class. We'll choose this bottom one for landscape edit layer splines because this one is going to be reserved for splines. We'll say select and it already calls it splines, and you can see it's got this fancy looking icon on it so that it is reserved just for landscape splines. Alright, with my spline layers selected here, let me go ahead and add those control points from an angle such as this. So holding down the control key, I will left click. Left click. Left click. Left click. Left click. Left click. Left click. Do one more maybe off in the distance there. Left click. There is my spine. I'm not going to connect the ends. And then over in the details panel, again, it doesn't matter if you've got a control point or a segment selected. I'm going to choose all segments. I'll add a single spline mesher by clicking this plus button. Expand out that indice. I'm going to do a search for rod. And I accidentally hit Capslock that's fine. And there I've added my spline mesh. All right. Now, if I was to select one of these and I'm just going to tap the space bar to bring on my movement widget here, I'm going to raise it up in the air and check this out. It's automatically going to populate the gap between it by raising up the landscape. It recognizes that this is a spine layer, so it knows what we're trying to do. So it's going to just fill it in underneath, which is pretty great. Likewise, you can move these down, as well. So if I was just like this guy and just kind of move it on down and then release, it's not going to be perfect here. So how can you deal with situations like this? Well, I've got this spine point selected, and with a spine point selected, you've got various parameters that you can play with. And one of the ones you have here is a mesh vertical offset. So if I was to set this to be something like 200 and press Enter, you can see you can raise up your mesh from the landscape itself. So note that for any Control point or segment, you may have some parameters that you can play around with. Now, note that when you are wanting to fiddle with your road such as this, and say you wanted to change out the mesh, you didn't like this one, you want to make sure that you've got all segments selected because you could change out the mesh for just an individual segment if you wanted to. So let me just change this out to something else. I'm going to go to segments. And let's say we wanted to add some other mesh, and let's choose something maybe from the Advanced Village pack. Let's see what we got for static meshes inside of there. And let's just say we wanted, I don't know, this bridge piece. Just go to drag that in there so you can see how it formats it like so. Now that's probably not how you want your road to look, but you could make it look something like that. And note that you can change out the forward axis axis for this, so it doesn't have to be the X axis. You could change it to be the Y axis, and it'll flip it something like that. So it doesn't all have to be one way. Also, I could once again add another spline mesh here. So if I click this plus button and add an element one right here in element index one, I can add that road back here, and now it's going to randomize which meshes are where. So you can see most of this is that rural Australia road but you can see if I keep forwarding like this, I've got some sections of my road that are consisting of this bridge piece here as well. So there you have it. That's your basics for working with a landscape spine. Specifically, in this case, a roadway and note that it is cordoned off into its own landscape spline layer here in your created level. Yes, you can add them to that preexisting level, you just can't separate it out by its own layer. Alright, guys, that's going to do it off for this one. See you in the next one. 40. Spline Fence: In this video, we are going to create a nice looking fence such as this using the landscape spline tool, and you can see that our fence is going to be populated with a variety of meshes. Alright. For this spline fence, I'm going to be using these static mesh fence pieces found in the Advanced Village Pack. And you can see that with the Advanced Village Pack selected, I am filtering by static meshes so that I can find these more quickly. Once again, if you forgot how to bring on your list of filters here, right here in your content browser, you can check on and off various filters that you'd like to have available to you here in the content browser. Also take note that I am currently in landscape mode. Once again, shift and two we'll get you there. Inside of landscape mode, I've got the managed tab selected, and I've also got my splines button here selected, I'm going to be adding this spline fence to my spins layer. See the previous video on how to add a spline layer to your landscape. With that set up, I'm going to go ahead and add some spline points here and I'm going to put this fence along the side of my road here. So once again, holding down the Control key, once you see your mouse cursor turn into this plus button, you can click to add a spline point. There is a Mountain icon, and I'm going to hold down Control again, select it again, and I'm just going to move over step by step here, holding down Control, left click. And if your mouse cursor ever turns back into a pointer like this, you want to just right click here in the viewport to ensure that it is that plus symbol, control, click once again. I'll do this a few more times. Control and click and control click and maybe one more time right over here. Control click. Now, if you ever click off this, like I've just done right now and you're like, You know what? I'd like to extend that spine further. All you need to do is select this last Control point, and then you can extend it from there by simply holding down Control once again and left clicking, and you'll extend from that last selected point. You'll know if your control point is selected because it's this highlighted, kind of a lighter color as opposed to this darker color. Okay, so for this, just like we did with our road here, what we want to do is select all the segments that make up our spine here. A couple of ways we can do that is we can choose all these segments by clicking right here in the tool settings or with any of these control points or segments selected here with your spine over in the Details panel. Currently, I've got that spline point selected. I can choose to select all connected segments. And just like we did in the last video now with all these segments selected, I can add some landscape spline meshes. I'm going to click this four times, one, two, three, and four. And the reason I'm doing that is because I've got four mesh fences here that I'd like to populate this spline. Now, if I come over to my landscape Spline Meshes and I right click right next to where it says Spline meshes, I can expand all to expand all the indices here. Now I just need to slot in these various meshes. For this first one, I'm just going to left click and drag my variation one. Whoops. That went away, how I can get that back is to simply go back into selection mode, seek out my spline once again. This is spline actor two. I could rename this right up here by right clicking Edit, rename, and I could just call this my spine fence. And with that selected, I'm going to go back into landscape mode. And let me go ahead. Select one of these spline points, select all segments once again. Let me try this one more time. Left click and drag. Boom, right in there. Now, this is going to look rather ugly to begin with. Don't freak out. Let me slot in a second fence piece here. Left click and drag. Let me go ahead and slot in a third fence piece. Left click and drag into Index two here. And then last but not least index three. Let's slot in this fourth one, like so. Now, if I kind of zoom on back here, you can see that it randomizes which fence piece is populating the splind. You don't get any fine control going this method over which fence piece, which fence mesh ends up where. So just know that. That's one of the weaknesses of this system. But now let's go ahead and fix the issue that these are way too big. The reason that these are so big is because we've got this scale to width checkbox checked for each of these indices. Just go ahead and uncheck scale to width for each of these. For each indice. And once you do that, uncheck scale to width here, and uncheck scale to width for our last one here. Then when we fly up, we can see that our fence looks a lot nicer, like so. And now, once again, you can click on any of these control points. And if I tap the space bar, I could lift this up. Now, before I lift this up, I want to make sure that I turn off my grid up here, my grid movement settings. Currently, I had it set to snap settings turning on increments of 10,000. And if I just lift this up, the landscape will terraform to go right underneath it, as well, which is kind of handy. But there you have it. You have a very nice spine fence. And again, if you wanted to continue this in any direction, simply go ahead select that spine point. I've got selected right there. And if I hold down the control key and left click, I can add another spline point. And look, it's auto populating it with the fence meshes that we had set up previously. Alright, so there you have it, guys. That is how you can add a spline fence to your landscape. 41. Spline Meshes: Now, up to this point in our discussion about landscape splines, we've populated the entire spine, the entire pathway with meshes. In this video, we're going to explore how you can use landscape spins to populate just the landscape spine control points with meshes. And it's really good for instances like this where you want to have meshes in a pattern of sorts, but with gaps in between. So, you know, if you've got a driver driving along the Australian outback, you can warn them every few meters that death by kangaroo is imminent. Now, what I'm about to show you is going to be good for placing trees along a driveway, maybe benches along a pathway, maybe utility poles every hundred yards or something like that. Essentially, this technique can be used anywhere where you want some meshes, populating along a pathway, but you want to have some gaps between those meshes. Alright, to get started here, note that I have my rural Australia pack selected. I'm filtering by static meshes, and here is my SM kangaroo sign. So let's populate a landscape spline with kangaroo signs because, you know, you got to watch out for those kangaroos. Here I am in the landscape manage tab landscape mode. I've got my splines button selected. I have my splines layer selected. And just as we've done before, to add some spine points here, I'm simply going to hold down control. I'm going to left click. I'm going to hold down Control and left click again. Now, if you don't see any of these icons right now, that's because you could have game view on. Tapping that G key we'll toggle game view on and off, meaning that you are toggling on and off the various unreal engine editor icons and wire frames and all that kind of stuff on and off. So if you don't see those spine control points, that could be the reason why. I'm going to add a few more here, holding down Control, left click. Once again, you got to see that plus button, not your mouse right here. But once you have one spline control point selected and you see a plus button, your mouse cursor is in plus button fashion, you can click again to add another Control Point. So I'll add just a few more here. Control, left click in Control and left click. And now this is where we're going to differentiate between our road and our fence and what we're going to be doing in this video. Before we had selected our spline segments over in the right hand panel, note that I've got a spline Control Point selected and I can choose to select either all connected control points or segments. We did segments before for the road and the fence. This time, we're going to select all connected control points. That are these mountain icons. I'm going to select those. Now, down below, I can associate a mesh to populate each of these control points. For this, I'm going to be using this kangaroo sign so I'm going to left click and drag this over in the details panel, like so. And now you can see that I've added these signs where every control point exists. Now note, I currently do have all these control points selected, and with that, I want to rotate all these because you can see these signs are not exactly facing any drivers going down the road. So what I can do here is scroll on up and for the rotation setting, I can rotate along the Z axis that's currently set to multiple values. And for this, you're just going to want to find the value that works for you. So if I was to say something like 90 degrees and press Enter, you can see that all of them are going to be turning. Maybe I can go with something like 200, et cetera, 50, 60, 70. You can see for each rotation, it's setting it to some angle. Now, you could select one of these individually. I'm going to try to rotate this a little bit. So you can see how you can rotate these all individually if you like. Maybe that one's this way, maybe this one, somebody really twisted, they shot it with a bullet or something like that, and it's like that, and it's like that. So you have the variation for how you want to fine tune these. And, of course, you can play these where you want by selecting them individually and moving it around to where you want it to be. So note, this is a landscape spline. The only difference between this and the road and the fence is that we are populating these spline control points with meshes instead of these segments themselves. And once again, you won't see these icons at all if you are actually playing your levels. If I was to click in some empty space, I need to jump out of landscape mode here. Let me go to Selection Mode. Right click Play from here. You see all those nice signs, and you do not see those spline control points at all. So that's a real quick and easy way to add some meshes to your landscape that are kind of in an organized fashion. So you can consider maybe some road signs like that it would make sense, maybe some utility poles, maybe a row of trees or some benches in a cityscape, all kinds of possible uses for that. Alright, guys, that's gonna do it all for this one. See you in the next one. 42. Character Movement: So this next lesson has nothing to do with how to sculpt or paint our landscape or how to add foliage, but rather this lesson has everything to do with how our character interacts with the landscape. Through years of teaching this course, I've learned that students eventually come to a point where they want to customize what angle of slope they want to allow their character to walk up. So you can see here I've got a rather steep mountain ahead of me. My character can walk up this angle of slope. However, when it gets too steep, they eventually come to a screeching halt. So how can you customize what angle of slope a character can walk up? Let's go ahead and escape out of here. I'm going to minimize my viewport here, and by the way, you can go in and out of immersive mode by using the F 11 key. However, I'm just going to click on this button in the far upper right of my viewport. And for starters here, I want to navigate to our project settings. There's a couple of ways from the editor here that we can access our project settings. Either this settings button in the far upper right, project settings right there, or in the far upper left, we've got this edit button, and we can access our project settings here as well. Either way, we'll get you there. Now inside of our project settings tab, I want to direct you to the maps and modes option. And inside of here, we are interested in our default pawn class, this guy right here. This is the character that we are currently playing as when we are playing in our editor when we're playing our game. Now, this is our third person character. And if you want to figure out how to navigate to this asset, you've got this folder button right here. This will browse to that asset within our content browser. So if I click on this, it'll show us in the content browser where this asset is located, our BP third person character. Now I'm going to double click on this to open it up. However, with it selected like this, the space bar would also allow you to open it up. I'm just going to dock this across the top, like so. Now, inside of this character blueprint, I'm just going to click on the Viewport tab here so that I can see our character. We've currently got this giant grid going right through our character, and that's because my grid setting is right up here are set really high. I'm going to set that down to 100. So it looks a little bit more normal. And what I'm going to do is I'm going to select this character movement component. Now, this is a component that is very specific to this class, a blueprint, a character class blueprint. Now, this component determines the movement characteristics about our character here. And specifically related to this discussion on walkable slope angles, and I want to direct your attention down here under the character movement walking settings. Our current walkable floor angle is almost 45 degrees. So you can see that right down here. So if you want to allow your character to walk up steeper slopes, that is the parameter that you are looking for. Now, if you set this to something like 90 degrees, you're essentially going to say, I'm allowing my character to walk up a vertical wall. So just because that's fun, I'm going to go ahead and save that change here. I go to go back to my level. I'm going to go somewhere close to the base of my landscape here. Right click. I'm going to play from here. And I'll just F 11 this to full screen it. There we go. And as I'm walking up to the base of this very steep pitch, you can see that our character can now ridiculously walk straight up. So that is the parameter to change your walkable floor angle. Now, while we're here, I thought I'd also point out that this is where you can find some other very useful settings and another one that you're really going to want to hone in on, I am sure is this max walk speed. Now, it says max walk speed, but this is essentially the speed that your character can travel. So currently, mine is set to 500 centimeters a second. So if you wanted to double that, something like 1,000 and press Enter, and I will click Play right from here. And I'll click F 11. Whoops. Let me just go. Let me just do a play from my view port right here. I was playing for my player start actor, and let me go to this walkable floor angle, huh, 'cause everything's walkable for me. Right click, play from here. Now I'm going to be traversing twice as fast, a little bit faster here. And obviously, of course, I can go straight up that mountain. So there you have it. So parameters that undoubtedly you will want to play with as you are working with your landscape. The first of those being the walkable floor angle right there. And the second being the Max Walkspeed right there. And again, that is in your character class blueprint. And we've got the character movement components selected. And once again, in your project settings, that is where you go to set whatever character you are controlling in your landscape level. And for us, that is in maps and modes, the third person character. Alright, guys, that's going to do it all for this one. We'll see you in the next one. 43. God Rays: In this video, we are going to learn how to create good ray so that we can have some cool light shafts filtering through our foliage. Getting this sweet effect working in your game is simple. Simply make sure you've got the directional light actors selected either in the level itself or within your outliner. With that selected, come under the details panel and scroll on down till you get to this light shaft section of parameters. And you're going to find one here for light shaft bloom. Go ahead and check that on. And if your directional light is positioned in such a way a little bit more overhead, you're not going to see any good rays just yet we need to position our light in such a way that we have essentially the sun off in the distance and some foliage blocking the sun. So remember, the directional light actor is our sun in the sky. Now, I could simply rotate it around. However, I like to hold down Control and L in my viewport. Now, first, I'm going to use my right mouse button just to show that I am in my viewport moving it around like this. I do Control plus L with my left hand. That's going to bring on this little sundial thing that's going to allow me to move my mouse and position, rotate this directional light actor. And if I get it in such a place there I am moving it down between the clouds, I'm going to go right about there, and then I will release, and I'm going to left click in my level. There we go. So now you can see I've got that directional light actor here. Let me select it back in the outliner. And we've got some good rays right from the get go. So that's simple enough. That's simply just checking that box for light shaft bloom. But there are some parameters that you can play around with to accentuate or dull this effect, and you can see that right there as I'm moving around like that. You've got this bloom scale. Go ahead and play around with that to either lessen or greater that effect. I'll set it back to 0.2. You've got this bloom max brightness that you can set to limit how much of an effect that is. Bloom tint. If you wanted to make this a little bit more, I don't know, orangish or bluish, if you got an icy world, something like that, you can help accentuate the feel of your sun filtering through the foliage like that. I'll go something maybe slightly yellow like that. And also, you've simply got the intensity of your directional light in general. So you can really kind of help accentuate this effect by just how overall bright your light is. But I'll set that to 0.8. And likewise, you can also set the color of your sunlight here as well. Now, this is not necessarily the bloom, but just the color of the overall lighting of your sunlight. So if you wanted to have, I don't know, a bluish light or a pinkish light or a greenish light, you could certainly do that as well, and that will affect the filtering of the good rays, as well. Let me just go ahead and cancel that. There you have it. That is a real simple way to add some good rays to your level. As a nice effect, indeed. Go ahead and play around with those parameters and find something you like. 44. Localized Fog: All right. In this video, we're going to learn how to add some fog to our landscape, and I'm not talking about our exponential height fog actor here. You can add some fog via the exponential height fog actor by selecting it and increasing the fog density slider to something like that. That looks like my local Bakersfield. Awful, I know. What we are going to be discussing in this video is how do you add some localized fog? You know, fog that you might see in lower elevations, something like that. Now this is going to be done through something called an actor class blueprint. It's going to involve a little bit of scripting. But this is going to be really cool because we're going to build the thing one time. I've got a copy of it right here. We're going to be able to drag it into our level. It is going to be cubish in shape or rather rectangular in shape, squarish in shape, et cetera. And then via some settings that we've exposed in the editor, we're going to be able to change the strength of the fog, making it more or less prominent. We're going to be able to change the size of the fog so I can make it taller, if I wanted to a column of fog. Or it can make it longer. And we can also change the color of the fog. And we've set up a color picker right here, so if you wanted to have some green fog, something like that, you could certainly do that. Alright, so that's what we're in for for this video. All right. The first step in creating this localized fog is to have your exponential t fog actor selected within your level. I like to select it from the outliner itself. That's the easiest way for me. If you do not have an exponential Height fog actor existing in your level, you could add one from your Place Actors panel. You could bring on the Place Actors panel by clicking right here. There's Place Actors panel. And within the Place Actors panel, select VX or search for it. You are seeking out an exponential Height fog actor. Simply drag and drop one of these in your level. Now, with one of these in your level and with it selected, down in the details panel, do a search for volumetric. I just did a search for volume and make sure you've got volumetric fog checked. Very important that you have that checked. That is step number one. Step number two for us is going to be to create a material. Now, I'm going to be creating this material in my starter content materials folder. Put it in some similar folder like that where it makes sense. I'm going to right click into empty space in my right click menu, create a material. It's going to prompt me to give it a name, and I will call mine for material. Underscore volumetric. Fog. And with that selected, I'm going to double click on it to open it up right away. And inside of here, I'm going to be adding a couple of nodes in just a little bit. However, the first thing I want to do is with this master material node selected, this one that already exists out here, I'm going to change the material domain over here in the details panel from surface to volume, and I'm going to change the blend mode from opaque to additive. So that's a very important step. Once again, with either this master material node selected or no nodes selected over here in the details panel, make sure that you've got these two set. Okay, so the next thing here in our material graph, I'm going to be adding a couple of nodes. Right click in some empty space. The first one we're going to be seeking out is known as a vector parameter node. This node is going to prompt me to give it a name. I'm going to call it fog color. And that'll be important for a little bit later on in this video in which we communicate with this node, and we actually get to decide what color we would like our fog to be. This is just going to be the setup for our fog. Now, a vector parameter node such as this has some float values, R, G, and B, three float values. That is numbers with a decimal point, red, green, and blue. Now, you could hard set some RGB values in here to give it a default color. However, if you click on this little color picker bar, if you will, I'm going to click on that. And I'm going to set it to be something like I don't know, kind of a lightish blue color, something like that, and I'll click Okay. I'm just going to hold down Control and score wheel in, and I'm going to plug in this top pin into this Elbdo input, and that's going to give me a base color for our fog. Once again, we're going to be changing this in a blueprint that we're going to be setting up here in a little bit. So this is just the setup for it. Next, I need to right click in some empty space down here, and I'm going to add a scalar parameter node, scalar parameter. There we go. This allows us to input a single number into our master material node here. First, I need to give this a name. I'm going to call it extinction, and you'll see why a little bit later on here. And I'll give this a default value of one, sure. And I'm going to plug this into our extinction input. Like so. So we've got two named nodes, fog color. That's a vector parameter node. This is a scalar parameter node plugged into our master material node here. I'm going to go ahead and save this right away. All right, next step, let's head on back to our main level editor here, and I will create a new blueprint. Once again, I'll do this in my started content folder. I'll go started content Blueprints. I'm going to right click in some empty space right down here. I'm going to create a brand new blueprint class of the actor variety because this is going to be one I'm going to place into the world. And it's going to prompt me to give this a name, and I will call this how about BP underscore localized underscore Fog. All right. And with that selected, if I tap the space bar, it'll open it right up. And I'm going to add a component right away. I will add a cube. So clicking this ad button, I'll click a cube, and I'll scroll on back a little bit here in the Viewport. And now with this cube selected, I'm going to assign a material to it, and the material that I'm going to assign to it is my volumetric fog, the one that we were just working on. Don't be alarmed. This will turn invisible like this. Next, I'm also going to make it so that we cannot collide with this cube. This cube is going to represent our fog space. So I'm going to scroll down here under the collision section where it says collision preset, set that to be no collision because you do not want to collide with your fog. Next, here in the My Blueprint panel, I'm going to create three variables that we're going to be using in just a little one, two, and three. I just click that plus button three times. I'll go back and select this top one, and I'm going to going to adjust the variable attributes in the details panel right up over on the upper right. This first one I will call extinction. I'm going to change the variable type here to be a float that is a number with a decimal point. I'm going to check this box for instance editable, meaning that we will be able to edit this particular variable from the level editor. We'll see that in a little bit. And if I compile this, I'm going to give this a default value of 0.5. The next variable I'm going to select right down here in the My Blueprints panel. Once again, I will give it a name here in the details panel. I'll call this one fog color FOG color. The variable type, the type of information that this will contain is going to be a linear color right here where it says structure, I'm going to choose linear color like so. Once again, I will compile the blueprint. To give a default value, I'm going to expand this out like so. And I will change this to be, I don't know, 0.6 0.8 and we'll go one and then one for the Alpha value, something like that. Compile this once again. I'll make that error go away. Oh, I will also check this box for instance edible so that we can change our fog color once we place this blueprint into our level. And then the last variable right here, I'm going to select. I'm going to give us a new name. This is going to be fog area. This will be a vector parameter. And I will also check this box for instance, editable, and I will also compile the blueprint to give us a default area. I will put in 50 by 50 by three. Okay, now to make this all work together, we're going to set up some code in our construction script tab right up here. Now, we've got two different tabs. We've got this event graph tab where you can set up some code, some script that runs during runtime while the game is playing. However, we're going to be setting up some script that will affect this blueprint during designer time or rather before the game is running. This will allow us to make some changes to some of our variables here, and what it'll do is it'll update this blueprint in our level editor before the game is running. So you'll see that here in just a little bit. Okay, the way that this is going to work is I'm going to drag in my fog area variable. I'm going to say get that. And the reason I want to get that is because I want to set the world scale three D for my cube to match that fog area. So I'm gonna drag in a reference to my cube here. I'm gonna put that down here. Gonna drag out of my cube, and I'm going to do a search for set world scale three D. Now, if I'm moving a little fast here, it's just because I'm trying to finish this video in the time limit. This is a function node, and what it'll do is it'll give this particular actor or rather component this cube a new scale, the new scale is going to be determined by the information inside of that variable. Ha. Next, I'm going to drag out of this cube, and I'm going to type in set vector parameter. On materials. So you remember in our volumetric fog, we created a vector parameter called fog color, and I'm going to actually copy this parameter name right down here. I'm going to hit Control C to copy that. It new that we are trying to set a vector parameter that is a new parameter for this property right here, and I can specify that property right here. Whoops. I want to paste that fog color in to that right there, make sure you get rid of the nun. So I'm basically communicating with this material placed on this cube and saying, Hey, I want to impact this parameter right here. Let's hook in our execution wire like so. And now the parameter that I would like to feed this value the color value I'd like to feed this is going to come from our fog color. So drag this in. We're going to get it. I'm going to go like this. I'm going to break this color. It'll break it out into RGB values like this. And the way that I can have this flow into this, which is seeking a vector value is I can drag backwards off of this and type in Me vector. Make vector node. And now if we plug R into the X, the G, into the Y, and the B into the Z, that'll feed us the R, G, and B values into that parameter right there, the fog color parameter. So to essentially be reading in this color that we specify through to this fog color parameter right here into our material that is applied to our cube. All right, Zoom in on back here a little bit. The last thing I want to do is drag out of my cube here one more time in the setup and type in set scalar parameter value on materials. Go to wire this in like so, make sure you wire that in. Our parameter name here is going to be extinction that we're going to get from this scalar parameter node, and once again, you can copy that. I'll control see that right there. Ctrol V that to paste it right there, and the parameter value that I would like to feed this is going to be determined by the contents of this variable. So just plug that in there. So I'm going to compile this and save this, and this is going to be our final setup. Now, what we need to do is place this blueprint into our level. Now, the way this is designed, this is kind of a cube shape, so I want to find kind of an indentation in my landscape, sort of a value like this. I'm going to go ahead and drag this localized fog blueprint down into this area and check it out. That is pretty nice, indeed. Now, if I raise it above the landscape a little bit, you can see it is cube in shape. But with this blueprint selected, you can see we've got access to all of those variables, extinction, fog color and fog area right here from our details panel. And once again, the reason that these variables are exposed here in the level editor with that blueprint selected is because we checked these boxes for instance edible for each of these variables. Instance edible is the equivalent of these eyeball icons being on. So if I check this off, it'll actually uncheck that for the instance edible. Check it on. I ticks it on, like so. And now you can see back here in our level Editor, I could change the extinction. Could kind of make it fade in and out more. That's essentially how visible is the fog. I'll go something like 0.12 there. Fog color, I could click on this to change the color of the fog. You're seeing it update in the viewport. I'll just cancel that. And then the fog area, you can make it bigger or smaller in any of the various axes. So that's how this is designed. It is cubish in shape. It's great for placing down into a little valley depression like that, and there you go. You got some localized fog that I think looks quite nice. Alright, guys, that'll do it off for this one. We'll see you in the next one. 45. Level Track: In this video, we're going to add a little bit of ambient sound to accompany our landscape. Now, what I'm going to be adding is a looping track that's going to sound like some birds tweeting, some wind blowing, that kind of thing. However, note that if you wanted to have some background music to accompany your landscape, the same methodology would apply. So with my level tab open here, my California level, I'm going to come up along the top here and right where we see this button that's got kind of this three node icon on it, I can click on this, and what I want to do is I want to open my level blueprint. So the method once again for doing that click on that and open level Blueprint. Now the level Blueprint is specific to this level and this level only, and it's where you can add script, that is some code that will apply only to this level. So if you have another level called Nevada, it will not apply to there. Now, what you see here are a couple of event nodes waiting for you to hook some functionality up to them, and they exist here because they are commonly used. I'm going to delete out this event tick right here. However, I am going to make use of this event begin play node. Now, if you hold down the Control key and Scowll in, you can increase your Zoom level here, which I like to do. And what I want to do is drag off of here and simply bring in a play sound two D node. A two D sound is one that is not localized, it's not specific to any point in space. This is great for menu music or just some ambient sounds or music, that kind of thing. And what I'm going to do is I'm going to slot in a sound. Now, the sound that I do want to slot in here could be picked from this list, like so. However, if you select a sound within your content browser and I've got my starter content audio folder selected, I'm going to choose this starter background music, and I can actually click on this play button. You can try that out to hear what it sounds like, but I'm just going to slot it in right here. Note that I do have it selected right here. And with that selected, if I click right here, it will slot in that sound. Now, it's worth noting that this function node does have this little down arrow here so you can access some additional options, collapse, and expand that. So we can increase or decrease the volume of the sound. We can pitch it up or down a little bit, et cetera. These are usually the only two I ever play with. But there we go. We've slotted in a sound. Let's go ahead and compile this. This makes sure that our script is good to go and it is and then save. And so now if we were to go back into our level, I can right click play from here, and I should be able to hear that sound anywhere throughout this level. Now, once again, if it's not loud enough for you, you can escape out of here, go back into your level blueprint, and you can increase the volume straight from here. So let's try going twice as loud. Pile save, go ahead and right click once again and play from here. And obviously, if you don't like that track, and you want to go with something a little bit more musical, you certainly can. Just simply swap that out. Instead of some starter background sound, you've got a default music track in here. Here's my starter music cue. Not great. But you could try that out. And just to show that I could slot that in, selected, slot that in. I'll change the volume multiplier down to one and then compile. Say once again, I'll just play from here, right click Play from here. And now you've got some background music. Before we wrap up this video, I wanted to show that we can import our own sound into the content browser, and I have a few in my Downloads folder on my computer. I've got this Erie loop. That's a wavefle and this desert wind. It's an MP three file. So all you need to do to import these into the content browser is simply find them in your file explorer. I'm just going to hold down Control to select both of these, and then I'm going to drag and drop them from my folder into my content browser. And there they are. Those asterisks mean that they need to be saved. I could right click on them to save them that way. Control plus as will save them. Or I could simply click this Save All button to save anything that needs saving. I'll click Save selected. And I know you're dying to hear these sound like, so here we go. Desert wind. Kind of quiet, Erie loop. Not exactly appropriate for this level, but you get the point. Now, if you ever did want to increase the default sound for one of these imported sounds, all you need to do is double click on one of these files. Let's do the desert wind right here. And there's your volume setting, so I could change the default volume from one, two, we'll say three, something like that, and then just go ahead, save it out, then close it out. Then come back to our content browser. Play it. A little bit louder. Alright, and there you have it. A really easy way to add some music or ambient sounds to the background of your landscape level. 46. Ambient Sounds: In this video, we're going to learn how to place and edit ambient sound actors so that we can hear sounds like this waterfall here only when we get within range because you don't want to be hearing a guy like that when you're on the other side of the map, only when you're up close to it. Alright, to start with, I just wanted to point out that I've got my content folder selected in my content browser, and I'm currently filtering to access sound wave or sound C files. I've got these filters on, and I got these to appear in my list of filters by clicking right here coming under Audio, and then I checked on SoundC and sound wave. Now, this lesson is not about sound assets at all, but just to give a quick primer, a sound waves just the raw audio file. A sound Q can take in sound wave files and modify them in some way. So if I was to just open up this smoke sound wave, there's just some parameters related to that smoke audio acid itself. Like I can check it to make it loop or not. A smoke Q, however, if I open that up, it, it actually references a sound wave and it's also looping it here as well, but you've also got some other nodes that you could hook up to it to modify that sound in some way. So just a very quick primer there. Now, the reason that I'm even filtering by sound wave or sound files is because these are the guides that you can place within your level and then you can specify some parameters in the details panel to make it so that that sound can only be heard within a given radius. Now, I've got a waterfall here and I don't have a waterfall sound, so to speak, at least one's not listed as however, if I was to turn on this starter wind sound, I don't know. I kind of think it sounds like a waterfall. So we're going to use this as our waterfall sound effect. And obviously, you don't want to hear this anywhere in your map. You only want to hear it when you're close to this waterfall. So this is how you do it. You simply drag and drop one of these files like my starter wind here, starter wind six somewhere in close proximity of the waterfall. I'll kind of place it right about there. That place in my level, I'm just going to tap the F key F two frame up on it, and it's got this a speaker type of icon associated with it. I'm just going to lift this up into the air a little bit just to make it a little bit easier to see. You'll notice over in the outliner that this is labeled as an ambient sound actor. Now, it doesn't really matter if I place a sound wave file or let me just place a light Q right here, a sound C file. They're both going to have that a speaker icon, but they're both listed as ambient sound actors. Let me go ahead and delete this one. Okay, with this starter wind ambient sound actor selected, over in the details panel, you got some properties that you can modify about this sound, including a volume multiplier, a pitch multiplier, et cetera. But I want to draw your attention down here under the attenuation settings. I'm going to check this box for override attenuation. Now, as soon as I do this, it's going to make some of these other properties appear. So let me just zoom on what I just did there. Under attenuation, I just checked that box on, and it made these guys appear. Now, what these parameters are going to do is give us a shape in which we can hear the audio. And we've got this inner radius in which we'll hear the volume of this sound at 100%, and then a fall off distance. That is a range in which it will gradually get quieter and quieter until it fades off completely, and then we can't hear it anymore. So let's zoom on back here in my level editor to kind of show this. So you can see right now around this speakery icon, let me just peel this on down. I've got this orange wire sphere. That is the inner radius in which I would hear this audio at 100% volume. Now, if I zoom on back here a little bit, I've got this bigger orange sphere. Now, if I walk my character inside of the sphere, I will begin to hear it. And as I progressively get closer and closer and closer, there's the edge of my orange sphere right there. I'll start to hear it right here, and then as I get closer and closer and closer, I will hear it at 100% volume. At which point, if I was to back away, quieter, quieter and quieter until eventually I can't hear it anymore. So I like this shape a lot, actually. But just so you know, you've got this attenuation shape drop down. You can actually pick some different shapes. You can choose a box shape if you want. Maybe you want this sound to fit into a squarish room. Maybe a capsule shape, if you're inside of a tunnel, that kind of thing. But for this, I'm going to go with a spherical shape. I'm also going to increase my inner radius there from 400. Let's go to about 1,000. Now, as soon as I press enter here, you're going to see that not only get bigger, but also the fall off distance gets pushed out, as well. So just know that. If you're increasing or decreasing the radius size, that fall off distance is going to be adjusted as well because let me just kind of click in here and shrink or expand this. Fall off distance is distance from the inner radius boundary until the edge of the fall off distance itself. So I'm going to go once again, a valley of something like 1,000. Okay, let me kind of zoom on back here and get to the outer bounds. Now, I am going to play from here and then kind of walk into this and get close to the waterfall. But just so you know, between videos here, I actually did modify my ambient level track here. In filtering, I did find a rural Australia audio track one and two. And inside of my level blueprint, I actually made it so that on Event begin play, I'm playing that rural Australia One sound. So I did change things a little bit between videos. Alright, here we go. Right clicking, empty space. I will play from here. There we go, everything is in. You hear that rural audio sound rural Australia. Okay, I'm not going to walk in. I'm going to gradually hear that waterfall effect get louder and louder. Now, I did make this water so that I can walk upon it. Hearing it get louder still. I did a poor job placing those water splash V effects, but that's okay. So you're hearing it at about 100% volume now and obviously, as I get further and further away. It gets quieter and quieter until you can no longer hear it anymore. So that is the usual way that I go about adding some ambient audio to regions of my landscape and also containing it within a given area of your landscape. Now, I just wanted to point out here in my Place actors panel along the left hand side. And once again, if you don't have this panel, you can access it by clicking right up here and bringing on a Place actors panel. You can also do a search for ambient, and there it is ambient sound and place an empty ambient sound within your level. So let me just do that to show that you can I'll drop it right down there. I'll raise it up. You can see over in the details panel, let me just tap the F key to frame that up. I could slot in a sound of my choosing as well, and I could slot in a sound cue like this fire cue here or I could slot in a sound wayfle like my starter birds. Now, you saw with this sound cue that if you place that in there, some of these will have a range already in them like that. Note, however, that you can override it, as well by clicking right there. So note that that is overridable if one already has a range specified. I'm going to go back to my starter birds here and place that in. Let me scroll it up. Start birds, like so. And so you can have some overlapping sounds as well. I'm going to kind of zoom on back here a little bit because I do want some birds in my little foresty area here. I'm going to override that attenuation. It will go something like that. So now if I was to right click in some empty space, play from here. Everything renders in gonna hear some birds. And as we get closer, the waterfall is well. 47. Audio Volume (Reverb): In this video, I'm going to demonstrate how audio volumes, such as the sphere here can be utilized in unreal to create distinct sound zones within a map. And just to show you this, I'm going to right click in some empty space, play from here. Outside of my cave, you're going to hear a rushing waterfall of sorts. However, when I go inside of the cave, that's going to be greatly dampened, and we're going to hear this torch crack alec. Also, we can have some cool echoing effect like this. Went inside of our cave as well. All right, before we get started talking about audio volumes here, I just wanted to point out a few things related to the setup that you see before you. For starters, this is my California level. This is my imported landscape that I imported way earlier in the course. This particular landscape has this landscape, no tiling material applied. It is the landscape material that we applied way earlier in the course as well. And if I double click on this thumbnail image, it was through this landscape visibility mask that we were able to carve out a cave in our landscape. Now, I also wanted to point out while we are here within our landscape material that you can, and I did do this between videos, you can check this box to make this a two sided material. If you click Save there, what that enabled me to do between videos here, let me just zoom up while I'm stuttering here is to make it so that we have a second side to our material so that on the underside of our material, we can see that as well so that when we walk into our cave, we're not just staring up at blue sky. Also to simplify our discussion and keep it focused on audio volumes for right now, I wanted to point out that between videos here, I did disable the level track that was playing in the background because I want to keep our discussion focused on our audio volumes here, and I don't want to get distracted with any background music. So what I did is between videos here, I went here, in open level blueprints, I clicked on those three nodes icon right up there, and in my level blueprint, I just disabled on Event Begin play the playing of this two D sound, this rural Australia track. And I just snipped that wire by holding down the Alt key in left clicking to snip that wire. Alright, so just want to get that out of the way. Let's get to working with audio volumes. Now, once again, I want to have some unique audio properties on the inside of this cave. So to do this, over in my Place Actors panel, once again, you can bring that on by clicking right here. Place Actors panel. We can search for audio and we can find an audio volume to drag and drop into our level like this. Now, it's going to start off as this sort of smalleish cube shape. And again, I can focus up on this by just tapping the F key. It's kind of hard to see in the video here, but it's got this orangish outline. Over in the details panel, we can see various details that we can modify about this. And the first thing I want to do is modify the brush shape. Currently, it is set to box, but if you click on this drop down, you've got various brush shapes. I'm going to choose this tetrahedron builder right there. That's going to give this sort of an odd, sort of a I don't know, dice, like 20 sided di look right there. Now, you can change how many sides there are to this dice, if you will, by changing the tessellation setting right here. So I'm gonna crank this up to be something like four, maybe five, five will make it even rounder still. So if you really want to fit that into a rounded space, but know that you have control over the size and shape of your audio volume. I'm going to also adjust the radius right here by simply clicking in here. And then just adjusting that number. And you can punch in a hard number. I might go something like 3,000, like so. And then you can position this accordingly. I'm not going to worry about being Uber precise. And again, I'm going to be okay if this is a little bit outside of the mouth of my cave, and it doesn't have to extend all the way to the top because I'm not worried about my character navigating all the way to the top. So you can size that and fit that into the size of your cave as you see fit. Next, over in the Details panel with this audio volume selected, we've got some reverb settings that we can apply. And if I click on this reverb effect, this drop down right here, you can find a variety of effects that are in. Look at the pathway there in my tooltip. The engine pathway. Now, if you don't have engine content showing at this point, you can click on this little gear icon and you can ensure that you are showing engine content. That would be the same, by the way, showing engine content as if you clicked down in your content browser right here under settings and you showed engine content. Do you want to have access to these guys, so I highly recommend it for this stage. So for a reverb effect, this is the echoing type of effect that you would like to apply within here. I'm going to click this dropdown, and I'm going to search for one called Cave. If you were to double click on this effect, it's got various settings associated with it, like how you want the audio to be processed within that volume. We're not going to cover how to create one of these right away because we have a whole bunch of them already made for us. Let me just exit out of here. Go back to my level. Now, right below this, we've got a volume setting that is currently set to 0.5. I'm going to set it to be 1.0. Next, we're going to be running a quick demonstration here. And for this, I'm going to be accessing those engine content folders. So ensure once again that you've got show engine content. And down here under our engine content folders within the content browser, I'm going to click Engine. We're going to go under VR editor towards the bottom here, VR editor. Inside of here, we're going to go under sounds. And you can see this pathway right up at the top here if you're feeling lost. And here we're going to go under this UI folder. Now there is a sound in here called click on Button Q. I'm going to double click on this really quickly to point something out. This is our very simple sound Q asset. It takes in this wave file right here. Let me just go ahead and click back on the speaker icon because I want to see the settings right over here. Firstly, I'm going to jack up the volume multiplier here. I'm going to set this to be two and you can hear what this sounds like if I click this play Que. You can see it firing off there. And now, one more thing I'm going to do while I'm here is I'm going to check this box for override attenuation. Very important that you have that checked. Now note that for any sound cue assets such as this, you need to have that box checked in order for this sound cue asset to be affected by the reverb asset, that cave asset that is set within our audio volume right here. But let's just go back, click on this and click Save. Go back to our California level here. Next, I'm going to set up a very simple script within our level blueprint. Once again, clicking on this little button right here. It's got the three nodes on it. You can go there, open level blueprint. And it'll open up that same name tab, only it's going to be blue. And I'm just going to hold down the right mouse button, and I'm going to add a simple script inside of here. I'm going to right click in some empty space, and I'm just going to type in the seven, the number seven because I'm going to add a keyboard event for when I tap the seven key on my keyboard. I want to drag out of here and I'm going to play sound at location. This is going to allow us to play sound at a given location within the world. Now for the sound, I'm going to choose. If I click right there, it's going to use the asset that I had selected in the content browser. That was my click on Button Q. You can see I had that selected alternatively, you could search for that by clicking on this dropdown, but that is the one that we're going to be using. And now the location for this, we're going to go like this. I'm going to right click in some empty space, get player character. You're going to seek out a get player character node that's going to get your playable character, your mannequin man or woman within the level. And then if we drag out of this, we want to get actor location. And that'll return the X, Y, and Z location of our character. So we're going to use that as the place to play that sound. Let's go ahead and compile here, make sure that our script looks good. And now we're going to go inside of our level, and I'm just going to peel this back, and we're going to attempt to hear this when we are outside of the cave versus inside. So I'm going to right click at some empty space right about here. Wait for all this to load in here and note that I am outside the mouth of my cave here. We got all that grass in the way. Okay, so if I was to tap the seven key right here, you don't hear any reverb at all. It's a very subtle effect. But now when I go inside of the cave to hear this effect, it's important to note that this camera that's following your character must be inside of the cave. It's not the character itself, but rather the camera following your character. So I should be inside of it right now tapping the seven key here. You do hear that little bit of a reverbing sound. So that shows that reverb effect for our audio volume here at work. 48. Audio Volume (Ambient Zone): Okay, next, I want to show off these ambient zone settings inside of our audio volume actor here. And for this demonstration, I'm going to firstly create a sound cue asset, and this will be instructive on how you can create a sound cue, as well. I'm going to scroll on up under my starter content audio folder. Now, in a previous video, I use this starter win six sound wave file for my waterfall, and I kind of like that sound. So I'm going to pretend like there's a waterfall outside of this cave. Spoiler alert, there's not. But what I'm going to do is right click on this asset, and in my right click menu, I have the ability to create a Q using that sound Wayfle as the wayfle for this Q asset. So I'm going to do this, create Q. It's going to automatically create a sound Q asset. It's going to give it that name just with the Q appended at the end of it. And if I open this up, you can see that this sound Q asset is taking in that wave sound. Now, while we're here, I want to ensure that this is nice and loud, maybe exaggeratedly so. So I'm going to increase our volume multiplier from 0.75 to two. And again, if you clicked off of this speaker icon, maybe you had this wave player selected. Click on that speaker icon and you can select your volume multiplier. Set that to two. Let's go ahead and save that. Next, I'm going to come back to my California level here, and I'm just going to drag and drop this Q somewhere outside of our audio volume. I'm just going to drag and drop it somewhere in here like this. I'm going to raise it up nice and high. Now, that speaker icon is a little bit small, so we can make it bigger over in the details panel if I do a search for Billboard. We can increase the size of that speaker icon like so, nice and big. Now, that's only going to increase the size of the icon so that you can identify within your level easy. Sometimes I like to do that for demonstrations like this. Okay, so that's going to be the sound asset that I'm going to be using to demonstrate these audio zones inside of our audio volume. Essentially, what I'm aiming to do is make it so that I can hear this particular sound when I'm outside of the volume, but then when I go inside of it, I can't hear it anymore. Now, in order to make these ambient zone settings work, I need to access an asset known as our master sound class asset inside of our project settings. Now, I've got my project settings tab open along the top, but if you want to access it, edit, project settings will get you there. Alternatively, settings, project settings, that'll get you there as well. Two ways to open up project settings. Inside of here along the left hand side, under the engine category, go ahead and choose audio, and this is where we can find the default sound class, the master sound class asset. If you double click on this guy to open it up, think of this as, like, your master audio asset that controls all the other audio within your project, a big one being you know, your overall volume level for everything in your project. Yeah, that would be where you could affect everything in one fell swoop. However, I want to direct your attention to this apply ambient volumes checkbox. It is not checked right now. Now, in order to turn on those parameters that I'm talking about with the audio volume asset, we want to check this box on. So make sure you check that on for your master sound class asset. We're going to save that, and then we're going to jump back to our level. With that checked, we can now fiddle with these ambient zone settings with our audio volume. So what I'm going to do here is I'm going to set my exterior volume here to be zero and my exterior time here to be two. Now, this exterior volume controls the desired volume of sounds outside of the audio volume. So that when our player is inside of this audio volume, we are essentially saying, Hey, any outside or exterior sounds, we want their volume to be set to zero. Now, this exterior time, this is going to be the time duration in which that change is going to be happening over the course of 2 seconds. So it's not going to be jarring. It's not going to be too abrupt where suddenly you hear it and suddenly you don't, let's go ahead and give us a play test. But before I do, I wanted to dive back into my sound cue asset here that I just created because I forgot one thing, and I needed to select my wave player here. Want to make sure that this is a looping sound right away. Go ahead and save that so that it doesn't cut out after 17 seconds or so. Now I'm gonna right click Play from here. And everything's gonna be loading in. And you can hear that rushing waterfall. I'm going to dive into our cave and suddenly over the course of 2 seconds, that waterfall sound of sorts cuts out. Let me exit our volume. Suddenly, it just comes rushing right back. Alright, now let's try this in reverse, and I'm going to select my audio volume once again. So I had this waterfall on the outside. Let's add a sound on the inside. For this, I'm gonna dive under started content blueprints. And I've got this blueprint effect fire. I'm going to place this on the inside of my audio volume here, somewhat near the middle. So Blueprint effect fire. Dragon drop that in here like this. And you can see there is an audio volume of sorts attached to this. I'm going to dive inside of this blueprint class. And what's happening here is inside of this blueprint, we have not only the effect of some fire, but we also have this audio component. And that is what's specifying the range at which we would hear this torch of sorts. Acacin. And now what I'm going to do is I'm going to go back to my California level. And with this audio volume selected, scroll on down once again. I'm going to modify my ambient zone settings here a little bit. What I'm going to do is I'm going to leave these exterior settings, the volume and the time. However, I am going to fiddle with the interior volume. I'm going to set this to be zero, and I'm going to set the interior time to be, actually, I'll leave that at zerot five. 0.5 is probably right for that. Okay, now, note the interior volume controls the desired volume of sounds inside of the audio volume here when the player is outside. Thus, with this setup that we currently have, the player, you are only going to hear this, I guess, I'd call it a waterfall sound when we are outside of the volume. And we will only hear that fire sound when we are inside of the audio volume. Okay? Let's go ahead and give a try and get a right click right here. We're going to play from here. Everything loading in. Okay you hear that rushing waterfall. So now I'm going to go inside of my volume, and I'm gonna make sure I get my camera inside here. Alright, we no longer hear that rushing waterfall. And when I get close to this fire that's crackckin right there, we hear that. Go back outside. Suddenly, the waterfall kicks back in. Now, if we did want to hear a little bit of our rushing waterfall from inside of our audio volume here, that's simple enough. We can just simply modify the parameters for our audio volume here. Let's go ahead and make it so that with our audio volume selected, our exterior volume, instead of being completely zeroed out, we changed it to something like 0.5. And likewise, if we want to hear a little bit of that fire effect outside of our volume here, well, firstly, I'm going to choose the audio component. Peeling that back here in the details panel. I can see those orange radii right there. I'm just going to go ahead and choose my fire audio. Let me just override the attenuation from here, and I'll just make that a little bit bigger. The inner radius, we'll make that a little bit bigger. So now you can see it extends beyond the audio volume right here. Let me go ahead and select my audio volume once again. And I will change the interior volume wind to be 0.5. So then we should hear the interior volume source a little bit from the outside. Alright, let's go ahead and play that. Right click. Play from here. Hearing that rushing waterfall, let me just full screen it here. Me full immersive effect. And once I go inside of the cave, the rushing waterfall is going to tamper down quite a bit while the torch picks up. Then if we go on out, I can still hear the torch a bit. While the rushing waterfall comes rushing back. Alright, guys, that's gonna do it all for this one. We'll see you in the next one. 49. Good Sky: In this video, we are going to learn how to add the Good sky blueprint class actor from Fab so that we can quickly and easily add a customized sky to our landscape. This will give you the ability to add a day night cycle, and you can customize some sun, moon, and star settings. You can even make a storm occur in your level if you would like some lightning flashes and whatnot. So let's get right to it. Alright, so we're going to add our good sky content to our content browser here. And you can get this by coming under Fab. And here is my fab tab open. Now, I've already added this, but where you can find it in fab is just simply type in GoodSky There it is. And you click on that and go ahead and add to project. Now, as soon as you do that, coming back to your content browser, you should see this folder right here for GoodSky. You can color this. I'm going to right click on this and I'll set a color to it to make it obvious where this is in our content browser. Color it maybe something like blue. Sure. And under here, we're going to go under blueprint. Now, this whole system, the star of it is this BP Good sky actor. So I'm going to go ahead and add this to my California level here by simply dragging and dropping it into my level. Now, I simply need to tap the G Key in order to see my various icons. There it is. You're going to see this sort of sundial thing. It's going to say sunrise in the East. And now, it's worth pointing out here over in my outliner, I have various sky actors that I put inside of a folder, here they are directional light actor, fog, sky atmosphere, skylight, volumetric Cloud. These were all added at the beginning portion of this course. And I did this under the Environment Light Mixer, if you remember under Window Environment Light Mixer, there were buttons associated with each of these actors, and you simply added them by clicking on the respective buttons, and they're added to your level. Now, we can retain some of these actors, but with our Good sky, we can get rid of our volumetric Cloud because it's already got some clouds baked into it. So I'm going to do that now. I'm going to just simply right click on my volumetric Cloud. And I could come under Edit, delete or simply tap in that delete key, we'll get rid of it. And with that, I'll leave the rest of these here for now, though, I'm going to come back to these in just a little bit. I am going to take my good Sky, however, and just go ahead and drag and drop it into my sky folder so that it's nice and neat in there so I can collapse that folder or expand it as desired. Okay, so now one of the first things you're going to notice here is that it suddenly became nighttime. We got the stars out. And the reason for that is with our good sky actors selected. Over in the details panel, we've got this enabled time of day, and it's checked on. Chances are you are going to want it checked on, but currently our time of day is zero. So this goes 0-24, 24 hours in a day. And you can see that sundial, that graphical sundial reflecting the position of the sun as I move this slider back and forth. Now, if I was to go right about there and then kind of fly over in my level, I should be able to see the sun, and there it is right up there. So essentially, this is 9:00 in the morning. You've got some various sun settings that you can play around with here, if I was to scroll on down here I've got my sky effect sun stars. I could change the size of the sun. Like so. I could change the brightness of the sun. Like so. Now, this is only going to increase the glow around the sun. This is not actually going to brighten up your level at all. I'll get to talking about that in just a little bit here. I'm going to go back to the default values. Now, coming back up here a little bit towards the top of the settings, the sky global settings, I want to talk about this sky effect setting. Right now, we've got sun and stars from custom mode, time of day. I'm going to click on this. You got various options here. I'm going to recommend that for now you go sun stars and moon. Go ahead and click on that. And now, what I'm going to do is once again play around with my various times of day. The benefit of this one with the moon is that we should see the moon appear straight up overhead. So now you saw me fiddle with some of the sun settings, but if I go on down below here, now you can fiddle with the moon settings as well. You've got your moon size. Like so. Moon brightness. Like, so again, that's just kind of the halo around the moon. That's not actually going to enhance the lighting in your level. You've also got this moon move where you can click in here and kind of reposition where the moon is, as well as this moon eclipse intensity. Now, this goes between either zero or one. Now, if I click and turn it to one, I'm going to enable these eclipse settings, essentially that crescent moon setting, and now you've enabled this. You can change how much of an eclipse there is like so, smiley face, or even the angle of that crescent. Likewise, right up above, we've got the sky effect, sun and stars. You can change the brightness of the stars. Again, I'm just clicking in these fields and just moving my mouse cursor to the left and right. Set that back. Star UVtile. I can move this, like so to kind of reposition. Star fall off intensity. I could go something like 0.4 there, just kind of creates a sort of a blinky effect. And you can obviously adjust the color of any of this stuff as well. Okay, I'm gonna go back up to my time of day settings instead it to something maybe 11:00 there. Now I'm going to focus on the clouds. We've got this sky clouds style. And what I can do here is actually, I'm going to click on this search bar up here and simply type in clouds and Skycloud style is one of the options. So I've got various cumulus cloud formations that I can choose. And within these, I can even choose how much cloud do I want? Do I want it to be very slight, like so, or do I want it to be a little bit heavier, like, super heavy, which I don't think that's all that heavy, but there you go. Okay, I'm going to get rid of my search here. Now, let's go back to our sky effect. And instead, this time, I'm going to choose Storm. Maybe some of you want a stormy night. There you go. You got some lightning strikes all around. And if I scroll on down where you can adjust some of these settings are your sky effect storm. You got the lightning brightness. You can really crank that up, like, so a little bit ridiculous. You can also change the color of your lightning as well as the frequency if you really want to put on a light show. Alright, I'm going to go ahead and set that back from storm back to sun, star and moon. No, you've also got some other settings here that I haven't really filled around with. I could randomize some settings here by simply clicking on some of these guys. These essentially act like a button. They're not a checkbox of source. Essentially a button to alter your settings at random. Now, if you wanted to set up a day night cycle, there are some settings right here in the Good sky actor that can help you out right away. It's under Sky Beta. All you need to do is click this box, and right below it is an associated parameter. How long is a day in the game, and that's in minutes. So with that checked, if I was to simply right click, go in and play, you will see the day eventually turn into night. However, note that while this is happening and our sun should be setting somewhere over yonder, There we go. That the shadows of our character don't actually move. So to fix that, what we would want to do is go back up and select our Good sky actor, and we need to associate our directional light with our Good sky actor. And that can be done in the parameter right up above where we've got this directional light actor. I'm going to go ahead and select this drop down, choose our lone directional light actor. Now, as soon as I do this, I can now jump back in and play. Let me go ahead, right click and play from here. And you should notice the shadow of my character there adjusting as my son is panning across the sky. And once again, here it comes. But you'll notice that it gets a little bit dark. So what can you do when the stars come out and you don't want to be in complete darkness? Well, let me go ahead and escape. Here's how you can combat that. Simply add another directional light actor to your scene, so I'm just going to go ahead and do that. And I'm just going to point this one downward from a top down angle with this selected. I'm just going to set the rotation here to be zero, negative 90 like so. They're just pointing straight down. And so as to not get confused, I'm just going to simply click on this hit F two. I'll call this my we'll call it moon for moonlight. And now I would also like to place this moon actor within my sky up here, so I'm just going to drag and drop this right up into my sky folder. I'll call my directional light actor so I don't get confused here, my original one sun. I'm going to go back to my moon here and I'm going to set my intensity here. Instead of an intensity of ten, I'll set it to be like one. And also, if you wanted your sunlight, the one that is actually associated with our Good sky actor, let me go ahead and select Good sky once again. You can see that updated name for my sun. My first directional light actor. If I wanted to adjust how intense my sunlight was, I could adjust the intensity of my sun. So I'm just going to go something kind of crazy now. Maybe I'll go like a value of five for that. So now, if I jump back in and play, play from here, you can see that sun is panning across the sky because my shadow is adjusting. It's very bright when the sun is overhead. I'll wait till the sun sets. And then that is where the moon directional light actor will come into play. Here it comes. We'll deal with that warning message here in just a moment. So now it's dark out, but we've got a little moonlight. And obviously, I could adjust that intensity of the moonlight to be much less, so it's not quite so bright out. Now, you see that error message up on screen where it says multiple directional light actors are competing. I'll escape. Simple way to fix this is simply go back up. I'll select one of my directional light actors, simply type in shading into the search bar, and this forward shading priority, just set this to a value of one and boom, that error message goes away. And so there you have it. That is how you can work with the Godsky actor within your landscape. Lot of parameters we could have adjusted there, but play with those to your heart's content. Guys, that'll do it off for this one, we'll see you in the next one. 50. Map Transitions: In this video, I'm going to show how with a little bit of scripting magic, we can make it so that by overlapping a trigger volume, we can transition from one map to another. Alright, so my plan here is to walk into this cave here in my California level. And then when my character overlaps a trigger volume, I'm going to transition to my Mountain example map. Now, for this setup, I need to ensure that I have a player start actor in my level. Now, the players Start actor is the spot where we would spawn in if I did not do a right click Play from here, but rather just click Play along the top. And you can find a player start actor in your place Actors panel. Once again, Place Actors panel can be added right over here by clicking on this plus button, Place Actors panel. And under the basic tab, you've got a player start actor. Let's go ahead and drag and drop this into our level. And then if I just tap the F key to fly up on that, I can see that it's indicated by this capsule, as well as this controller icon, and this blue arrow, not the one going up and down, but this one right here, that indicates your character's facing. So if you tap the space bar, bring in your rotational tool, I'm going to have my character spawn in kind of facing the mouth of the cave. Okay, the next thing I'm going to do here is add a trigger sphere inside of my cave here. So in my basic tab, I've also got access to a trigger box or a trigger sphere. They can do the same thing. One is just shaped like a box. One is shaped like a sphere. What the heck, I'll choose a sphere. I'll drag and drop this into my cave. And I'm going to kind of put this around the area of my fire. So I've got a visual as to where this is going to be. Now, with this guy selected, let me just zoom up on it. You can see it's kind of small down there. In the details panel, I've got a sphere radius, so let me go ahead and increase the size of this to sort of envelop the flame there. A little bit hard to see. There it is. I can also increase the line thickness here just to make it more prominent and easy to see here in the editor, and so I shall. And if I want to make this visible while I'm playing the game, you know, just for testing purposes, I can scroll on down in where it says actor hidden in game. I'm going to uncheck this, you know, just for the time being for testing purposes so that I can actually see this trigger volume. If you're to transition from one map to another, you probably want to obscure your trigger volume with some sort of a particle effect or maybe, you know, have your character walk through a door, that kind of thing. But for our purposes, this is going to be fine. Proof of concept. Okay, now, with this trigger sphere selected, make sure you have it selected, we're going to go into our level blueprint to add a little bit of scripting so we can transition out of our California map to another map when we overlap this. And you can access your level blueprint by clicking on this three node icon along the top, open level blueprint. I've got mine open along the top. And what I would like to do is I'm going to hold down the right mouse button and go to a new spot here in my event graph. This is where we can add some scripts, some code, if you will. Once again, scroll wheel will zoom you in and out. Holding down Control and scroll wheel will get you some extra Zoom. And if I right click in some empty space, I can add an event for that trigger sphere. And if I expand this out, go to collision, I want to do an add on actor begin overlap. So let me just zoom up on that so you can see it. In the right click menu, that's the guy that I'm looking for right there. I want something to happen when I begin to overlap this. Right click? Okay, begin overlap. Now, what I want to do is check to see if the other actor is my player character. So I'm going to right click in some empty space. There's a few ways I could go about this, but I'm going to go with a generic G player character node. So I just right click Get player character. Now, with this node, we can compare it against the other actors. So if I drag out of the other actor pin right here and I tap in the equal sign, I'm going to bring this operator's equal symbol right here. What this allows me to do is plug one into the top end, one into the bottom end. And essentially what we're doing here is when we overlap this trigger volume, it'll output who the other actor was. If the other actor was my player character, if they are equal, then I'm going to bring in a branch node. Go to right click, bring in a branch node. This guy right here. This takes in a true false condition. We're going to go like so, and our flow is going to be something overlaps a trigger sphere. It's going to output who was the other actor, the other entity that overlapped it. Was that equal to? Is it the player character? We're finding out if that is true or false. If that is true or false, it's going to be determined by what it outputs right here. And if it is true that the other actor that overlapped the trigger sphere is a player character, we're going to do something. We're going to open up a new level. If it's false, we're going to do nothing. These are called execution wires. It makes one node, execute the next. This is our event node. Event nodes are in red. Okay, now what I'm going to do is I'm going to right click in some empty space right here, and I'm going to type in open level, open level by object reference. This is a function node. It performs some function. In this case, it's going to open up a new level. Now I'm going to say if this is true, we're going to open up a new level and which level would we like to open? I'm going to type in Mountain. And that's the one that I want to navigate to my landscape auto material, Mountain Range example. So I'm going to click that right there, and that's going to be our final script setup here in our level blueprint. Now, it's important to note here that if you want to spawn in at a given spot within your level that you're navigating to that you're opening up, it's a good idea that inside of that level, you also add a player start actor one of these guys right here. Now, before I started shooting this video, I did ensure that I had one placed within that level. So I'm going to go ahead and save here. If I come under this file menu at the very top, I could save the current level, but I like to get in the habit of saving all, control, shift, and ***. We'll do just that. Or you can click on this from the file Dropdown. And now instead of right clicking and playing from here, I'm just going to click on this play button, and that's going to cause me to spawn in right here. Let's go ahead and give this a try. Okay, everything is loading in here. You can see that trigger sphere inside of the cave. And we just navigate right to it. There I've transitioned from one map to the next. And there you have it, guys. Not a bad day's work. That'll do it all for this one. We'll see you in the next one. 51. Level Bookmarks: Setting level bookmarks is easy, and it can be a huge timesaver. Step number one is to identify some points of interest around your map that you want to come back to. Maybe it's an area of your map that you haven't quite finished yet and you want to do some further work on. There's a few ways that you can set level bookmarks, and the first way is the manual way, the hard way, and that is to come underneath your Viewport options in the far upper left here, clicking on this hamburger icon. And if you scroll on down, you'll come to a section labeled bookmarks, where you can set a bookmark, and you can click on any of these to set a bookmark, that is to mark this point, this camera angle in your level at which you can fly back to. So how it works is you can set a level bookmark and it's showing the ten possible bookmarks that you can set Bookmark zero through bookmark nine. You could click on any of these to set a bookmark or using the hotkey combination, you can set up to ten bookmarks. So Control plus zero will set bookmark zero. Control plus one will set bookmark one, et cetera. Now, this is the manual way of doing it, and it's not the way that I typically do it. I typically just go the Hot key route, and so I will. Now, if I want to mark this point in my level right here, again, the camera angle matters as well. I'm just holding down the right mouse button. I'm going to click Control plus zero. And I can see in the lower right, it says, save bookmark zero. Let me fly to another spot around my level. Maybe my waterfall. My waterfall right here. Let me do Control plus seven. You can see I've saved that bookmark right here, and then let me fly to one more spot in my level, maybe kind of an overview of my entire California level here. And for this, I'll do Control plus eight. Control plus eight, you can see that level bookmark right there. And now I'll even full screen this at 11 to fly quickly to any of those bookmarks, all you got to do is press the corresponding key. So if I tap the zero key, it'll fly me up to where I have bookmark zero. If I tap the seven key, it'll fly me up to my waterfall view. And if I tap number eight, it'll fly me to bookmark number eight. Now, you can override any of these. So note that this is my Control plus eight bookmark. If I zoom up on my road right down here and maybe I want to make this my new bookmark, I'm going to do Control plus eight. Right there, it saves that as a bookmark. So now if I fly way far away, like so, and I want to jump quickly back to that area of my level, all you got to do is tap that a key and boom. There I am. I highly recommend the use of level bookmarks, especially when we're working with gigantic open worlds such as this. Control plus number key will set that bookmark. Then after it's set, simply tap that number key to fly back to that spot. Then I'll do it all for this one, guys. See you in the next one.