Unreal Engine 5 Stylized Night Environment: VFX Lighting, Foliage & Landscape Design

1. Unreal Engine 5 Stylized Night Environment VFX Lighting, Foliage & Landscape Design Intro: What if you could light a moody, stylized night scene that looks cinematic without spending weeks wrestling with landscapes, foliage and folk headaches in real? In this course, that is exactly what we will build step by step inside our reel Engine five. Hello, and welcome to Unreal Engine five stylized night environment, VFX lighting, foliage and landscape design. I am Luke from Predi Tutor, and I will teach practical production minded environment building, and I love turning messy workflows into clean repeatable steps. We start with a fast gray box to plan composition. Then we sculpt it to rain and switch to creating a non repeating landscape material that blends by slope and distance with high base displacement on nana topology. We replace a blockout with modular ruins kit, tune the skies and stars, stack or volumetric for depth, add motion to the foliage, sprinkle in niagara particles, and finish with the lighting and grading for that cool versus warm punch. If that sounds like a lot, don't worry. We'll take it one step at a time. So what you learn the ruins workflow and composition. Block out first, then swap module pieces for clean focal path terrain and materials, manual mountain sculpting, distance based blending, slope logics from grass to rock, and height displacement. Volumetric tool kit, exponential height fog, drifting animated fog planes, and localized noise volumes that layer together convincingly. Stylized foliage and motion, animated trees via global parameters and world space noise, optimized grass using vertex masks and wall position offset for the wind. Particles and decals, a ruined teleport effect on the ruins, a stylized campfire, and custom moon cloud decals to control the sky. Lighting and color balance. With the resource pack, you receive a zipped reel engine five project, which includes modular ruins, meshes or seamless landscape texture sets with full PBR and height maps, and everything else you need to create this environment. By the end, you will not only have a finished night scene, you will understand why each choice works, how to control repetition on landscape, how to stack volumetrics without a foggy mess, how to make foliage feel alive without tanking performance, and how to push that cool versus warm balance. So the scene reads beautifully at a glance. Create your stylized environment you will be proud to show and a toolkit you can apply to any night scene you build next. So join me in unrelengin five stylized night environment. Let's Build a night your portfolio deserves. 2. Setting Up Your Stylized Night Scene in Unreal Engine 5: Hello and welcome, everyone to Unreal Engine five stylized night environment. We effects lighting, foliage and landscape design. And to start it off, we're just going to mention that all the shortcuts that are going to be used in the course are going to be seen on the left hand side. So everything that we're doing over here within the scene creation, you're going to be able to recreate with ease. All the mouse clicks, all the letters, everything can be seen on the left hand side. And before we get started, I'm going to go on to the Epic Launcher. And for this particular course, we're going to make use out of the version 5.6 0.1. If you don't have this version, whenever you are within Unreal Engine library, just click on This plus button over here and select the newers version for 5.6. Afterwards, you can click the yellow button to install and then click on the launch. While since launching, let's go over the resource back. Resource pack will include a zip file. Make sure you extract and unzip all of its contents because within it, you'll find the Unreal Engine project and images folder as well. Now, going back to the Epic Games launcher, once you clicked on the launch and let your project load for unreal engine, you're going to get this sort of a window. We need to do within here is find ourselves the project that we're going to use. So by clicking on Browse over here, within the recent projects, we'll be able to locate the night scene free Cheater folder, and it should have the config content and dot u project file. Mine has additional folders because I already have it open. Once you open up the project, it will generate you those new folders. You don't need to worry about that. We simply are going to select this file over here and click Open. Is going to mention that it was created with a previous version. That's okay. We can just simply use more options and use Convert in place. The first time it loads, it might take some time to do so, but the next time, it will be much faster. And you should get yourself this sort of a window. To make sure we're seeing exactly the same layout, we're going to go onto Window and use a loadout for default editor loadout. That we're having exactly the same layout, so it will be easier to follow along this setup. Now we can go on to content drawer and find ourselves preview level. If we were to double click on it, we're going to see all of the content required for the resource pack. Now, if you're getting some errors like this, all you need to do is just go all the way to the right hand side and find Fix button over here, click on both of them like so, and that's going to fix any of the map checks. Then we can go ahead and close this down. Now, this is the type of content that we're going to have, and we're going to have all the necessary pieces for creating our own ruins within the environment. We're going to also have a single tree before this entire setup is more of a stylish tree for this type of environment. We're also going to have a couple of rocks, a plane of a moon some clouds to go over it and campsite items like so, then we're going to have some materials for our landscape use, just like that, and finally some foliage to be used again for the environment. All of which we're going to set ourselves up for the landscape itself to make the best use out of it. Now, this is not quite finished piece when it comes to the resource pack. We're also going to have something additional needed to be added onto the setup. And if we go back onto the content drawer, we can click on this ad button over here. And this will allow us to import additional content back. And from this, we're going to make use out of the third person import. Now, this will allow us to add the human scale that we're going to use throughout our scene, as well as if you'd like, we can also make use out of the third person template. Two well run around in our scene. This version of a third person has been updated from 5.5 to 5.6, and it will be a newer version. In case if you're using an older version, this will be slightly different to you. The most important thing, though, now that we we have added this. We can just close down all of this content browser. The most important thing, though, is that once we have the thing added onto our project, we can go onto characters, mannequins, meshes and find ourselves a quin simple, which we can drag it onto the scene to check the human scale reference. So that's pretty good. And you can already see that the moon, for example, would be way too small for the scale of a scene. So we're going to go ahead and adjust that throughout the course, making sure that everything fits nicely within our environment. We're also going to have a menu open up that says that ten changes to source content have been detected. We can click What change and see that A, there are some changes that have been created because the update of a file was needed, but we can fix it by clicking Import, and that would be it. We don't need to worry about anything else in here. By default, this should be set up as a normal setup. We can just click Import, and that is going to fix all the necessary issues. The final thing that I would like to mention before we continue on is that we would need to save out our level, and just using Control and S, which is a standard procedure, wouldn't be enough because using Control and S would only use save current level. Whenever you're having a certain window open, it would only save out that specific window. If you want to save everything, you would need to use Control Shift ands. At the bottom right hand corner, we can see a tab that says free unsaved items. Using Control Shift and S, we would be able to save everything all at once. Alternatively, we can just simply click on those unsaved items over here on the bottom right hand corner to save all of its content. And now you see that it says all is saved, and that's exactly what we want. So that's going to be it for this video. Thank you so much for watching, and I will be seeing you in a bit. 3. Building a Powerful Reference Board with PureRef & AI Tools: Hello and welcome back everyone to UnreelEngine five stylized night environment, VFX sliding, foliage and landscape design. In the last lesson, we imported ourselves a resource pack for the scene, and we added ourselves a first person template onto our Unreal Engine five. Within the resource pack, there is one more thing that I'd like to bring out, and that is going to be this image folder over here. Once you unzip the entire setup, you're going to have a folder of images for referencing. And those folders will contain everything we need to have for just quick references, including just a general lighting setup, as well as the PNG formats for, well, the environment itself, and also just some render shots of the scene. So to make it easy for myself, what I tend to do, you can either have it as PNG files or so I'm going to use an application called PURF. If you're wondering what Puref is, I will add a video at the end of this one to explain what it's all about. But for now, though, I'm going to have myself an empty project, and I'm just going to start dragging each one of those folders individually just to make sure that they each have its own space. And just by doing it, so we can import all of these items into its own separate pieces. And once we have it, like, so we can see that everything that we need is basically going to be set ourselves, is going to be set for us, and we're going to have everything nicely ready for us. So first swings first is just general images of environment referencing. And to be honest, when it comes to referencing, the more the better. Honestly, you should have the type of referencing for lighting. You should have the referencing for some composition for general environment, the location of the environment, as well, so what kind of trees you'd have and whatnot. All of that type of setup, you would really, really benefit from having just to kind of get a broad idea, a general idea of we're trying to create and the positioning of each one of the pieces. So first things first, if we zoom in, for example, let's have a look onto this shot over here, this vertical shot. Although the final render that we're going to create is going to be more of a landscape. This is a perfect example of how the setup would look like. And at foreground, we have a nice camping site fully, nicely lit. So the focus of our eyes always would end up going towards this section over here. We also have at the opposite side in terms of, you know, symmetry. So if we draw the grid like this, we'd have one, like in one corner and another focal piece in another corner, and all of that would be a little bit more enhanced with the moonlight itself and the moon itself. So that would be a nice type of shot, and we have some bit of connection with a path going upwards, and the rest of the objects is more like silhouette type. So they're not fully lit and whatnot, but because it is a night scene, we'd get those darker shadows, those hotter type of colors. And in the background, we'd get actually lighter ones because of the soft type of fog that is going in the landscape itself. The entire landscape, the terrain itself would get lightened up a little bit by little bit. And that's a nice way to kind of break up, you know, the foreground with the background. Like so and then in the background itself, real nice light from well, the skylight, the beautiful type of scenery that we're seeing over here for all the stars and everything of that sort. That's basically it. When it comes to the night scenes, it's really important to kind of distinguish that it's not as simple as a day scene, and I really recommend you to just go into movies and cinematics and have a look at the way the night scene is set up. And usually when it's done, it's going to give you somewhat of a glow for bluish tint. So they're not actually creating a realistic type of a night scene, but it just has to be believable. We're going to talk more about the lighting as we get further down the line. But the whole point is that the bluish light is often associated with, well, the night scene, it gives that cold type of a look, and whenever there is a campfire, it would be more of a warmish glow. And over here, we're going to have ourselves the references for, well, just the general terrain. We're going to have ourselves the human reference, which is 1.8 meters for, I believe, both the female and male mannequins. So that's that, and over here, we're going to see a few of those mannequins placed around the setup just to kind of get a bit of a reference for the overall scene. Then we're going to have the overall landscape, again, with those Mannequins slightly visible. For a better visibility, we're going to have this scene over here, which is going to have all of those Mannequins visible over here, and we also are going to have some numbers seen in image. These numbers are going to represent the height that was being used for this particular landscape. So this mountain over here, for example, would be a bit lower in comparison to this one and this one is the tallest peak. And then we're also going to have a number for this mountain over here. So these are the four numbers that we see on the terrain to help with the overall referencing. So we have a lighter coloring, lighter exposition to kind of see what kind of mountains we're having out of the setup, and that's pretty much it. The rest is mainly for, well, better bit of referencing. You see the top down views and whatnot, a bit of extra close up shots, all of that good stuff just to kind of help us visualize this overall scene. So with all of that being said, just to make better use out of PUF, for those of you who want to do that, I'm going to play a quick introductiony video to the PureRef, and this will help you to better navigate throughout the entire program. So that's going to be it for me. Thank you so much for watching, and I will be seeing you in a bit. Welcome, everyone to our in depth referencing guide. And it's very important that we actually use references in pretty much any kind of modeling or environments that we're actually going to be work on. So before we actually do anything, before we put any cubes down or anything like that, it's really important that we have some really, really decent references to actually work with. So the first thing I want to recommend is that you can use something to actually put all your references on like Photoshop or even word. But what I'm going to recommend is that you use something called pure so if you go to the site, that's called purev.com, you will actually open this, and from there, you can actually click Get Pure Rv, and that then will take you to this download screen. And you will see at the moment, you've got 157 or custom amount, you can actually put this on zero and actually get this for free. So it's completely free, and you can come back and make a donation if you like. And then all you need to do is click Download. So the only things we're going to talk about pretty much for reference in here, are going to be free, except our mid journey part. But there are other alternatives like Dlly and a load of others out there that you can use instead of mid journey. Once you open up pura, then, this is what you will be greeted by this screen. And if you want to right click, you can actually drag this around to any of your screens or you can actually make it smaller, like so. And it's a really, really good program. This really, really handy, highly recommend getting. Now, let's actually think about getting our references. And there are a few sources that we use to actually grab references from. But generally, what you want to do is you want to build up a kind of reference pag if you're going to be a hobbyist or a professional in three D modeling or environments where you're going to see things perhaps on Pinterest or sketch up, and actually, you want to save them in a file. So I know people with thousands and thousands of images that they've saved over the years. And whenever they're coming to a project, they'll then dive in and actually find all of the images that they've got on that particular thing. This could be a samurai warrior or a Chinese bell. Also, a lot of people I know as well, who are working professionally at this will go around museums. They will take their own actual images, and then they'll also upload those to the file as well. So the first point of call if you're not actually got your own database yet is probably going to be actually Google. So let's open up Google, and you can see here that at the moment, I'm looking for a Victorian delivery truck. I'm going to do is, I'm just going to go through these and get some nice references like this one, for instance, and then I'm simply going to right click and I'm going to copy image. Then what I'm going to do is I'm going to go over to PUR RVs. I'm just going to open it back up, press Control V, and you'll see now that I've got my nice image in here. What we're also able to do with PUREvs we're able to also pull it out and make it bigger if needed, which is really, really handy when we're putting in lots and lots of actual images. Now, the next thing I recommend you do once you've actually got an image in there, is what you can do is you can left click and drag it over somewhere. And then what you can do is you can press Control N and you can actually make a note. So let's call this Victorian Trucks. Let's put it Trucks. Now, within my scene, I might actually want a Victorian lamppost as well as part of the scene or something like that. So let's actually look at the next one. So the next point of call is actually going to be Pinterest, and let's actually put in Victorian lamppost. So let's try that. Like, so let's see what we get, and we can see we've got many, many styles, especially this one. This one's actually really nice. This one's also really nice. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to actually take this one, I'm going to right click Copy Image, go back to my PUEv and then drop the images in there, like so and maybe make this one a little bit bigger. What I tend to do is I gather a load of images for each of these things. When we're actually building a scene or even just the model, you want to grab as many images as possible. I'm talking hundreds of images here. And especially if you're doing a scene, you want all of the little parts. You want everything down to the lighting, the environment, the trees. You want to grab references for absolutely everything because it will make your scenes just really, really look so much better if you've got some really good references. So now let me show you this is one that I'm actually working on at the moment, so if I come over and load Reason, and I'm just going to load this one here, and you'll see at the moment, I have all of my props. I have all of my main buildings that I'm going to be looking out to use as references. I have a ton of doors. I even have a load of foliage. I have all my windows. I have my lights over here, and I also have, more importantly, all of the lighting. In other words, it's a scene. So what time of day is it going to be? Is it going to be, you know, early in the morning, or is it going to be at dusk? Is it going to be a night scene, or is it going to be midday with that sun beating down on my scene? Just make sure that it actually matches the scene. There's no point having a scene like this, for instance, so this one here. If you've got a log cabin out in the snow, you really want it to match your actual scene. Now before moving on, there are a couple of other places that we do go to use for referencing, especially something like sketch up, which is really, really great because you can actually come into an actual scene. And then what you can do is you can actually rotate around it and really, really check out how a model is put together like something like this, which is one of our actual own. But you can see here how easy it is then to get a good idea of what actually incorporated in this scene. And what you can actually do from there, then, is we can actually come down and we can actually get some screenshots of this or even right click and copy image. There's also, let's say, if we wanted to do a Victorian truck, for instance, to keep the same theme as what we've been doing, you can see that there's no end of actual Victorian or vintage type vehicles on here. Not as many as what there is on ArtStation, but still a very, very good place to start looking for reference in. That leads me on to my next one, which of course is ArtStation. This simply is one of the biggest resources for referencing or for looking up artists in the world. So let's put in a reference of Victorian, for instance, and let's see what we actually get. Let's search artwork. So we're going to search artwork and let's see what it actually comes up with. Should be lots and lots of things to work with here, especially good, if you're looking for actual lighting. So you're looking for lighting effects like this one here. And again, we can take these actual um use them for references. And the best thing is about ArtStation is we can also come down and look at things that may be concept art, so two D or actual three D. And we can also come down as well and look at what subject matter it is. So it could be automotives, so Victorian automotives, or it could be architecture or something like that. So the possibilities with ArtStation are pretty much endless, and you're able to grab tons and tons of really, really high quality references. There are, of course, hundreds and hundreds of other places you could probably go to grab references, but I'm showing you these because as far as references go, these are some of the best places to go. Let's move on then to one of the things that we really use a lot of now, which you wouldn't have thought actually would come into it as far as referencing goes, but it actually is really, really handy. So let me introduce to you now Chat GPT. So here is Chat GPT. You can see that we have Chat GPT four, but we also have 3.5. 3.5 is actually free, and it is actually good enough to do whatever you want. You really don't need to pay for this. It's also free. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to go to message, and I'm going to type in, give me ten different buildings for a Victorian town scene. Something like that. Let's click Enter and let's see what it gives me. So you can see now it's given me a lot of things to actually work with here. And the best thing about this is you can also say, give me ten more. And it will just then go ahead and give you ten more. Now, these things are really handy to use because then I can simply take these ideas and it'll also bounce other ideas to me, and I can then go into Pinterest. Or Google search and actually look them up or try and find something like this. And I can kind of get ideas and design my scene around there using all of those things and especially Pure rev. We can also take them in to our actual Mid Journey. Now, again, our mid journey is paid for. I think the lowest amount is $20 or something like that, but there are many, many free things out there, but I will still show you what we actually do with our AI based image generator. So you can see at the moment, this is the image that we've actually generated. I know we've called it it's Victorian era delivery van, and this is what we actually get. If we go to my images, you will see that we've generated a ton of images about all of the things. Especially, we use this as well to generate textures. It's not just there to actually generate images and ideas and things like that. You can actually use it to generate transfers that are going to go on Windows or adverts or actual textures. And we do use this, especially for things like curtains because it's really, really easy to get that look that you're actually looking for. Can see we've got a lot of ideas for living rooms. We've got a lot of ideas for bedrooms and things like that. What we can also do in mid journeys, we can also go and explore. And what you could do is you could look up with a search prom Victorian. Let's put in carriage. And then we can also get ideas from this. So if I put in Victorian carriage, you can see this as what comes up. Now, if we come over to here, we can also see if we click on here, this is the actual prompt that somebody put in, so you can actually take that prompt, maybe change it around a bit, and then get your own images rather than just simply copying other people's images. It's a great place to start to actually gather your own images. The other thing is about mid journeys, I can come in for instance, let's just go back. And then what I can do is I can hold the shift but down. I can grab all of these, for instance, and then what I can do is click the Download button and download all of those images. And the best thing is about PUREv is you can bring in multiple images at the same time, so you can just drag, drop them, and then they'll all appear actually next to each other. So really, really handy things to have. So, lastly, then, to sum up, don't do what I did a few years ago, where I just dive straight into blender and not even think about references and just find references if I had to while I'm actually building something. Don't do it that way. It leads directly into building a beautiful gray box, as well, all this, because first of all, you grab all of your references, you make sure everything's set out. You can go and find some more references if you need to. You know, if you suddenly have a spark of inspiration, you want to make something on the fly, then grab some more references for but to start with, grab all of your references, have them really, really nicely laid out, and spend, you know, even half a day to a day grabbing all those references. You can then save the pura that as well into individual files, and then you'll have all the other references around that particular build in there, ready to use maybe on another project in the future. Or everyone, so I hope you found this useful, and I'll hope you'll take my advice going forward. Thanks everyone. See you on the next one. Cheers. 4. Creating and Navigating Your First Level in Unreal Engine 5: Hello and welcome back everyone to Unreal Engine five stylized Night Environment, FX sliding, foliage and landscape design. In the last lesson, we went over the PURF setup for our referencing, which got us this sort of a file. Now we're going to move on to creating our first level. So for us to do that, we're going to go on to file new level, and we're going to select the basic scene. We're going to go ahead and click Create, and right away, we're going to hit Control and S to save our level. So this one, we can call it night scene like so and click Save. And that way, we got ourselves a very nice basic type of environment that already gives us a nice components such as directional light, skylight, as well as cloud system. If we want to set ourselves up with a third person character, if we were to hit plane now, nothing will happen. But if we do want to have that third person start a content that we imported previously to be within the scene, we can do so. We can simply go on to edit project settings, and then we're going to find ourselves a game project. We can go on to all settings over here. Then search for simple y game mode. There we go, default game mode over here, and we can select BP third person game mode. Once we have it over so we can hit close. And now when we click Play, we're going to see ourselves this character, which we're now going to be able to move around in. If we want to control where the character spawns, we can simply go on to Add button over here and search for start player start, like so and then select it. And this will give us capsule where we basically move it, it'll spawn our character in. So that's pretty nice. Um, in terms of motion and how to navigate within the viewport, I'm going to play a quick video for viewport navigation basics, and then we're going to continue on with the next lesson. So thank you so much for watching, and I will be seeing you in a bit. Hello and welcome everyone to Unreal Engine five basics guide for the camera motion. And we're going to start off by introducing you to the camera type of motions within Unreal Engine five in order to help you follow along the lessons easier. So to start off within the middle section of the software, we have a perspective camera view by default. And using this, we can move our camera around. The main thing that you need to remember for when you're moving your camera around is that by holding Alt and ev one of the mouse buttons, you'd be able to make a certain motion. So, for example, by holding Alt and left mouse button, you'd be able to rotate your camera around, like so. By holding Alt and middle mouse button, you're able to pan your camera around just like that. And finally, by holding Alt and right mouse button, if you were to scroll up and down using this motion, you'd be able to zoom in and out of your view. Alternatively, you can simply just scroll your mouse wheel and zoom in or out of the project like that. Now, if you want to zoom in towards a selected object, what we can do is if I were to select this box over here, for example, I can click the letter F and it would zoom in right onto the object. Now we can use this to rotate our camera around and simply see a level with the object selected as a center. If we were to select a different one and click F, we'd zoom in onto our asset. And if the asset is larger, like this ground plane over here, for example, if we were to click F, it would zoom out and make sure that the camera view has the entire selection within our view. So this is pretty good for whenever we want to zoom in onto our selection. You do need to be careful, since if we, for example, were to select a sky and click F, it would zoom out all the way, and we don't really want this to happen. So make sure that before clicking F though, your selection is not something like a skysphere. Now, if you want to have more control over camera, and let's say you want it to be similar to our first person game, what you can do is by holding Right Click, you'd be able to enter a sort of camera movement mode within your editor. Right now, if I were to hold Right Click, I can simply rotate my camera as if this was a first person sort of a game. Now, what's nice about it is if we were to hold Right Click and use WASD, we'd be able to move around our acid so. So by holding RClick and W would be able to go forwards by holding right click and S. We can go backwards, A to go left and D to go right. And also, if you want to go up directly or down directly, you can use the combination of Q and E. So by holding right mouse button and holding Q, I can directly descend down to level. Similarly, by holding right click and holding E, we can go up to level just like that. Now, if the camera is a little bit too fast or too slow, we can make use out of this icon in the upper right corner, which says the camera speed. If we were to click on it, we can use a slider over here to set the speed of our camera. So for example, if I were to set it to one, I have a really slow motion and we'd be able to have a really fine control over where our camera with an editor mode is. If we were to set it up to eight, we'd be able to go really fast up and down, just like that. But by default, it should be set to something like four. There is a value underneath it, which is set to one. If we were to set it to two, for example, this will multiply our four speed to be all the way to eight. So right now, if we were to go up and down, you'd notice that it is way faster. So this is quite useful for when we're working with different scales. I personally only recommend you to use this value for when you're going up and down in scales. So, for example, if you're working with planetary kind of scaling, we'd want this to be increased to, for example, 14, and then this way we'd be able to go all the way out real fast out of a level. But by default keeping it at one and simply scaling this up and down, we'll do just fine. Within the perspective view, we also have a couple of hover perception modes, and those would be on the upper left corner of the window for the perspective camera. So right now we have set it to perspective. We can change those to be top, bottom, left and right. What this would do is basically it will help you get different types of use for our level, right now, because I'm set to bottom, if I were to set it to left, and if you don't see anything, we can always make use out of the letter F and go back onto the level just like that. This is quite useful for whenever we're creating environments and assets, and we just want to make sure they look good and proportional to the rest of our level and from all sides of angles. Again, by default, this will be a perspective. If you do want to change it to be into multiple cameras, though, and you want to see multiple of them at once, we can click on the upper right within our view mode, but over here, you click Maximize or restore View. Way we get three different viewpoints, all from which are different types of perspectives. Now, other than the perspective, all the Ava ones will by default, be set to wireframe. If you don't want this to happen, we can always set them to be lit. So especially when designing a level, this sort of a view might be quite handy. To go back onto one view, what we have to do is locate our perspective camera and click on this button over here. Within this perspective view, we can also change the way our camera perceives the entire level. And right now it is set to be default of IT, which means that all the shading would be seen with proper shadows and whatnot. So in order to change that, we'd have to click on it. And if we were to, for example, select unlit, would show you all the level without any types of shadows. You can go ahead and do that. We'd get this sort of result. It's also something like a wireframe, which you'd see in AVO cameras. If we were to click on it, we'd see the types of geometry that we'd have. So it's quite nice to know, especially if you by accident sometimes, click on one of them and you don't know how to get out of, can always go on this button over here and select after which we also have show icon over here. This one will get you different types of visualizations for your respective camera. But what you need to know, though, is if you have something that's a little bit off, for example, I have my grid right now, which is barely visible, but it is often quite useful for when we're creating our level. But if this is not visible, for example, if I have this turned off with this button over here, I want it on, but I don't know which one exactly it is. We can always go ahead and click USE Default, and this will bring back all the selected defaults that is usually set up by the default template. That's pretty much all there is to the camera controls. I hope you enjoy the video, and now let's get back to the course. 5. Graybox Spiral Ruins in Unreal Engine 5 with Precision Tools: Hello and welcome back everyone to Unreal Engine five stylized night environment, VFX, lighting, foliage and landscape design. In the last lesson, we went over the basics of, well, the user viewport and created ourselves a nice brand new level for us to make use out of. Now we're going to start off, well, working on the scene. And first things first, what we're going to do is we're going to create ourselves a basics cube sir, no, the basics, shapes cube. There we go. And that's going to give us a nice scale one by one by one for well, a cube. We're going to make use out of this to create ourselves a very simple and nice little setup for gray box. In terms of moving the object around, we can use W to select our Gizmo for movement, which can be also clicked over here on this corner upper left hand corner. We can use this to move it around using this Gizmo of the arrows like so. We can also click E to go into rotation axis, which will allow us to rotate our object around just like this. And finally, we can use R to go onto the scaling Gizmo, which will allow us to either scale the whole object like this or use only the axis lock to scale it in terms of the axis itself, just like that. And if we look at the reference, like, so we're going to create this piece over here. We're going to start off by well oversimplifying this entire shape to give us something for, well, the ruins. So we have ourselves a cube, and I would also like to grab a character that we had previously placed it in a different scene. So Quinn Mannequin, like so, we can leave it as is and now start working well with the basics. And First things first, when working with the design, we need to visualize how it would look like as a ruin setup. And for that, I'm just going to start off by, well, using this soup to extrude it. Like, so notice how I also have some snapping turned on. At the very top, we have highlighted blue grid snapping. Make sure this is enabled and angle snapping. So when we are rotating, it's going to snap by ten degrees. And also we have scale snapping as well. So that's set to 0.25. All of these options are set up by default, just kind of help us out, visualize how this will be shaped out. And to start off, we're just going to well, make a very basic type of platforms. And whilst we're doing this, we're going to talk a little bit about how well they're going to be looking like for the setup. So when creating ruins like this, it's important to not just create a simple blocky type of results, and we're going to work towards more dynamic type of a shape. So in this case, I'd like to make more of a spiral type of a setup, meaning that we'd have, well, this is the front platform. We'd have another platform that's also going, lower a little bit, like so maybe a little bit closer, just like that. And that's a nice basic setup. And then another one at the bottom, like, so something of that design. So it's going upwards like this, which is looking quite nice. And then let me just have a look. I think it's a little bit too high up, so we can just go ahead and select them both and lower it by one. There we go, something like this is nice. Then when it gets to the middle part over here, we can make it even higher. So I'm going to upscale this a little bit, like so and scale it outwards just to make sure that the corner is not touching, and it would look a little bit more natural to the setup. Now, in this case, I don't like the way this is being overlapped. I'd like to ideally move it outwards or alternatively, I can squish this down a little bit like so, and we'll get this sort of a setup. This part over here, it would look a little bit too void, too empty if we'd leave it as is. So what we're going to do is we're going to make yet another duplicate and move this downwards like so and even maybe expand this a little bit. But I don't want this entire gap to be filled up. What we're going to do is we're just going to move this a little bit to the side and slightly scale it downwards. So just to make a nice little platform to help us break down this vertical entire shape just like that. And already, it's looking quite nice. It's going upwards like this, and then it's going to spiral upwards even more on the higher section over here. However, at this point, we might have noticed that the material being used is a little bit hard to visualize, especially with such bright lighting. So one thing that we could do is we could change up the material for this gray box. And if we were to select all of these blocks, so, we can go to elements on the right hand side within a detail stab, scroll down until you see materials. We can simply click on the material stab, search for grid, like so and find world grid material. Click on it, and we're going to get this type of result. Some of the parts are going to be slightly glitching out, and the reason for that is because we are overlapping some of those meshes, but that's totally acceptable for something like a gray box, we can fix that later. We're going to fix that now because it's boring me, so I'm going to turn off this scaling real quick and just slightly upscale this a little bit just like this, just by tiny bit, like so, and there we go. We fixed it. Need to worry about this, you know, being a little bit outward or something. We can do something similar for this one, as well if we want to. But, again, this is just a quick fix for overlapping. And since this is only a gray box, we don't need to worry about it too much. Honestly, we could have kept it overlapping. It would have been totally okay. Moving on with the shape. So we already have this type of a setup, which is already looking pretty good. Now we need to move it even higher up over on this section. This time, we need to also visualize a little bit for the staircase, as well. And for that reason, I think I might even lower down this scale. So this time the scaling is set up with snapping. I'm going to kind of squish it downwards a little bit just to make it a little bit thinner. The reason being is that I do want to have some space for the staircase. And when working with the staircase for gray box, there are a couple of options to do. One way would be well to hold alt, move this outwards to make a duplicate, like so, and we'd have ourselves very nice basic type of platform which we could then rotate it and just pretend like this is going to be a staircase. That would be one way of doing it. The other way, a little bit more of a complex way would be to go onto the selection mode, go on to modeling section over like so, and we have a brand new well, setup layout for creating and adjusting different meshes. For now, though, we're just going to go on to create staircase, and you can see it over here allows us to create a staircase. We can adjust the number of steps over here. Probably we can change something like six maybe, like so, and that would be totally okay. I think six is enough. Going to go ahead and just tap on our terrain, click Accept, and we're going to get ourselves basic type of a mesh for the staircase. Now let's go back on to the default selection mode, and we can just slightly tweak this staircase a little bit just to kind of better fit this overall setup. And I am going to lower down the grid to ten for the snapping. That way, I can actually tweak this a little bit more in terms of, well, it's positioning. So I think this staircase is a little bit higher up too high. Something like this will be quite nice. We then we can then hold Alt and drag this outwards. So if we're dragging the gizmo, you'll notice that we have arrows, but if we're just selecting the square over here, we're going to affect multiple axes at once. That way we can do the vertical axis as well as horizontal axis, but not move it in this kind of way. So by just selecting this, we can just move it like so. And again, while it's holding old, we can just duplicate it like so. And yeah, in this case, I think this setup is a little bit too much. So what we're going to do is we're going to break down the staircase a little bit and just leave a little bit of a place for, well, a platform like this. Like so. That will be much, much better, I believe. So there will be a nice walk in platform. It then goes upwards again. And over here, let's say we could have a staircase, maybe more like so. You can imagine it being broken down a little bit, just like that, and yet another platform. Just like. And this edge is right. The upper side over here, we can have a little bit more control over the setup. We can start working with curving to be higher up, even higher up section over here. And I'm just going to go ahead and select this block over L Zo, move it up to the side, just like that, and we should probably have another staircase actually going upwards even from here, just like that. And like so. Yep, that sounds that looks like it's going to be quite alright. Now, this platform over here should be even higher up. We now need to decide in terms of the staircase setup. So, honestly, I'd prefer this to be a little bit steeper. That way, it could go up higher, faster. And then I'd want to have another staircase, which would only be a couple of staircases along that just kind of would finish up this section over, like so. But this staircase is a little bit too much. So we're going to create a variant for that. We're going to go back onto modeling mode, get ourselves to staircase. And this time, we're just going to create two steps. So select two steps, click Enter, and then place it somewhere on the ground, click Accept, and we're going to get ourselves basic two staircases for grey boxing out or setup. So that's what we're going to do. Now, in terms of the setup over here, we're just going to grab this piece like so and move it upwards like this. And we are actually running out of time. So I think I'm just going to help us finalize it a little bit to have a small platform over here and extend this over, like so, something like this is a very good start. We can over view this in a next lesson and kind of fix up all the necessary parts. So yeah, let's go ahead and continue on with this in the next lesson. Thank you so much for watching, and I will be seeing you in a bit. 6. Designing Natural Spiral Staircases for Stylized Ruins: Hello and welcome back to room to n reele Engine five stylized night environment, VFX sliding, foliage and landscape design. In the last lesson, we went over a nice little sea for a gray box that we're going to continue on with this and talk a little bit about, well, the original idea of just making sure that the gray box itself is going in a little bit of a more spiral organic type of way. So on the right side, we're having this nicer elevation that goes up and up and up until it goes to the end of the middle part, and then it turns with the staircase and then goes onto the left hand side over here. So if we look from this end over, so we're going to see that it's quite vertical. We need to go ahead and fix that. We also need to fix up this staircase over here because we ended up, well, not quite finishing that just yet. And I'm just going to, well, change up the position a little bit, change this up in terms of the box, making sure that the staircase at the very end is going to be a little bit more well flashed out. Let's put it this way. And we also um, now think about, well, the end bit over here at the staircase, because we don't want this to end on the stair itself. So we want to have a small little platform at the very end just to make sure that we have some nice way of ending the staircase. Again, we're not worried about it too much in terms of, well, it's positioning or anything like that, blocking out the shapes just like that. So something like that is going to be more than enough, and then we can think about the last piece of block over this one over here. And I think I think this block can be a little smaller, just a little bit like so and places closer to the section at the very start. These staircase might be a little bit too wide, so we can just shorten this a little bit and just looking at overall setup. We can see that well, it's looking quite nice for the overall section. We now need to start considering, well, the final pieces. So for example, this back end over here, even though when we're thinking about original camera placement, it might not be quite as visible. It's still a good idea to make sure that everything from all the sides are going to look well, quite nicely. So for this part, we can have a look at the reference a little bit. So if I was just check reference, we have the staircase. Go all the way up to the topper section. Then we have some way of breaking this vertical section like so and a little bit of breaking around over here as well. So let's go ahead and just grab some of those elements to make sure that we're having something like this. So from top down view, we're going to have this kind of a visual aesthetic. Let's go ahead and have a look if we can sort this out. So first things first, I reckon we can have a little bit more of a nice elevation over here. For this section, we can just make sure we are having a little bit of a part like so. Nothing too much, just a little bit of a platform going downwards like so, and maybe even that same staircase, small staircase that we had over here is going to be placed over like so. When doing a gray box, I'm also making sure that I'm not overusing too many of different elements. So, for example, this staircase over here is a little bit wider one, and I might want to shorten this down a little bit in terms of width to make sure that the duplicated staircase is going to be well, somewhat of a similar width. So when we come back to creating assets or using the module parts, we don't need to, well, make sure that we have each width uniquely set up, and we don't need to make multiple unique acid parts. So that is that in terms of this section over here, we can actually, I reckon, make a little bit more wider of this area over here. So I can make this quite a bit wider over, like so and just place just like that. And the bottom part will also need to be wider, actually. So I'm just going to go ahead and stretch it out like this and just place it replace it like so, and this needs to be the not as wide, something like this. What I'm doing right now is making sure that well, we're breaking this surface around a little bit, and we're also having some well, non 90 degrees type of angles over on the end. So it helps us to just break down this entire section. And I think that's honestly enough, we just need to make sure now that we have this whole setup. We're going to have some well, breakage, as we talked about earlier over here. So I'm going to make probably a duplicate over from this one, this and just create it something like so. Again, it doesn't need to be super accurate. We just need to get general shapes out of it. And I'd say the best setup of the gray boxes would be just to make sure you're keeping the flow going, not stopping and just constantly iterating and adding unique shapes to keep the organic out of your setup. So something like this, I reckon at the base, like a small platform to just break up this vertical surface will be quite right. We can have some bricks or something of that sort. And that's another thing. When you're creating gray box, you might want to consider the type of well, assets that are being used. So for example, in this case, because we're having more like a ruines type of setup, it's really important to know that you could have bricks at the type of pillars you could place. And all in all, you know, considering the type of assets you're potentially able to work with. Even at the very start, when creating a grid box, you don't really have those assets. It's still, you know, good to know. That's why at the very start, it's important to have some references of that exactly the type of theme you're going for, what kind of visual effects you're able to get out of your setups, and what not. So for example, we're also needing to consider the way emissive glow will be shown in the runs and stuff and whatnot that will allow us to highlight some of those asset parts. But something like this, I think is quite right. This is a bit of an empty gap, so I'm going to be a little cheeky with it and just fill it in with an extra block. Again, I'm not too concerned about it at this point, just making sure that it's just blocked off. And then when we're using assets, we're able to consider the type of setup. This part over here, I am a little bit concerned about because we don't have exact the staircase that would fit. We could make this, for example, bigger. We could make free staircases and whatnot. But looking at the reference, if I was to go back onto the reference, like so, can see that this staircase is actually a little bit of an interesting one. Let me just find the one that shows the reference a little bit better. So over here, this staircase ends up having more of a vertical drop over here. So there is a staircase that goes to the right side and a staircase step that goes upwards from here. But this part over here is a little bit more of a vertical drop. And in this case, it's totally acceptable. And the reason for that is, well, because the staircase that's being used over here, can be considered to be, well, broken up a little bit with used up parts. So we can just simply put that into consideration. And when we are going to have a step that's going to be missing, it's going to look like it's just broken off or something of that sort. So in this case, I am actually just going to reuse this part over here, just to kind of replace it, like, se and put it over on this end just like that. This way, we can have this sort of a staircase, which can be accessed through the side or through this part over here. So I'm just looking right now that maybe we need to elevate, lift this platform up just to make sure that the section over here is nicely covered. So something like will be quite nice. And, of course, we can have a little bit of an extra platform over here just to kind of make sure that these aren't floating as a staircase, and that's pretty much it. So as you can see, this over here will be missing step, but that's okay. We'll just make it look like it's broken up a little bit, and that's all right. So, once we have this type of a chunk, the main block of our ruins set up in a nice spiral kind of a way, we can even visualize it a little bit if I was just to bring this onto our Puref, I can just show that, like, A, it goes in a spiral, kind of a way. And that's exactly what we want. It makes it look nice and organic, with some parts, you know, broken up a little bit, and it doesn't look like it's exactly just chunky type of ruins. So I think we can work with that in terms of placing our assets. Uh, the other thing now that we need to consider is going to be placing the setup in order to make sure that the silhouette of our environment is going to look quite nice because if we consider the angle of our original type of a setup, where we have a camping spot on a foreground, and then in the background, it's the ruins. This is going to look something like this, where the ruins will be a little bit more of a distance with a back light, making it more of a silhouette, meaning that if we look at it from something like this angle, right now, it's just block. It's not visually pleasing to look at. We need to make sure we add smaller ways of breaking this up a little bit to get a better look out of this. But we are running out of time, so we're going to continue on with this in the next lesson. Thank you so much for watching, and I will be seeing you in a bit. 7. Shape Dynamic Silhouettes with Pillars, Arcs, and Framing: Alone, welcome back everyone to Unreal Engine five stylized night environment, VFX lighting, foliage, and landscape design. In the last lesson, we went off with our gray boxing setup, which is already shaping up pretty nicely, but now we're going to continue on with this and make sure that, well, we add some silhouette aesthetics on to our setup from the designated viewpoard. So what I mean by that is now we need to consider about this type of location or final composition. At this point, it's really good to start considering how we're going to set this up and how it's going to look like when the final piece is finished. So we really need to start thinking about well, the overall silhouette of our ruins. And before we do that, we need to consider where the camera is going to be placed, and it's actually going to be placed in quite a low angle. I am going to make this platform quite a bit smaller. So I'm going to select this platform, go onto the TTL stab and change the scale to two by two. I think that's quite right. And so, just to make sure it goes out of our way when we are lowering the camera. Now we can just simply start considering the angle of this setup. Something like so. And I'm trying to find where the human reference is. So that's where it is. And it's going to be at a reasonable size. Yeah, okay. So I think it's a little bit closer, something like this. And yeah, I think that's pretty good. So once we have a setup, something like so, we can save this position of our viewport location by clicking Control one. Clicking Control one, you can see it saves bookmark. So using Control one, Control two, and so forth, we're able to save out different angles of our viewport. And then when I click one, I'm able to go back onto that saved viewport location. So no matter how differently I move, I can click one and then go back onto the same setup. So that's pretty handy. I'm going to move the platform a little bit more to the back, so it would go out of our view a little bit and something like that. All right. Now we can start considering the overall viewpot setup or our Ruins. If we look at the top down view on this setup, we have some pillars over here for the entrance, which is pretty good, we're also able to make use out of this setup of an ark, and we have some pillars over here just to help us break down this seemingly boring shape. So that's exactly what we're going to do. We're going to make sure that we are breaking all of these parts up. And we're setting up some nicer shapes out of this gray box. So real quick, again, we're going to just we're going to make use out of this platform. We're going to hold Alt and make a duplicate out of this. And then just simply make it smaller, like so, and something like this will be right or an entrance, again, keeping it simple, keeping it basic. That's the key of making sure that everything is quite nicely set up. Now, if you look back at this setup, from a distance, this might look like it's taller than this, but it's only because of an angle because if we have a look at something like this shape, we'll notice that this angle shows that, A, they're kind of close to the same height. So this part and this part is kind of similar, but it's still able to help us break down the overall shape. And the reason for that is because, well, we are able to get this closer to perspective, which is going to give us that nice outcome so far was to place the seemingly same height over here at the start and click one, we're going to see that, hey, we are having somewhat of a same result. And quick tip, we can also use letter C on our keyboard whilst holding Rock mouse button to kind of zoom in to see visual aesthetics how it looks like from this angle. So again, if we are holding right mouse button and clicking and holding C, it's able to zoom in, like so and I believe, yeah, by using Z, you can zoom out. So these two buttons, whilst holding, again, right mouse button allows you to zoom in and out within your viewpoint. And once we release the right mouse button, it goes back to normal. So it's pretty good for, like, just visualizing, seeing how it looks like with the setup. So this part, I think, might need to be a little bit further, actually, it's a little bit too close to my taste for the platform, like so, and again, real quick, real simple setup because it's a gray box. We're just making sure that everything is looking quite nicely as a setup. And now we can use this to make a duplicate, to make a pillar, like something like so, making it a bit probably thinner. And something like this is right. So we can place this someplace in this area, reckon. If you click one, we can see why because it helps us to break down this again type of look. And if we look back onto our design, this one is actually well, in terms of the silhouette is quite similar to the front arc, this pillar. The arc in the back is a little bit lower, and then the pillar in the back is even lower, giving us this very nice and unique type of shape where it's just like a quite high start goes lower than even lower and then quite high up, again, but not as high as the starting point, but quite close. And that just gives us a nice type of zigzaggy type of setup, and it just helps to break down the silhouette of the design. And that's what we're going to try to get. So over here, the design might be a little off maybe because this needs to be a higher up, maybe closer to this. There we go. Is this better? Let's say that it is, but we're now losing on something, and that is we are losing on this small gap in the middle, meaning that the part or well, for the pillar that goes behind the arc and the front pillar is going to be quite quite, quite bad. So this pillar over here needs to be a little bit more apart. And so this, I think, this pillar needs to be moved a little bit off to the side, so that way we can have a better positioning. So maybe just a little bit off like this. Let's see. Quite right, except this pillar now is needing to let's have a look at the top down view for this setup. And the pillar is actually at the back end of the back platform. So it's going to be on here, actually. Now let's go ahead and see how it looks like. It's looking quite all right, actually. Just needs to be a little bit more right to the left, sorry. And I think this platform could be potentially a little bit bicker. That way we can move this a little bit more to the back. So when we click one, we can see that this really needs to be going more like this. Actually, let's have a look. Aha. Now it's outside of the setup. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to select this, go just the top down view, and going to use this to go diagonally across like this. I think that's going to be quite nice. Let's have a look. And yeah, that looks quite nice. Maybe this dispillar could be a little bit smaller, look a little bit shorter, like so, and there we go we're getting that shape that we wanted out of the setup. We don't need to worry about gaps too much just yet, just the overall shape of a silhouette, because we are going to come back to it all with the proper assets and aesthetics and everything of that sort nicely set up. I don't think we need to worry about anything else at the moment in terms of the gray boxing. We got the main part. This little platform is going to be just an asset on its own, and everything else, I believe, is pretty much sorted. So we got ourselves a very nice, basic setup. Or an arc. I just don't like this to be a block, and the reason being is that it's a bit hard to see as this part is, well, quite large at the front. So real quick, I'm just going to make a duplicate out of this, make this squish up a little bit and put this on both ends, then just have a nice column at the top. So basically, we're replacing this block of a grey box into more of a door hinge type of look. And we can now delete this block, and that gives us a better look on how it's going to look like for the front entrance of that archway. I think is looking pretty good. So yeah, but just playing around with gray boxing, you know, playing around with the shapes a little bit, we're able to get some real nice type of a looks just like that. And now we can start thinking about, well, the night scene. But of course, we're going to continue on with this in the next lesson. Thank you so much for watching, and I will be seeing you in a bit. 8. Stylized Moonlit Lighting with Manual Exposure Settings: Hello, and welcome back everyone to Unreal Engine five stylized night environments. We have fax lighting, foliage and landscape design. In the last lesson, we left ourselves off with a nice little gray box for our scene. We're now going to continue on with this and start setting ourselves up with a nice lighting. So, real quick, we're going to talk about what we have already in the scene, and I'm just going to zoom into the middle part over here to see that we have well directional lighting. We have the skylight. And I just realized that the outliner was upside down for me. So let me just put this back by clicking and holding and then dragging it. I can move this around. So going back to this skylight and volumetric Cloud. All of these can be enabled and disabled just like that to see what exactly we have inside of our scene. So that's pretty good. When it comes to the lighting setup, we will also need one more extra thing out of this entire setup. Keep in mind that all of this for organization's sake is already placed in a lighting folder, and we can open this and close this folder down like that. Everything is going to be nicely positioned. So one more extra thing that we need to think is the post processing volume. And this will help us to get the lighting a little bit better. So if you click on this button on the upper section, we can search for post processing, like so and then click and drag and drop it into our scene. Right away, I'm just going to right click onto this object selection and scroll down within this massive menu and find move too. And then whilst we are hovering over, we're going to select lighting. And this way, it puts this post process volume into the lighting folder just like that. That way we can have a nice control over the entire thing. Anyway, why we need this post process volume? Well, by default, real engine has exposure set to be automatic to have a certain eye correction for the scene. When we are making general lighting scenes, that's quite all right. But if we're doing more of night scenes, that's going to give us more problematic setup because we want some harder shadows. We want the darker setups. So for that, we're going to make sure we have the post process volume selected then within the detail stab, we're going to scroll down until we find exposure tab. Within exposure tab, we're going to change the metric mode from auto exposure to manual. And then we're going to change well exposure compensation. I think that's what it is. The fault tab is quite small, but yeah, exposure compensation. By moving this up and down, we can have a completely different type of look, and nothing is going to happen because I totally forgot about one more tiny thing. And that would be that by default, this post processing is not going to affect the entire world, and your camera would need to be going inside of the setting inside of the box for it to be actually affecting your well viewpoint and everything you see. In order to make sure that it affects the whole world, what we need to do is we need to select this post process volume and then search for infinite. So infinite extent or in brackets unbound. If we have this selected, then this entire post processing is going to start showing up for the entire world. We can now hit delete on the search bar and go back to the exposure setting, and then we can just play around with this value to get brighter and darker result. However, for the night scene, it's not just simply, you know, darkening down the setting. This is not going to look quite as nice for a night scene, and there is a little bit more to the overall settings than just making the scene a little bit darker. So we're going to explore a little bit in regards to that in terms of what exactly makes a night scene a night scene. I'm going to increase the exposure by a little bit for now because we're going to firstly talk about other options. And first things first, directional lighting. We have this option over here at the very top. If we were to select it, we're going to have lux intensity set at six, which is great for sunlight over here. But if we want more of a moonlight, we're going to need to change this up a little bit. So sunlight is going to be much brighter, much more intense in terms of lux value, but the moonlight is actually going to be closer to a value of 0.7. If we were to change the intensity over here, it's going to give us this type of result already, which is looking well, darker up. Which is fair enough because our exposure is a little bit lower at the moment. The other thing I'd like to talk about is the direction of the directional light. Right now it's placed all the way at the top. But what we can do is we can use Control L to move this. So whilst holding this, we can use our mouse to go up and down. Oh, let me make sure I change up my direction of the camera like this. So we can use Control L and move it up and down to move the sun just like this. We can also go left and right to change the direction of it. And notice how the sun also gets well more of a orange type of color and whatnot. The reason for that is because we have a sky atmosphere. Sky atmosphere will change up the lighting parameters for a world of your scene to change as the sun position changes, you're going to have different absorption values of the lighting. And that's all fine and nice. We will want to make sure that the lighting that we're getting over like so when it's a little bit lower, it's going to be more of a bluish tint. I'm actually going to click one to make sure we go back onto our well, setup for the position of the scene, going to click Control L, reposition the sun like so, and now I'm going to switch up the color of the light. For that, we have option for the light color over here, right underneath the intensity. If we were to click on this box over here, we're going to get ourselves color picker. Using it, we can change the color just like that. And we also additionally to the color, we have the value over here, which will change up the brightness of it. But for now, all we need to know is that the value should be at the very top, and then we can change the brightness to be slightly bit of blue like so, and we can click Okay. Then once we get it, maybe a little bit more positioning, let me just put it something like. So once we get it, so we can grab directional lighting, and yeah, we're good with the directional lighting. We just need to make sure it's a little bit larger when it comes to the overall well, brightness of this, we are going to change the texture of the moon. But for now, we're just going to change up the size to make sure we're getting a nice overall shape. For us to change the size of the light, we can simply go on directional lighting and scroll all the way to the top where we see source light source angle. We can use this to, well, make it larger, smaller, all the way up to us. And we're going to make it a value of eight. That's reasonable size for such a stylized scene. If we have a look back on the reference, the moon is going to be quite large. So it is quite nice to have this source of light as a starting point. For the moon, although this is not going to be a sun and we're going to be changing up the texture later. It is a good starting point. Afterwards, we can go on the back on to our exposure just to increase the visibility. So let's go back on to where it there we go, post processing volume, and we can slightly increase this to a value of let's say 13 Yeah, that looks pretty good. So that way, we're getting ourselves a very nice bluish type of a tint with hard shadows. And honestly, when it comes to, well, basics of the setup, this kind of a look usually is, well, pretty good as a starting point for night scene. And that's what I tend to use most of the time, just changing up the I just realized that there's two player starts in our end. So let's go ahead and delete one and just keep the upper one, and I'm just going to place it in the scene, hit play, and now we're able to have a nice lighting or our scene. Now, let's go a little bit about why we did what we did. And the first thing is that if we go back on to referencing, we'll see the type of the setup that we have over here. What we want to ideally do when we're creating a night scene, looking at reference is lower down the brightness when it comes to an angle the light source is coming from to get those nice, hardened shadows. So darker spots would be quite, you know, dark and black and mysterious to create some interesting silhuettes, especially when we are facing the light source, that would be the ideal scenario. The other thing is that when we are lowering the intensity of the color, it's going to look a little bit lower saturation. Um, we are trying to mimic what a night scene would look like, to make it more believable and to make the perception, although visible, like in this shot over here, we still want to make it seem like it's not entirely day scene. It would be more of a night scene. This still needs to do some work with the post processing and whatnot, but as a basic light, that is quite nice. The thing is, when we are viewing something darker, our eyes naturally adjust to the darker environments, and we end up seeing the same scene as we would in day if there's enough of light source. But the amount of perceivable color that we would see would be way less. So that's why it would seem more or less saturated, less color in your scenes. In terms of a blue tint, that's commonly seen within night scenes, that's also really good to talk about is when we are seeing the night scene, it looks quite cold. It looks quite desolate. But the thing is that when we are seeing something in a light source that is way less of light intensity, or eyes tend to shift the color a little bit towards more perceivable visuals. That's why, even though technically the moon reflects the light of the sun and it should bounce off in the same manner, we see more of a blue tint because essentially our eyes shift up that perceivable light source, and in turn, we get that older look. Although when we look at the light source over here, it's going to be warmer because the light is a little bit quite more intense, let's say, and it gives off that warmer look from the fire. When it's mixed up with the light source of the moon, overall scene should look quite cold in comparison. And that's pretty much it. We're going to add in a fog as well to our scene to make sure we're able to well get more detail out of our environment forgot the setup. Again, though for now, this basic type of setup will allow us to get a very nice type of look out of our scene whilst not overdoing with the setup of the lighting. One thing I would like to say, though, is if you're not seeing the same type of outcome, you might potentially have a different look a quick little tip if you find the scene a little bit to be too dark for the moment, we can change the exposure without changing the lighting within the scene itself for just this viewpoint. If we go onto the perspective tab on the top, there is an option to use game settings. If we were to take this off, we have option to use lighting for just the exposure of this well, just this viewpoint. So we can use this to drag it upwards like this and we much lighter type of a scene which would help us with just overall perception and visualization of the environment. And once we are happy with placement and other stuff, we can just simply take this option back on and we'll get the lighting that we had previously. So that's going to be it from this lesson. Thank you so much for watching, and I will be seeing you in a bit. 9. Sculpt Terrain Elevation for Cinematic Landscape Composition: Hello, welcome back everyone to On real Engine five stylized night environment, VFX lighting, foliage and landscape design. In the last lesson, we left ourselves off with more of a natural night lighting type of setup. So now we can continue on with our environment. And this time, we're going to continue on with the terrain design. So we're going to go onto this button over here onto the little tab and select landscape. By default, when we're first creating the landscape, it's going to give us options for what kind of setup we want out of our grid, the base of our well, terrain. And we have options for scale, and we have options to change up this grid quadrants and all of that setup. But honestly, the default setting for what we want is going to work quite well. So all we need to do is just make sure that we're creating a new and we are going to just simply click Create. So let's go ahead and do that. Let's click Create, and it's going to set ourselves up with this sort of a terrain. Now, what kind of a terrain is this? Well, the terrain will allow us to create height values, essentially for a scene. And we can use the sculpt button over here to either raise this value like so, or while folding shift, we're able to lower this down just like that. And that's essentially it. We have other options for the tools, which we're going to slightly touch up. But the most important part is that this is using height Map, meaning that we're only able to go up and down with the terrain tool. Not able to, in our sculpting software to just move the setup sideways or anything of that sort. We're only able to move it up and down. So in order to erase this, we can either use eraser tool, which will allow us to erase all of this data that we previously created or we could use a tool called flatten, but we'll have plenty of chance to work with this option well, now, though, let's go ahead and think about the overall design for this scene. So going back on to our references, we have this nice little reference for the height of our hills, and we have all of these values. So we can make use out of that. First things first, though, we can use a sculpt tool to kind of lower everything around this area or where we have our ruins. To just somewhat of a reasonable setup, something like that. And then we can consider where the camera would be for the cam site. If we click one, it's going to be, well, quite low, actually. So we can, for example, lower this down and see where it would look like, and there we go. We at least now have a camera where it's not going into the terrain itself. So that's a good start. Of course, we're not quite done with the setup. We now need to consider the values of the rest of the rain essentially. So, going back to these values over here, this value was set as default zero because it's the point where we were having the zero axis of the world and where we had this entire gray box for our ruins. In terms of the setup over here for Little Hill, it's minus 885 meaning that if we now go onto the FlatenTol we have latin target. If we were to enable this, we have options. And by just simply clicking on WO Mouse and using minus 885, we're going to Oh, minus 885. There we go. Clicking Enter. We're going to get ourselves a grid slightly visible underneath the map, which will show the exact height that this mountain was supposed to be within our reference. So it's a nice little functionality for this setup, which will allow us to get exact same values as I had in this scene. In our life for well structuring this entire environment much, much easier. I'm going to click one once more and just kind of reposition my camera perhaps a little more, a little closer, just to see how it would look like. And yeah, okay. So I think a little bit closer. So now I'm just looking at how close this setup is in comparison and actually is much, much closer, something like this. Yep, that seems much better. Our previous camera was way, way too far off in the distance. So having it something like this will be much better. We can also click F 11, by the way, to go into full scale view. That way we can actually see the entire 16 by nine resolution and to see a wide screen. Yeah, this one was too far away. Something like this would be much better. And we can now click and hold and just tap it on our surface to determine where the setup would be. And let's say a mountain over here will be much, much nicer, something in here. I'm going to click Control one to kind of reposition my camera. So now we can go back onto it. And I'm going to kind of flatten this out a little bit just to make sure that we're getting a nicer setup, going to double check how close it is to the edge of this terrain, which is not too much something around. This will be quite right. And now we can just simply click one, see again the distance. Again, we're going to add a little bit of additional detail afterwards. We're now just checking to make sure that the original mountain is going to be over here. Then we're going to have another mountain on the back. But I would say we're going to make a brush much, much larger. So using brackets square brackets, we can make it larger or smaller. Or alternatively, we can go back onto our landscape view by clicking F 11 and changing the brush size over here. So what I'm doing right now is just making sure that I have this area all the way around just a little bit lower down. We're going to fix it later with the rest of the setup. But I would say that makes it a lot more workable with the entire layout. And then we can determine where the rest of these values would be. So if we were to go onto this section over here, we have some human references as well in this section. So we have a bit of a ravine over here, which would be at say, in this section. Yep, over here. You can use the scalp brush to make the brush much, much smaller. And then holding shift, I can just get a quick result. I'm going to go ahead and turn off the game settings just to kind of see a little more on what it's looking like and something like this as a base will be much, much better. So just like that, we're able to get somewhat of a similar look to what we have over here. So it's already shaping up pretty nicely. Next up is going to be a mountain in the background. I'm going to go ahead and check real quick. This needs to be lower down so we could actually see what's going on behind these parts. There we go. Now we're seeing what's in the background. And the next one will be a mountain on slightly left side for this section over here, and that is going to be two, three, five, so slightly taller than what we have over for the ruin. So let's go ahead and use the platin tool. Changes to two free pipe, like so we can see the grid being like this. I'm going to go back onto the camera that we had previously and just kind of slightly set it up, so it would be slightly to the left of our entire position of the composition, the camera setup. Let's say it's a little bit, well, if the center is somewhere around here, it's going to be a little bit of the middle section of the left. So okay, we can do that. We can click F 11 to make sure that we're having anti scammer setup. So somewhat center. And I'd say over in this section over, like so, that would be our mountain. I think that yeah, that will do quite well, actually. Maybe it needs to be a little bit further. Let me have a look. I think it does need to be a little bit further. So over like so, and I'm going to use eraser just to kind of erase the rest of the Oh, not eraser. We're going to use platin This time, we can use this pipette option over here and just tap on the lowest section. And that way, we can use this as an eraser in comparison to where the lowest ground is. Like so so we have a bump over here in comparison to the setup. Although looking back at this, I think it does need to be just a little bit closer. Yeah. I think the first time I used it was quite a bit alright. If we have a look at this setup, we have basically kind of same distances from this to this mountain and then this to this, and then a bit of a zigzag essentially onto our main focal points. So I'll try to get it a little bit close in comparison to the distance from this to here, and I think that will be a little bit better. So we have a setup over here, and the next one should definitely be let's have a look a little bit more. Should be over here. Yeah, definitely closer. All right, we can do that. We can just select this back, and I can just click on the top surface over here, then just kind of get it like so and even closer, let's say, like this there if we're going now, it's growing a little bit taller, exactly what we want out of this setup. Keep in mind that we're going to have also some trees as well to kind of help us break down the surface. All we're doing now is just making sure that the humps themselves are well, a little bit nicer of a setup. And I'm just going to flatten this back a little bit just to kind of see the general shape of this. Again, I'm not really interested in the overall shape of the mountain at this point. I'm just checking if the hump itself is nicely placed up. And I think, honestly, that looks quite nice. That looks quite alright. So we have a setup over here like Solic. So let me just have a quick look again over on this section. It looks quite alright, and the one in the back is going to be minus 450. So let's go ahead and do that. We're going to go click F 11. And we're going to select the value minus 450, like so and then a bit of a zigzag, and it should be somewhere in this section over, so I'm just going to check for the value over here. So this is the mountain in this area. This is the tallest peak, so slightly a bit more to the left. So yeah, right over here, I'd say it a little bit more to the left. I'm just going to flatten this part out, and there we go. I think we're having some nice peaks. Now, once we have general locations of such peaks, this area, this area, this area, and this area, we can start working around those sections and we lower everything else down. Let's go ahead and check the area for the lowest parts on here. We can just grab a general setup and then work our way in terms of adding terrain detail afterwards. I would say we can go on, well, back onto the landscape, grab a little bit of a lower value over here. I say, we can lower this down just a little bit. So holding shift, I'm just going to lower it down just a little bit more. Like, so I think that's quite right. Let's use flatten with the pipette and just select the value something like this. And now we can just simply, well, erase everything else from our setup. So we'd have those main islands for composition shot. Then we can work from there. And once we go around our setups just like that, we can later work with the general setup. This area is going to be for a mountain. Yep. Just going to double check. Yeah. This seems like nice curves. Just going to check in 16 by nine setup. Just for the sake of it, I'd like to change the game setting to this to make sure that the exposure is going to look right. Also, if you're not liking the what's it called the game icons visible or post processing box and such, we can click G to hide all of those game icons like so, and now we can properly see and visualize the composition. We can then click G to go back out of it to again, see these icons, click F 11, and we're able to now see back to what we had previously. All right, so once we have this general setup, let's so L So we can now go ahead and well, erase a little more of it. So start making the brush larger, larger, larger, and just erasing everything else. Afterwards, we can start adding some humps and bumps in a bit. But for now, let's just make sure that we're having those main sections properly set up with our flattened and everything else can be, well, added in later. So once we have this section, we can just erase everything else from existence in terms of the height value, lowering everything else down just like that. Quick and nasty type of way. And in the next lesson, we can continue on with this. Of course, to make sure that we are having a little bit of a nicer type of a setup when it comes to, well, these chunky type of mountains and hills that we're having. So let's just make sure that we are lowering everything down just like that. We don't need to be super clean. You know, some humps and whatnot are okay. We're going to come back to all of that in a bit, but the main height needs to be lower down just to make sure that we're not losing any of the main section or our composition. So yeah, we got ourselves the main parts for the mountains. We're now going to continue on with them to make sure that they're looking a lot better instead of the hums that we're having right now. So that's going to be it for me. Thank you so much for watching, and I will be seeing you in a bit. 10. Sculpting Jagged Paths and Stepped Platforms: Hello, welcome back everyone to Unreal Engine five, stylized night environment, VFX, lighting, foliage, and landscape design. I'm going to go ahead and go onto Perspective tab and just tick off the game setting. So that way, we can have a better view of our landscape. And now we're going to go ahead and, well, go back on to the landscape setup. So, first things first, what I like to do with this kind of design is make sure that we don't have any of the edges that are just straight at the very end. The reason being is that even if we have a specific camera shot and whatnot, it's still better to just kind of get rid of those sharp edges on our horizon just in case anything happens. So the best way for us to do that would be to use noise texture. If we have this selected by default, the noise will allow us to use noise mode for both adding and subtracting and if we start dragging, we can see the type of a setup we're going to get. So just like that, we're able to get some variation, although I'm going to click Control Z and perhaps lower the scale. So where would that scale the strength be? There we go. Tool strength, we can set this up to be 0.1, and that way, when we are using it across so, we're able to get some interesting results just like that. And we don't need to do it too much. We just need to make sure that we're able to break this down like so, and we're getting some, well, more unique type of results and shapes out of the back just like that. And yeah, we're able to get ourselves nice results. If we want more variation, what we can do is we can increase the scale over here, and that would allow us to have more intensity for, well, those bumps going up and down and whatnot. But honestly, the default setting is, well, quite all right. You can see now the difference that we're having is looking much, much better. Now, the other thing that we would need to do is going back to the setup over here. We would need to set ourselves up well with better a design for those mountains and whatnot, for all the ridges. First things first, I'd like to go back onto the selection mode, grab the mannequin that we had previously. Like, so and let's see. Yeah, we're just going to go ahead and click W, hold Alt and move this onto the side that way. It creates a duplicate, and we're able to place it on the ground. We can hit home key, sorry, key on our keyboard that just plunks it down onto the ground. Like, so in that way, we're able to see the overall size and scale of the setup. And I would say that, yeah, looking at this, the reference for a human is a little bit smaller, so I'm going to just reposition the camera a little bit. Click F 11 to kind of have it over, so that way, we have this mannequin a little bit better position. Oh, let's just make sure it's not on the ground. Something like that. I'm just again, checking with this reference shot, making sure that the size of the human is somewhat similar to over here, and I think that is looking much much better. So now I'm going to go ahead and just reposition my camera a little bit, maybe a little bit higher up, like so more of the skies visible. Very nice. Clicking Control O. That way, we have a better camera. At this point, we can remove this platform over here that we had previously because we're not using it if it for a gray box. So and then we can start thinking about, well, this platform over here, how can we get more of a normal looking platform going from the entrance onto the exit? Well, a quick way for that would be using the landscape tool called Ramp. Ramp is a very nice option allows us to well create one point over here, and we can tap on another point, and it gives us this type of setup. We can also go back, click on the previous point and just realign the way we want. And once we get the right type of result, should be a little bit smaller, something like this. Once we get right type of result, what we can do is just we can simply click Add Ramp, which is going to give us an attire. So my software has crashed while doing this operation. It happens every once in a while. Let's go ahead and just slightly redo this step. I'm going to reposition my gizmos a little bit, like so. And once I'm happy with the result, we can also change up the with a little bit if we want to honestly, the default one is quite right. We're going to click ADRM and there we go. Hasn't crashed. I am very happy about it, so that's very nice. I'm also going to click one just to make sure that the ramp is not too much, which I think it is. Looking at the reference over here, it's a little bit more of a steeper type of result in comparison to this. So I'm going to click Control and Z and just select this a little bit, bring this back a little more. Click Adamp and see the result, and I'm much happier with this. Alright, now that we have something like so we can play around with Latin tool because honestly flatten tool is such a helpful option to make use out of because you're able to well, control the placement of your setup quite nicely. We're going to take off flatten target, and this will start giving you a brush that behaves completely different to what we had before. Now the flattened target is off, meaning that when we click on a specific point, it's going to be that flattened target by default. If I was to click on the center point of this and start holding it, it's going to keep that flattened target as such. That's quite useful because when we're using it from the bottom over here, I can start a little bit higher up over here. And with a tool strength of 0.1, I can just start tapping it and I go slightly lower, and then it starts creating a sort of a path. And using that, we can, well, create ourselves like a nice little zigzag that goes up the mountain. We don't need to be super accurate or something. It might just look like an abandoned path, and I think that's more than enough for the setup, although I'm going to click Control Z, and I'm going to make this a little bit smaller or a brush and just like that, I'm going to start carving out this into, like, a sort of a zigzaggy path for people to get up to. And usually I start off from the top and just kind of, like, go downwards. And again, just a basic type of a path. Nothing too complicated. We can also bring in our little human reference because that's going to be quite helpful for perceiving how high, how tall and how steep this place is. I'm just going to place it right in here, like so, and now going back to the landscape using the sculpt, we're able to, well, make some nice path. Just like that and just like that. So I am hpping multiple times basically until I get the desired result. Sometimes I go up higher a little bit and then start dragging it outwards, sometimes from the bottom a little bit. And whilst doing this kind of process, we really need to be considering how the positioning of the mouse initially affects the overall setup. So for example, if over here I want this to be a little bit outwards, I start off with the top a little bit and then drag it outwards. I want to be lower down, I start with a lower placement and then kind of, like, drag it inwards, and then it carves into this setup, like so. And just like that, we're able to get well, nice reasonable nice setups, just like that. So a little bit of this aggi pattern more than enough for something like so. And just like that, we are able to get ourselves a nice little pattern like so. And something over here. And just like that, a path to our ruins. So it's going to look quite right on this edge. We might need to carve into some of the parts over here just to make sure we break down this overall shape. It's going to be barely visible, but even so I think it's quite nice. Perhaps we can just bring out this shape a little more. And all in all, there we go. Nice, little shape overall. Alright, so that's the basic setup. Of course, we have a lot more to cover. So I think we can do that a little bit over here. We can also use something called smooth, which will allow us to well smooth out this sharp setup, another great tool. And just like that, we're able to get well, some smoothing out edges. Over here, we can use flatten to kind of help us break down this overall shape a little bit into multiple parts. So here I'm having more like free, more like free platform. So one on top and one on the side, and here at the bottom to kind of again, help us break down this overall pattern just like that. And in terms of the shape over here, when we look at it from this distance, I think it's quite alright, although we could just break it down a little bit even more, like so and all in all, that's quite good. Our sides, I'm not too concerned about it because I'm not going to show it too much, but we can also use the flatten tool to kind of help us break this shape up a little bit into nicer patterns. So maybe a little bit of a higher section over, like, so maybe inwards, like, so just like that. And by playing around with just the flattened tool, we're able to get really, really nice type of shapes just like that. Over here, maybe I'll break this down a little bit more. Like so. And we can even increase the strength 0.3 now to kind of even speed up this process, like so, and dragging it from lower end, dragging it from higher end. It gives us some nice elevation in a variation for this section. Just like that, I'm going to check the camera, make sure it doesn't affect the composition too much. But speaking of composition, we can basically use this elevation tool to also get, well, more interesting elevation over here. So by just grabbing it from higher sections, we can just play around with it and just, you know, build it up a little bit, take it down a little bit, something something like so, and get some really nice, unique shapes. And honestly, that's quite right. In terms of the back, we can also play around with some noise, but I just realize we are running out of time, and I would like to spend a little bit of extra time, well, sculpting these mountains out in the background because they're going to be quite important for the overall silhouette of the setup. So that's going to be it for me. Thank you so much for watching, and I will be seeing you in a bit. 11. Erosion and Hydro Tools for Realistic Mountain Shapes: Hello, and welcome back Everyon to Unreal Engine five stylized night environments, VFX, lighting, foliage, and landscape design. In the last lesson, we went over mainly the use of flattened tool and Ramp tool as well as a smooth tool. Now we're going to continue on sculpting process and get ourselves a little bit of a nicer design out of these mountains that we're having over here. So what's happening with them well, can start off by getting the flatten tool, actually, we can just make use out of it to kind of help us break down these shapes a little more so we don't need to worry about it going, you know, higher than the mountain is. We can just break down the elevation to get more organic looking shapes by just clicking in between the mountain on top of the mountain and just outside of the mountain. And just by doing that, we're able to well, get some nice variation out of this entire setup just like that manually sculpting it what exactly we want. And whilst looking at the main composition, we're also considering, well how the elevation is over here, for example. And just like that, we're able to, well, get some more unique and interesting type of shapes just like that. And for now, that's going to be quite right. When we're adding material, perhaps we might need to adjust some little bit of tweaking for the slopes, mainly because we're going to be setting up somewhat of an automated material system, which will create cliffs on the slopes of those mountains. But looking at this is quite right. I would like to now go on to yet another tool or two tools, to be honest. Erosion and hydro. These tools really help to get more organic type of look out of a situation for when we have those landscapes, all of that nice setup. We're able to make use out of hydro and erosion to well, simulate erosion and hydro as it says. But in terms of technicality, they're basically applying certain noise and just kind of wver down the already existing height data to give us well, more organic outcome. So most of the time I will use hydro if I was just to increase this and just click and hold, we'll notice what it does. It essentially smooths it out a little bit with some averaging out information, and that's going to well, give us a very nice setup. The erosion on the other hand, if I was just to make this brush quite a bit larger, you can see that it kind of drags everything down, and the noise or the setup is going to be quite more organic or larger mountain pieces. I prefer to use this but when it comes to well, basic landscapes itself where there is more grass and stuff, for this area, for example, I would try using it the hydro setup, and that gives us a nice way to break down some of this shape a little bit, just like that. Now, in terms of erosion, we can just use it over here and just kind of tap it a little bit. In certain areas where we don't think much detail is needed. In other areas, we can even click and hold. So, for example, over here, we can click and hold, and then it starts eroding, especially on level pieces. It's quite nice, actually. So we can get ourselves well, somewhat of an interesting looking detail. I would recommend you not to overuse it. And if you want for areas like this, for example, we can use where would be noise mode from lower. We can use both. That way, it gives us that extra detail whilst at the same time not changing the location of the placement too much. So we're able to just tap tap, tap tap up and get some more unique results. I just realized it went to selection mode for some reason, we just go back on the landscape. There we go. And I can just use erosion with noise set to both and just kind of get some great results. So over here maybe would be pretty good as well. Just the very, very on setup. I think that's quite right. And maybe a little bit over here just to kind of break down the shape a little bit. I think that's quite all right. Yeah, it looks perfect. G to click F 11, just to make sure the design is quite nice. Now, this mountain over here, let's go ahead and start with flatten because I really like this tool and it just helps me nicely shape what I want. I'm seeing some highlights, and I'm just going to click G. There we go that fixes it. That's quite alright. So by clicking G, we're able to lower down this highlight. And now I'm just going to well, start clicking, making sure that this peak is the peak section. Same shape of a silhouette needs to be over here, so a little bit on the left side, slide drop on the right, and small peak over like so. And that's exactly what we're going to try to recreate. The peak is going to be at, say, let me have a look again. Yeah, the peak is a little bit off to the side, giving some space for the tent. So let's say this part over here, meaning that this should disappear, like so, and we can even erase it just like that. And again, drug in it from lower onto the higher part allows us to just essentially erase it. Going to make the brush quite a bit smaller. Start sculpting out this section to be a little bit sharper. So just a little bit sharpened up, like, so we don't need to be completely sharp, but just from this visual, there we go. A nice little sharp part, it right, maybe even more, actually. Like so. And then we can, well, use a little bit of a sculpt over here to kind of get this area a little bit higher up maybe, a little bit, like so, we can go back on to the flatten tool and then slightly just, you know, flatten this section, just like that. And this side is looking quite right. I'm quite happy with this result. This side, on the other hand, needs a little bit of a way to break this up. So that way, we'd have its own peak at the very end, yep, that will be quite right. And of course, we can spend as much time as we want, as much time as we need. No need to rush. All is okay in terms of the setup. But once you get a general shape, what you can do is then build around this shape itself, you know, make sure it looks more fitting as a design. So just breaking it in, going from higher setup, from lower setup and just using the flatten tool to well, get a nice, unique shape. And once we're happy with it, we can, again, go back to hydro to erosion to kind of mix those two in a little bit to get more unique deep shape. There we go. Erosion on the end might be quite nice. It really helps with the slopes, especially since it doesn't get those sharp parts. So that might be quite nice over here, especially, like so. But then we can also go back onto the flatten tool and kind of flatten certain parts just to get back some of that steepness because when we are going to have our own terrain material, it's going to help us highlight these sections. So something like that is pretty good where it has multiple levels and whatnot, really helps to bring out niceness out of the design. And honestly, I think that's quite right. We got to sell a nice mountain. This part, I'm worried that it might be a little bit too high up. I'm going to slightly shave it off or at the very least the front of it, and then just slightly lower this down. There we go. Nice. Now I like it. Perfect. I think the overall design is pretty good. Let's have a look at it from the perspective of, well, lower down exposure. And yeah, it's looking quite nice. It's very good. Alright. We got ourselves nice little chunky mountains or hills in the background. We can also add a little bit of erosion over here. I would honestly recommend mixing it up with some noise, so a bit of noise, like so as a starting point, just quick quick taps, like so throughout this section. Nothing too much, just a little bit like so. And by doing that, when we are using erosion, it's going to give us even nicer details. So afterwards, we can just click and hold and then drag across even with a higher strength point heat even, I would say, let's go ahead and drag this down. I would say noise mode can be set to lower. We don't want to increase the foliage too much. So by just doing it, so you can see the type of result that we're getting. I'm making sure I'm not touching anything in the middle, though, the parts in the back, making sure we're getting some really, really nice type of detail route. And I think that would be all. I would also lower maybe a little bit over here. This part as we get closer, it looks quite nice. And I just realized we lost some bit of detail over here. So real quick, I will go and fix this up because I think I touched it up a little bit too much in this section. That's right, though. Let's go ahead and just do a couple of quick fixes. There we go. Oh, the flatten tool is too strong. It is very, very strong. Let's go ahead and lower this to point free and just kind of oh, still too strong. Let's go over it to 0.1. And there we go. More manageable, way more manageable setup. Like so, making sure that we're having just a little bit of that tail. And just like that, we're going to be quite alright. Okay, so that's going to be it from this lesson. Thank you so much for watching. And I will be seeing you in a bit. 12. Creating Layered Landscape Materials with Texture Blends: Hello and welcome back everyone to on Reel Engine five, stylized night environment, BFX, lighting, foliage, and landscape design. Now that we have ourselves a nicely modeled type of terrain, we can make use out of it. Let's go onto the selection mode and start working well with the material itself. To start off, we're going to begin by going onto the content drawer. We're going to just simply right click on an empty space and select material. We can call this landscape material. Like so now we're going to double click on it. And we get ourselves into the graph material shader. Within it, it's a two D interface of a graph. We can use a right mouse button, right mouse button to move around. Mouse wheel to go up and out of the setup, and that's the basics that we need to know for this moment. We can straight up start by changing this material to not use a conventional material setup, but instead to use a material attribute. If we select this, it's going to be highlighted in orange. Now we can go into its detail stab on the bottom left hand side and use material attributes. Once we click on it, the material will change to be a single piece, meaning that it requires just a single input. This single input, all of the time will basically be make material attributes. Over here, it turns the convential PBR material into a material attribute which then can be connected onto the setup. But we're not going to connect it just yet because we need to set ourselves up with something to be used for a landscape. To use landscape setup, what we need to use is going to be landscape layer blend. So this one over here, landscape layer blend. Let's go ahead and click on it. It's going to give us a real nice type of a node, which we can then use in the detail staff if it's selected to create new layers. So we're going to start off by creating two new layers like so, and it gives us Index zero and Index one. And within it, we can change the name of the setup. So for this particular one, we're going to make a setup for green layer name, and the other one can be yellow. And once we click Enter, you'll notice that layer naming changes over here as well. And by default, that's what we're going to use to test out the setup of the landscape. So I'm going to select this, use Control C, Control V to make a duplicate. And now we're going to attach one to yellow and another one to green. And to make sure we have some well, ability to differentiate between those two, we can click and hold free on our keyboard and then just tap on the graph, like so. And this will give us vector free, which is also used for coloring. So once we have the selected, we can go onto this box over here and change this to yellow, like so and attach this to base color. I'm going to do the same thing for green as well. So I'm touching it to base color and changing this to green. Click Okay. And now we have two different colors basically for make material attributes, which we can then connect it to the landscape material at the very end. We can then hit Control Shift in S to save it out, make sure that everything is saved at the bottom right hand corner. It says all saved, and I'm going to now close this down real quick. It's going to ask if we want to make changes and whatnot. We can click, and now it's going to go back onto the previous viewport setup, which will have the content drawer for landscape material. This landscape material can be now applied onto our landscape. So once we have the landscape selected, we can scroll down until we get where is it material so there we go landscape material. We can just simply have this selected. And once we have selected, we can just click on this button over here, use selected acid from Content Browser, and this will apply the landscape material. And right away, it's going to give us complete ***** blackness. What is going on? Well, we need to create some weight paint information. Which will be used as a mask. So for us to do that, we need to go on to landscape. And landscape now has also another option within its stab. It's called paint. If we were to click on paint, we'll see that, hey, there are some at the bottom target layers. Right now, there's nothing here. So what's going on? Well, we can click on this button over a year to create layers from Assad materials. And because we have this applied, it's going to create those layers for yellow and green. Then we click on this, we're going to see that both are set to none. We need to create new weight blended layer information. So let's go ahead and create it. It's going to create a folder for us with layer info. Let's just go ahead and create one. And let's just create another one for this one as well. Click Save, and there we go. We're going to get landscape layer information within this folder, which was created by default once we click Save. So shared assets. There we go. Let's go ahead and click on this bottom again to make sure we save everything or use Control shiftiness. And now we have the weight information selected, and with it, we can select yellow, and we can start painting, and now it starts refreshing and here we go. We start getting some information about our setup. We can also click on green and also click on it to get green color. So that way, using the wet paint information, we can blend in textures onto our landscape. And that's the basis of landscape material creation. Once we have something like that, we are able to move on to creating some of a little bit more advanced material setups. So let's go back on to the material and see what else we can create out of it. Now, in order for us to well, create PBO materials, we have some options. We can go click Control and space on our keyboard and go open ourselves up with the content browser within the material stab. Now we can go onto content and select textures. Then we have dirt, grass, stone, and yellow grass. We're going to set all of them onto our make material attributes. So let's go ahead and actually make uh, hit Control C, Control B four times to make four of those. And then once we have them set up, we're going to be able to make use out of it within our setup. So first things first, it's going to be dirt. Let's go ahead and just grab everything and place it into our scene. Like so then we can just move it around until we get all of them nicely laid out for the setup. Like so. I'm actually just going to move this off to the side, just like that so we can have more separation. All right. So once we click on the texture sample, we can see on the left hand side what kind of texture it's using if we scroll down. So this one is going to be, well, ambient occlusion. Let's find Amber occlusion within here, which is going to be this one over here. Then it's going to be dirt. Let's attach it to a base color. This is the only one that's brown, so that's the easiest one. This is going to be a height, which is going to be used as displacement. However, before we use it as displacement, we are going to drag it onto an empty field and search for multiply. Like this, we're going to select multiply. The reason we're using multiply and then attaching it to displacement is because by default, a value of one would be way too much for something like dirt. Using a value of one point, sorry, 0.2 would be much better. Afterwards, we have ourselves the height, sorry, normal, which is going to be attached over here. And finally, this is going to be roughness, which is going to be attached over like so. So that way, we have ourselves material attribute for this setup. We're going to do the same thing for a grass as well. So let's find yet another setup and connect this too, if we go back on to our textures, to grass. So let's go ahead and grab this whole entire piece, and again, let's just reassemble it real quick, like so, and we are going to have ourselves a nice little line that we can now just quickly reattach it so this one ambit occlusion. So this one is the only one with color, so base color. This one is the only one, well, not only one, but this one is a height. So it can be used over here, displacement. Then this one is normal. So let's go ahead and attach it to a value for normal. And finally, roughness value. Let's attach it to roughness, just like that. And honestly, we can just try to replace it as a starting point for yellow and green just to see how it behaves as landscape material. So we're going to go ahead and delete these ones that we had previously and just quickly reattach the setup for yellow layer and for green layer. So the end of the sockets, we're just touching it, like so one more thing. If you ever mess it up with the socket, just use Control and you can hold it and just take it off from a socket, just like that. So in case you're making a mistake, you can easily fix it. And once you have it attached, like so you can hit Control Shift in S, make sure it's all saved up. Now, if you go back onto the material landscape mode, still not showing up as the right material. What's going on? Well, let's try just closing this down. There were going out, popping up with, Hey, would you like to save this? Yes, please, let's go ahead and save it. And once we save it, it's going to refresh, and there we go. We got ourselves grass and we have ourselves the dirt. Of course, this is not acceptable. We still have a long way to go because everything in terms of the pattern setup is still not up to par. How can we break up this seems? How can we break up this pattern? We're going to learn everything about it, continuing on with the next lesson. So thank you so much for watching, and I will be seeing you in a bit. 13. Breaking Texture Repetition with Noise Based Material Blending: Hello and welcome back over on to On reeelEngine five stylized night environment, FX sliding, foliage and landscape design. In the last lesson, we left ourselves off with a very basic type of a setup which allows us to well, go and use different materials for dirt and grass. We're now going to go over certain different techniques for, well, making sure that we're not having this repetition visible in our seems. So first things first, let's hop onto our material and talk a little bit about one thing, which would be beneficial for us. And that thing would be simply scaling the texture. We can use something called if we were to right click, something called texture coordinate. This little node over here. And by default, we could select it and use on the left hand side its details for UV tiling. If we were to change this from one to something like four, for example, it would be four times smaller, or if we were to use something like 0.1, it would be the size of the original like 10%, the size of this one, which would also benefit our setup. So we could either use this tylingO if we want to have a little more control, we can set this material up to be a material instance instead. Material instance means that instead of just using this material, which is often called master material, it would allow us to change parameters that would be directly affecting the scene without the need to constantly save out this material every time we're trying to change certain parameters. So for us to do that, we simply can hold S and tap on our a left mouse button on our graph and then have the name for this to be scale graphs. So then we can hold and tap on a graph and get ourselves a multiply node, and connecting both of them would give us multiplication for both the U and V at once because this is actually a vector two. So U and V would be basically two parameters, and they're going to be scaled up by one single value. So we can change this to a value 0.1 by default, and then we would need to connect every single one of those texture samples, and right away, we can see it changing in our texture area just like that. So we just need to make sure that we're connecting every single one of them just like that. Now, once we hit Control Shift and S to save we should be able to see it over here. I'm going to actually close this down because, again, we just need to make sure we save this by clicking. Now it updates it, and now we're going to have a much, much larger type of a grass textion. Of course, if it is a texture, maybe the grain itself might be a little bit too large and whatnot, so it might not always work this type of solution for our setup. Also, going back to the setup of the parameters, what we have over here, if I were to click this pattern over here, like so, have a material. To change this into material instance, we can right click on the material and choose create material instance. So this way, we have ourselves, well, the material instance of our landscape. And now with this selected, I can hit Control and space and just click on this button over here to change this hopefully to landscape material underscore instance. So that's the important part that this is changed. Now, if I was to double click on the material instance. I have on the right hand side, a global scalar parameter values. We can open the step up, click on this tick box over here, which will now allow us to change this parameter. And by simply upscaling this or downscaling this, we can adjust the parameter value just like that. So straight off the bat, we don't need to oversave the master material or whatnot. We can do some tweaking like so. Well, the sake of this setup, we're just going to keep it as a value of 0.1, because it works quite well for this particular environment. Now, an alternative thing of what we can do with the setup if we were to go onto the material instance, now within the material instance, we can select parent over here, double click on it, and it's going to give us back onto the well, material graph that we have mastered material. We can hit Control Shift and just to make sure we're saving everything because I noticed at the top on the tab, it had an asterisk, meaning it wasn't saved. But now because we saved it, we can see at the bottom, all saved and the asterisk on the tab next to the name is missing, where if I was to make a quick change like so, or let's say, copy paste, like so, now, what else can we do with this? Well, the other way of making sure that the tiling noise is not as visible so over here, don't worry about this part in the back because if you start filling it up with a specific weight of layer, it will update itself. Right now, we don't have anything, so that's why there's no information for it, and for that reason, it's just black. We're going to go back to it in later. Now let's just focus on this pattern over here. How can we additionally fix this? Well, another way of fixing it would be to make use out of certain noise overlay. So what I mean by noise is if we were to right click and search for texture sample, like so, we can have ourselves texture image just like we had with the import, except now if I was just to make this a bit bigger and actually, we'll take off the substrate material over here since we're now using it to get more view out of our graph. There we go, because this is going to get more complicated. Alright, so now we have texture sample. What do we do with it? We don't have any images. Well, within Unreal engine, we have a couple of choices for noise. If we type in noise, we can see the variation of noises that we have, and we're looking for tiling noise 05. This should be within the Unreal engine itself and should be part of the choice for you to select basically. Now that we have a selection like this, we're just going to make sure we create a section, just like we had over here. We can even just copy this, actually. So let's go ahead and drag our box across, so using our leftmuse button, we can hit Control C, Control to make a hop paste for the texture coordinates, and we just want to change the name of this, which we can do so by clicking F two, and we can name this a green caras. Noise scale, just like that. Because we renamed it, this duplicate is not going to be the same. If the parameters had the same name, then it would the value within an instance would affect both of them in the same way. So if we were to change one, the other would also change. That's why it's important to change the naming whenever we're creating parameter nodes. So anyways, we have this setup. This noise scale is going to be set as two, and we're going to attach it to the texture sample. So it's going to overlap nicely on our setup. And also we are going to, well, get ourselves yet another parameter. So let's hold S, tap on the screen, and create a name for green grass, noise, opacity. Whenever I'm creating the names, by the way, I'm making sure that if I'm working on the same shaded section, having the name setup be basically the same start because it's alphabetical order. So you notice that here is green grass scale, green grass noise opacity. In this case, however, it's scale grass because if we're having al material incidents over here, we can have all the scale parameters for different shaders at the top, and that just kind of makes it easier. Alternatively, there are options for additional ordering of the parameters. If we were to select the node, we could create a group over here for a parameter. So now it's set to none, but if we were to create a name for it, we'd be able to create small tabs that would help us organize it. In this case, we don't really need to, but feel free to do so as it might help with some organization for certain cases. Alright, so going back to this, we have green grass noise opacity. This one is going to be set as one by default one. Let's click Enter. There we go. Then we're going to hold M and tap, and then we're going to attach the upper section to A and bottom section to B. Essentially, we're multiplying by this value. So that way, we can, if needed, simply increase the value over here, and it's going to change whatever this is being used for masking to either lighten it up or darken it. This could technically be set up with the multiply for a base color to increase the performance. In certain cases, it might be better. But I personally realized that the tiling is also going to be visible with something like a normal, as well as the roughness value. So this tiling that we see, even if we change it up with the coloring, the pattern that we're seeing throughout the section, if we zoom out a little bit over here, maybe it's more visible this pattern, this pattern would still be quite visible because of the additional PBR information like normal or roughness and displacement and such. So we've not touched the displacement yet. Don't worry about it. We're going to get back to that. Uh, for now, let's go ahead and simply change up the coloring overlay using this mask. So this mask can be actually set up with a No material attribute. We're going to make a copy of this material attribute, and we are going to set this up with a black value, so we can also right click on this. Oh, just maybe I'm rushing too fast. I used I held free and just tapped on the screen, and that gave me vector free, which we can use for color. This color by default can be set as black, but we also would like to ideally use this as well, color parameter. So we can right click and convert this to parameter. We can now rename this so we can call this green grass, noise, color. And you can actually have spaces inside of this, like so I prefer not to. It just makes a little less hassle. And in the past, programs used to be a little more well picky with the spacing, especially encoding sections. So having no gaps and just having capitals, I just find it more useful as a personal preference. Plus, whenever we're having a smaller tab, more is able to fit in these texts. So just again, personal preference. Feel free to have spacing if wanted. The other one, the roughness, I think we can just set up the default value. We don't need to change this one to a 0.9, so it's going to be quite a rough, no reflection type of a value, like so. And then we're going to just combine this basic material with the material of the grass. Using something called blend material attribute. There we go. Blend material attribute will allow us to well combine A and B of these two material attributes. And Alpha is going to be this noise over here, which we can connect it like so, and now it's going to give us a nice little noise setup. So let's have a look at what we did. We're going to click Control Shift in S to make sure we save out or well, not yet. Sorry about that. We need to attach this to what we had for the grass, which is layer green, click Control Shift in S and save this or I guess we can use Apply. There we go. We can use this button over here to apply it. Usually, I just close it down and that makes sure that well, gives us the right setup. I'm just going to open up the material instance now. Move this window downwards, or if you have a second screen, don't be afraid to just move this window to another screen, makes it a little bit easier. So let's have a look at what we did. All right, so what we have over here? Well, we have noise opacity and noise opacity if we increase it over, like, so we can see that, he, it's overlaying noise. So if we set this to zero, we can see that, Hey, this is the default one. If we set this to start setting it up higher and higher, we're going to see the type of result that we're getting. Now, when it comes to scale, we can set this up to 0.5, for example, and see that this is what we're getting and the type of noise that we're overlaying. By playing around with this, we can essentially get ourselves very nice way of helping us break down this pattern, as you can see over here. Now the pattern is a bit different. So if I was to change the opacity to zero, this was the pattern of the grass, and if I was to change it to 0.3, let's say, or 0.8, make it a little bit more extreme, we're going to get ourselves this type of result. So just like that, we're able to break down the pattern. For this particular case, I think we're going to keep this scale grass of two. And noise opacity. Actually, we're going to change the scale of this grass to something more reasonable, so value of 0.6. There we go. We're going to change the opacity a little bit. So opacity itself, I think is quite right. The scale, however, can be way lower because we just want to make sure that when the pattern is being used in larger places with a background, it's not going to be quite as visible for the setup. So the scale, I just increase opacity just to make it more visible. The scale of this can be set to 0.06. I think that's going to be quite right. Or sorry, 0.006. There we go. So it breaks down these larger chunks. And of course, now opacity can be lower down two more reasonable amount, so back to 0.8, like so. And just like that, we're able to break it up even more. And, of course, let's not forget global vector parameter value, which is going to be the color that we had for the setup. So we could make it, for example, something like reddish, like so, or, you know, a bit of a darkish green something like this I think will work quite well. Let's click Okay, and there we go. It helps us break down not only the color, but also the noise. So if we have a look at certain aspects over here, so this is a little bit more flat. This is a little bit more chunky. That is exactly what we want. So that's going to be it from this lesson. Thank you so much for watching, and I will be seeing you in a bit. 14. Camera Based Grass Blending with Distance Blend Nodes: Hello. Welcome back eon to Unreal Engine five stylized night environment, VFX, lighting, foliage, and landscape design. We are now going to continue setting ourselves up with the landscape material. So let's go ahead and just go back onto the material instance, or the landscape, and, of course, open up the master material. Now, within it, we're going to start off by going back onto the landscape layer blend node and changing up some things. Those things will be, well, making sure that we have multiple arrays, not just two that we currently have. So let's create a couple more to make them four, and we are going to change up some of the names. So Uh, first things first, this layer green is going to be grass. We can just rename it real quick. So from green, we can just call it grass, like so to make it more easier to read because it's going to get more complicated with the node. We want to make sure we keep it as readable as possible to not overwhelm ourselves. The yellow was dirt. So let's just call it dirt, like so. Also going to have another layer, and that is going to be for Index two. So we can call this one grass, yellow and brackets. We can put auto because this is going to be an automatic setup using the slope, which we're going to come back to it in a bit and index three, actually, sorry, we will just go ahead and remove it. If we have too many of the items, what you can do is you can click on this arrow over here and select Delete, just like that. So now we have three items. Alright, we're going to move dirt a little bit higher up. We're going to move grass a little bit off to the side. That way, we're able to well, distinguish them a little bit better. And also, if we want, well to organize it even more, you can select the entire piece and click C on your keyboard to make a common frame. Here, we can call this one dirt, like so, and we can even change the color if we want to, well, distinguish it a little bit better. That is totally fine. Here, we can have it as a grass. So we can select this entire piece, click C and call it grass plus noise. Like so. That way, we'd have ourselves a nice indicator of what this is just like that. And we can even have a frame within a frame. So if I was to select this entire piece, hold Control to select frame, click C over here, and we can call this one noise. That way, we have a frame within a frame. If we want to delete the frame, we can just simply make a selection for it, click delete, and that would delete the frame. And yeah, that's pretty much it for organization. Let's go ahead and continue on with the layer grass yellow. So for this piece, let's grab an make material attributes like so, and we are going to start off with actually setting it up as a base color. The reason we're setting this up as a base color is because, well, we want to have some visualization for our piece. So we have this material attributes, and we're going to make a duplicate of the same piece. We're then going to hit three and just tap on the screen and make new base colors just like that. We're then going to make one color. I I two. There we go. Updated now and another one, another color. And now we're going to talk a little bit about blending materials based on a distance. So that's ano way of breaking up the landscape, what's it called? The pattern, making sure that it looks a little bit more organic. There is a very nice little node called distance blend. One over here, and this will allow us to blend the distance based on, well, the distance of a camera, how close, how far away the piece is. So let's go ahead and visualize what it does first, how it works. We're going to use blend material attributes for that. As always, it gives us an ability to mask these two pieces, and I'm just going to connect A and B to these two material attributes and distance blend to Alpha. Now, for blend range, what we can do is we can set ourselves up with two parameters. So hold S, tap on a screen, and this one is going to be a grass yellow distance range, and the other one is going to be grass Yellow, distance, start, offset. Hopefully, I wrote them correctly. Luckily, this is not a coding setup. We don't need to make sure that we don't have any of misspelling or anything of that sort. This is mainly for well, for us, just to make sure that we have certain reference to work with. So now that we have this, we can go ahead and connect this piece onto layer grass, yellow auto. And let's go ahead now and save this out, Control shift in S. And just to make sure it saves it out properly, I prefer to just close it, and then it asks me if I'd like to save it properly. Let's go ahead and click Save, and we're going to have, well, black material. The reason being is that we changed everything that this material instance had meaning that we need to go back onto the landscape and delete the layer data for these pieces, which had different weight information. Now we're going to go ahead and just click this button over here, and it's going to create us three new pieces. And right away, I'm just going to add weight to each one of them. I prefer that this wouldn't pop up, but it is what it is. Let me just go ahead and just click on every single one of them just like that and click Uh huh. So this one cannot have brackets inside. Let's go ahead and just fix that. There we go. Now we have three different materials. We can click Control Shift and S to save it all out to make sure it registers. And now if I was to use grass, it should update this piece. There we go. And the most important part, though, is grass yellow auto. This one is an interesting one if I was just to paint it out a little bit in a larger scale so we could see what it's doing. So we have a blue shift. Once we get closer, it should switch up to colors. So let's see. I'm going to also check if the distance range, Oh, right. We didn't set up distance range. So I'd like to have these default parameters to already have a certain value. So let's go back onto. There you go. Default value. So the distance range can be set as one and distance start offset can be set as 5,000. There we go. Let's go ahead and click Control Shift and S, save it all up. And now we should see it's not setting this up. Why is that? There is a bit of an error on unresolved error on the top right hand corner, so let's go ahead and click on it and set ourselves up for rebuilding landscape data. Hopefully, that will solve our issues, and I'm still not seeing the fix over here. So why is it not changing? I think the values might be off at the moment. So for the range, let's go ahead and use 1,200 or a value. And for start offset, let's use -1,500. So, and there we go. Now we have ourselves a material that blends together. So basically, once the camera is getting closer, you're able to change and adjust the material, change it onto another material. The range will allow you to control the distance of the setup. Oh, let me just change it gradually. So you can see how it blends in, and 1,200 will work quite well for this. The distance is basically saying, like, how fast it starts going from one material to another, so we can change it, so it would change up faster and whatnot. But -1,500 will work quite well for us. And yeah, with that material now working properly, we can finally go back onto the landscape material and figure out how we can make use out of it. So, we have the mask that is working pretty well. What can we do with it? Well, we're going to make use out of it to change the scaling of the texture, and I just realized we are running out of time for that. So I think we can continue on with this in the next lesson. Thank you so much for watching, and I will be seeing you in a bit. 15. Layered Texture Scaling for Realistic Grass and Stone: Hello and welcome back everyone to Unreal Engine five stylized night environment, BFX sliding, foliage and landscape design. In the last lesson, we create ourselves a nice little mask that allows us to blend in two different materials based on the distance of the camera from the landscape. Now we're going to go ahead and, well, make use out of it. So let's go ahead and find ourselves yellow grass texture. So within a content, we are going to find textures over here, and we are going to get yellow grass. Let's go ahead and just simply drag it out and quickly reattach the pieces. To make it easier for us, we're also just going to duplicate one to another, and I'll explain you shortly why. Let's go ahead and just move the rest of the piece a little bit lower, like so, so we'll have more space to work with just like that. And now let's go ahead and see. So ambient inclusion goes in here. This base color can go off and we can just attach the grass, base color, then height for displacement and normal as well over here. And then finally the roughness. So the roughness will go in here. Now that we have the connection like so, we also need well texture coordinates. So let's go ahead and create ourselves that. So we can just type in chord, and it should pop up with texture coordinate, setting up the multiply scale for grass yellow, scale A. So and just attaching one to another. Then we are attaching all of this to UV just like that. And finally, so now that we have it like this, we can go ahead and make a duplicate out of this entire piece because I don't really want to do this again. So I'm going to delete the blue color and just make a duplicate out of this. And that way, we can connect it to B. And this one is going to be scale B. This way, we can make the upper one scaled as one. So it's going to be quite small, and the up one can be scaled as 0.1. And now let's talk a little bit about what we did, why we did this. Well, for Saus we basically are reusing the same textures that we have over here. Again, the second time, the thing is, though, it saves the performance because you're calling out those same textures only once, even though you're blending them in twice and reusing them. Um, it also saves out on the size of your landscape of your project. So if you're not, using new textures every time, if you're reusing them, it will generally be more optimal and more efficient for the use. And now the reason why we're doing this is because basically, when we get closer, we want to make sure that the detail is in higher resolution. For certain pieces of grass, it might work for quite a noisy texture. It's going to work when it comes to texture that has more recognizable pattern. It might not work quite as well, but something for, like, a noisy, again, noisy texture like this, it's going to work. We also have, for example, stone. So this stone over here, the pattern is quite recognizable. If we have a look at it, if we, you know, change the scale whilst we are getting in closer, it's going to be very, very recognizable. We don't want to do that. We want to make sure that we are having a reasonable um setup based on the type of texture that we're using. So something like yellow grass, where it's just just noisy and stuff, even though you might think, like, Hey, the buds might look different in size and stuff. When it's on a distance, it's not going to be visible, honestly. It's going to be quite right. So it's a nice little trick to use. And once we have this type of a setup, we can go ahead and click Shift an S, save it out, and see if this updated, which it did not, so I'm just going to go ahead and apply this over here. Let's see. There we go. Now, it's updated. Going to hit Control Shift and net just to make sure it saves everything out. And that is what we're getting now. So once we're getting closer, the texture is changing. Once we're getting further apart, the texture gets quite a bit larger. So at this point, what I like to do is I like to, well, make sure that we have this texture applied everywhere. And I'd say, yeah, we can just simply make the brush larger and just, you know, brush in the entire landscape, like so just like that. So the main weight of this texture will be this grasp. Now the next thing is if you click one, which again, the saved out camera that we have, the bookmark camera is we're going to see the type of difference. So for this hill over here, we want to make sure that it keeps that smaller grass. For the ones in the background, it can keep the larger grass. But this type of grass might be a little bit, you know, too chunky. But whilst we're looking at this type of setup, we can go back onto the landscape material. Instance material, there we go. And I'm going to adjust and tweak it a little bit. So the upper section is maybe too small, actually. So I'll go ahead and think I'll change this to a value of 0.3. Like so. So now this texture over here is a little bit better. And the scale of B, I think keeping it as 0.1 will work quite well. Although I'd like this to be just a little bit smaller. So maybe 0.15. Yeah, there we go. Perfect. Again, the pattern is very recognizable now, but we're going to start mixing the materials up and whatnot. It's going to give us, well, pretty great results. But just like that, we can see the type of difference we're getting when we're getting closer, we're getting further apart. We're getting a very nice transition. And yeah, if you're looking at it from a distance, these parts are going to look more like, you know, bushy types, chunky types. It's going to help us break down that natural foliage because we wouldn't have just rows of consistent type of foliage. But when we were using this method, again, we were able to, you know, make more of an organic look out of our environment. So, yeah, that's going to be it from this section. Let's go back on to the material now. Since we have a little bit of extra time, let's go ahead and set this up with yet another material. This time, it's going to be stone. Let's go ahead and set up this material attributes node as a PVR material with all these textures. So let's link everything up, just like we did with the yellow grass, and this is going to be roughness. This is going to be normal. Like so, height is going to be over here, and base color is going to be over here, and amet oclusion is going to be over here. So, what can we do with this? Well, we can firstly get ourselves the texture coordinate with some additional parameters for scaling, and this is just going to be stone scale, like so, and I'm just going to go ahead and attach everything just like we did previously. So we'd have a parameter for stone. Just like that, hitting apply, let's have a look. And maybe we need to hit Control ****. There we go. And I'm still not seeing the stone. So what is happening over here? This should be stone scale in the parameter section. And oh, right. The reason we're not seeing it is because we have not attached this to the output of our master material setup to this little bar over here. If the parameter is not going to the outside output of the settings, it's not going to do anything. But we are going to continue on with this in the next lesson. So thank you so much for watching, and I will be seeing you in a bit. 16. Natural Cliff Transitions with Slope and Height Blending: Hello and welcome back everyone to On Reel Engine five stylized night environment, VFX sliding, foliage, and landscape design. In the last lesson, we left ourselves off, well, with the blending material for different scaled textures for the yellow grass. We're now having ourselves also the stone that we have already set ourselves up with except we don't have anything to plug it in with. Well, the thing is that we are going to make use out of it to blended in with the already existing grass, yellow grass that we have over here. Let's go ahead and do that. First things first, what we're going to do is we're going to slightly reposition our set up so we'll have even more space to work with over here. Then we are going to create yet another blend material attributes. Material attributes like so, and we are going to combine the output of blended material attributes from the yellow grass, the one that we had, and the stone over here to a value of B, just like that. So these are combined. Now we just need to figure out what to do with, well, the mask. And for that, we are going to use something called world aligned. World aligned blend. Yep, that's the one. And this is going to allow us to determine the angle of a landscape, and based on it, we'll be able to say, Hey, when angle is hitting that specific point, we want this to be a stone instead. That's going to help us break down this entire section. So instead of it being just grass greenery, we'd have some bits of cliff being seen through. And that's going to be quite nice. So first things first, we are going to go ahead and create a couple of parameters. So first of all, it's going to be il holding. Actually, sorry. Let me just move this a little bit to the side. I don't want to be hitting this node link. So okay. The ones that we need is basically the blend sharpness and blend bias. So by default, the up ones will be right. If you see in the brackets, it says brackets, brackets S, meaning that it's a parameter, single value, and free would be vector free. So that would include three values. We don't need to do anything about them, but it's still worth the gnome. So right now, we're just going to go ahead and create blend sharpness. Like so and put it in here. Oh, sorry, let's go ahead and make another one as well, right away. Well we blend bias and put it in here. That way, we have the values required to create by default a nice angle. Right away, we can test this actually. We can go ahead and just attach the vertex with normals. This is the one that we need to use or the mask, we can attach this to Alpha and see if it works. And let's not forget to tach this entire piece onto our lovely layer grass yellow automatic. Now that we have this type of setup, let's go ahead and hit Shift sorry, let's hit Apply First, Control Shift ins and that should give us everything that we need over here. I'm going to just move this downwards, and it's popping up with a new warning over here. Let's just hit rebuild. And hopefully, we're going to start seeing some interesting stuff, which we're not because these values over here, I have not set them up yet. Let's go ahead and just select them both. The value on the top can be set as 2.44, and the value at the bottom can be set as minus sorry, -5.82. There we go. And there we go. So you can play around with these values and whatnot. We are using the negative value, so it would basically invert this mask and put the cliffs on the side. If it was a positive value, it wouldn't detect the slope at all. Yeah, but just playing around with these values, we can see the type of difference that we're getting right away, right off the bat. So yeah, using -5.82 will give us a real nice result. And just like that, we are able to break up this entire piece. With multiple of materials based on the slope of the setup. Of course, this is not quite done. If we have a look at it, you'll notice that the way it blends in is very generic. It's not giving us any detail out of the surface. And if we get closer, it's very, very obvious. We need to make sure that we're adding more detail out of it. The landscape itself has, well, low type of resolution. We can even, I think, preview this with the wireframe mode, so you can see the wireframe is actually quite low in comparison, which is good in a way that it keeps the density of the mesh low and performance quite high. But again, this blending is not acceptable. We need to get better. So what can we do? Well, we can go to landscape, and we have a little option. The option that we're going to use is going to be this value over here. So the high texture. If we double click on it, we have some nice dark and light values of a mask that can be used for displacement. But now, though, this is going to be used with the combination of the already existing mask. And by blending these values in the mask of a grass is going to intervene more between the crevices of the stone. So how do we do that? Well, the thing that we need the only thing that we need to be honest for this, Oh, let's just go and move this to the side, is to use blend overlay the blend overlay will allow us to mix in the values that are in between the darkest and brightest points of the mask. In this case, it's going to be in between the stone mask and the grass mask. So the areas that just have partial transparency, essentially, that will be mixed up with if we set this base, that will be mixed up with the height variation over here. So we can just plug this in into our blend V free and put this out as a result. Of course, this will give us a lot of control. So in addition to that, we are going to create some intensity control. So we can use something called a power, a math node that will allow us to increase the intensity of this height value over here with parameter. And this parameter can be set as a control parameter for the slope, so we can hold S and create slope height Power, and attach it to the exponential power over here. And now we can combine it onto the blend overlay node, and the result, we can put it as an Alpha. This way, when we set ourselves up with applying hit Control shift in S, we can see that we're getting this result. Now, what is this result? Well, if we go to the material instance, we can find ourselves where would it be? There we go. Slope height power. And there's an upper warning. Let's just go ahead and click on it to make sure it fixes the landscape problem that it had, which just popped up. Anyways, going back to this slope height power parameter. Once you start increasing it, you'll see that, A, it's now blending a little bit better. I'm going to move the camera a little bit to a better angle over here. So you can see by increasing it, you can see the grass basically starts overlaying more in crisis and whatnot and gives us a very, very nice type of a blend. Now that we have parameters like that, let's go ahead and change up the scale a little bit. So scale for stone, I think, should be instead of 0.1, should be 0.15. That way, it will be a little bit smaller, but from a distance, it's not going to look too repetitive. And as for the slope height power, we can lower this down to a value of 6.57, and that's going to give us a very nice transition for the setups. Over here, we are having some interesting results, but I think it's because the slope is just weirdly placed. Everywhere else is looking quite nice. Let's go ahead and check it with our lighting to see how it looks like so far. So game settings, turn this on, and that's what we're getting over here. Again, it's going to be mainly solo at work, but if we look at it, we are still seeing those differences, small little differences, small little detail for scene, but it's still going to work quite nicely. And now with this slope over here, we can play around with the settings for we the values of the landscape. So I think we can go ahead and do that. We can go onto the landscape sculpting and just use flatten tool to kind of get ourselves more interesting results. Let's see. So there we go. A little bit smaller, like so, and even brush fall off, if we lower it down, we can get steeper bit of cliffs. There you go. Some bit of a variation. It's going to be quite nice. All right. So now that we have the seatings like this, we can go back onto our landscape paint and I'm just going to reapply the yellow grass over here. And here as well, there we go. Now we're getting nicer setups. And let's go ahead back to flatten, just kind of fix up these breakages a little bit. Even if I'm not planning to have it visible by the camera. It's still quite nice to have some variation. There we go. Just nice little breakage. Like so. And just like that, I think, it's quite alright. Okay. Yep, it looks quite nice. This part over here, I'm not quite keen on it, so let's go ahead and just fix it. So now we can work with slopes while visualizing the type of detail we're getting out of it, which is going to look much, much better. And I think I got a nice hump over here, but it's a little bit too much, so I'm just going to kind of ease this off like this. Just kind of removing this entire hump. Just like so. Let's go ahead and have a look. It's still a little bit too big of a hump. So let me just go ahead and just work it down. Like so. This way, it's not going to be in the way of setup over here. This part can be just broken down a little bit. Like so and yeah, that looks much better. These parts over here can be just slightly broken up a little bit, a little bit, not too much. So we'll have more detail in these parts. These parts are going to be covered quite a bit with the foliage, with trees mainly. So I'm not too worried about it, but just having some bit of variation. In our setup is going to make this so much better looking. Alright. So that's what we're having so far. Looking pretty good. We're going to continue on with it in the next lesson, though we're still not finished with the landscape, by the way. I'd still like to enable a couple of additional parameters. So yeah, we're going to continue on with this in the next lesson. Thank you so much for watching, and I will be seeing you in a bit. 17. Nanite Displacement with Height Map Remapping: Hello and welcome back around to Unreal Engine five stylized night environment, FX lighting, foliage, and landscape design. We left ourselves off with well continuing for the landscape, and now we're going to go ahead and just select the landscape output material, and we're going to enable nanitetessllation. So within here, if we were to go ahead and select the well mass material output, we can search for Nanite in its detailed step then select used with ninite and enable tesselation. And once we do that, we're going to hit Apply, and this will allow us to make use out of the already existing displacement that we had. So previously, you know, how we attached the displacement onto or make material attributes. Well, now this information is going to be used for the setup. So this means that once we hit Apply hit, control shift in S to save it, it's going to start giving us some tesslation out of the setup. We're going to go ahead and just double check Yep. All right. So once we select the landscape material, now in the mesh itself, we need to search for Nanite in the detail stab within the viewport, not within the mass material this time. And once we are searching for that, we have option to enable Nanite. Once we click Enable, it's going to give us a warning that we need to build data. Once we click Build data, it will start rebuilding the mesh. Meaning that the painted material painted setup will be used for displacement. And that's the setup we're going to get. So we need to make some fixes, make some adjustments for it. Right now, everything by default is too intense for the displacement. We need to go ahead and just clear out the search history, go back onto the landscape material, master material. And within here, let's select back onto the landscape material. Search for nanite and we should find ourselves. There you go. Nanite tesselation. So once we are back within the mass the material and change up displacement magnitude to be way less by the fault is set to four, we can change this to 0.5 and hit Apply. This will fix up the overly exaggerated amount. Now you can see that we're getting a lot of nice detail out of our mesh, especially the rocky surfaces. So we go to areas where there is a rock texture, so we're going to get the displacement out of it, which is pretty good. But when we are enabling displacement, of course, there are certain issues that we need to address and we need to fix certain parts. First things first is going to be the fact that when we are zooming out, we are essentially changing this texture. One to another in the tesselllation. And that is firstly quite performance savvy because well, it needs to tesselate this same location twice to displace it. It's looking quite right, perhaps, but honestly, what I like to do personally is make sure that I only use single displacement for this type of deformation. So going back to the material, we're going to locate ourselves to yellow grass, which is this part over here, and we're using one displacement for one scale, another displacement for another scale. But in this case, we're going to find ourselves the larger or in this case, smaller value, which gives us larger texture, and we are going to just locate a displacement, the texture over here, and then we're just going to replace the one that's at the top for a smaller texture, which is used with the distance blend. Now whenever we're using a distance blend, it's going to switch out those textures. But the offset of the displacement is still going to be kept the same because we're just reusing the same height for both of these make material attributes. Now we can go ahead and click Control Shift and S. Well, let's apply it first. Control Shift and S now hopefully once it calculates everything, you can see at the bottom right hand corner, it says preparing shaders. We are going to have a setup that's only going to have one type of displacement. So it's still going to look like it's just moving the entire time. Of course, this tesselation, because it's set up with nanite, it means that whenever we are further apart, the tesselation is going to be less. Whenever we're getting closer, it's going to be more and more detailed, but at least, you know, the bulges are not moving for the landscape. And just seemingly random setup. Now it's just one displacement, and I think that's much, much better. The other thing that we might consider would be when we are having dirt. So if we were to now use landscape, paint tool with a dirt material, there we go just wait for it to update. We're going to have a certain location here for, well, ten, if we were to start applying dirt weight material, let's just wait for it to compile the shader. Like so. We're going to see that, hey, there is something weird going on. What's happening over here? Well, this dirt height is actually when being used is actually lowering down the entire setup. So if we go to find this dirt over here, if we were to have displacement by default, like so and hit Apply, we're going to find that now it's loading. You can see the feet of manikin is quite alright. When we want to, for example, lower down the value of displacement, we can use multiply to low displacement. The difference though here is that this is a height map and we are having a displacement map. The thing with the height map usually is that zero, which would be a black colored, darkest patches in the setup, that would mean that it's not going to displace anything, but with a displacement texture, what that means is that it usually has a value of 0.5, which is a gray value as a standard default value. And having zero means it would start going downwards. So if I was just to show you as an example, so this value over here, if it was 0.5 for displacement, that would mean it's a neutral value. But for height value, zero being black would mean that it's the default value. And if it was for displacement, this zero value would start dragging and displacing the value downwards. For the mesh. So to offset that, what I usually do with displacements, is I simply change up the range of the setup, meaning that if we have, let's see, range map value range, there we go. Using this remap value texture, we can essentially convert our height onto, well, displacement value. So instead of using this multiply, we are going to make it slightly adjustments to make sure that we keep the entire information of the texture whilst allowing us to use displacement without the offset of what we saw over here. Now, the dirt is being placed on top because we just remove the multiply. Anyways, so in order to avoid the extreme offsets and whatnot, by just using height for displacement, we can use remap value. So if I was to put this in input, we can say that actually, let me just move this a little bit outwards. We can say that the input low is going to be zero. I'm going to hold one and just tab on the graph. This way we're getting parameter value, but sorry, not parameter value, just a float value, but that's not going to be a parameter value, meaning that we can't change it within our material instance. We don't need to change it because we're simply just adding some values. So input low is going to be a value of zero, so it's going to be black. Input high is going to be a value of one. And we are going to be changing this from zero and one to a value of -0.5 to a value of plus 0.5. That way, the main center section will be nicely placed in the middle. So the gray area is going to be kept neutral as displacement intended to be. And yeah, let's go ahead and just simply do that. So -0.5, 2.5. So just like that, placing it in like so and putting it into displacement. Now we can use the multiply value a little bit more comfortably as well, because once we have this remap value range, we are able to, well, lower down the intensity without having some extreme values of it going downwards and whatnot, like so, and just using this as a value of 0.2, as we did previously, we can see the effect by applying it, waiting for it to recompile a little bit. And seeing that once this is done, there we go. I will actually just put the result without multiplying to the displacement. So just putting it directly, applying hidden control and S to save it out. Let's just wait it out a little bit. So in this case, a multiply value is not actually even needed. That's fair enough. But we do need to do something about those peaks over, like so. I think the intensity of the value is, well, too much. So we can actually use clamp over here. I think that would be better. And clamping the value from, let's say, -0.3 to a value of 0.3 will basically crop out the top section, like so. And if we were to attach it to displacement, it's going to give us a very nice dirt effect. Of course, if you want to just simply lower the intensity, instead of using a multiplier, what I would recommend. So let's have a look. There we go. Much nicer result. A. So instead of using a multiplier or a clam, you could also, what you could do is create a vector free, value like so, set this to a value of 0.5, meaning that it would be default displacement value and then use arp, which you can do by holding L, tapping on the graph like so, attaching this to B, having A set as the value for remap value range. And now we could use afterwards, the Alpha to control this setup. So that's what we're going to do actually over because I think still it's being a little bit too intense. Yeah, let's go ahead and have a look. We're going to go ahead and just move this out of the way. So this would be an alternative way for other materials, for example, the stone or the rock. Maybe it's a little bit too intense. So by just using the larp like this with value of 0.5, it means that we're going to get only half of the intensity of the value range. Now, once we plug this in, we can apply, and now Once this loads up, there we go. We're going to get this type of result, which is still too much. So let's say if it is too much, we can set this to 0.9, hit Apply, and then, there we go. So we're only doing it just barely, so if we set this up to one and hit Apply, then it's only going to be the general color value of 0.5, meaning that it's going to be a neutral offset and nothing is going to change. So if you want to remove it completely, you can do that. You can see now the ground is completely flat. You can see some bumps, but that's because of the normal value. But if we set this up to value 0.9, I think that worked quite nicely for us. So let's go ahead and just use that, and there we go. You can see there is some slight bump in the dirt value. And of course, you could set this Alpha up to B well, a parameter. So you can click and hold S, tap on a screen, and then just type in dirt displacement. Intensity, like so, and just attach it to the alpha and apply it. I should have changed this with a default value to 0.9 because I don't want to go back onto the instance. Now we have it so, let's go ahead and just quickly do a recap. Because I think I just ended up over explaining this little part, but I really, really think it's important to know all of this. So essentially, with the displacement, we can change up from the height to a value of displacement information. Then we can use clam value to kind of extrude the upper and lower piece of information, making it a little bit more flatter as a as a height value. Or alternatively, we can just lower the opacity of the height value and lowering the intensity, overall intensity of the information, giving us less displacement whenever we need to using this little setup over here. And hopefully, that gives us a lot of control with, well, creation of future landscape setups. Of course, we could set it up for other areas as well. But honestly, the height values and everything are going to work out pretty well in our favor. So that is pretty much let's go ahead and just close this down and have a quick look at the height map. So click F 11, and there we go. We're getting to rain with a lot more detail on our setup. It is looking much nicer. So, yeah, that's going to be it for me. Thank you so much for watching, and I will be seeing you in a bin. 18. Advanced Height Blending for Realistic Grass Layers: Hello and welcome back over to Unreel Engine five Stylized night Environment, VFX lighting, foliage, and landscape design. In the last lesson, we went over more variations with the landscape texture. We're now going to do one more final thing in order to make some additional variations, and that would be going into the landscape material. That would be to create height information or blending. Now we have a nice way of high blending for the steepness of this automatic grass. But let's say we want to well add our own grass over this section over here, and the issue would be, once we start adding a grass over, like so just normal weight painting using landscape mode, we'll notice that this grass and this grass just has a very generic type of blending and it's not going to look quite as nice. You know, the detail for it is going to be relatively low resolution for the mask. So what can we do? Well, going back through material, we can actually for the landscape layer blend node, make use of instead of weight blend, we can make use out of height plant, and that's what we're going to do. We're going to make use out of it for grass blending. So this layer of grass layer is going to be index one. You can see the layer name over here. We can use blend type to be from L B weight to height blend. And once we do that, a new height grass information piece pops up. So instead of just having layer grass, we also have height grass. And this height grass can be used well with height information that we have over here, dirt height or something. In this case, it's actually going to be not grass that we have over here. So we have second. This is roughness. This is height. So this height information could be potentially used for blending, but in this case, we can reuse another piece, and that would be reusing the if I was to find it, there we go, the height information from stone. The reason we can reuse this one is because it has a very nice mask. That's going to be combined with the weight information later on, and this will give us nice blending for the setup. So we don't exactly always need to reuse the same height value. We can just combine them, and it will give us a nice result. So for us to use this, what we're going to do is we're going to use Right Click and let's use height arp. This one is an interesting one because we can grab the information from the height texture. So let's go ahead and do that. I'm going to find the height value over here. Just double checking if it's a height value. It is. Let's grab this information like so, and quick tip if you want to have, well, some control over the way those noodles end up interacting. You can double click on the part of the link to create this reroute node. Then with this selected, you can just move it holding control and just using Lt Mase button to move it out of the way. That way, it doesn't overlap as much with the rest of the setup. And we can get fresh information. So for A, we're just going to set it up as zero, like so for B, we're going to set it up as one, like so. And then for this, we are going to have transition phase, so that's going to be while holding S. We can just click on the graph and call this grass stone height phase. So that way, we would know that we can use this value to transition between the grass with, well, a mask. And then, of course, we want to contrast. So let's go ahead and create a new parameter called grass, stone contrast. Like so and put it up like this. The grasstone height phase can be set as 0.5 to make sure it's like a default value, and then we can use the result within R, or is it at the very top height grass. So this will just give us some additional information to control instead of just using direct value. And let's go ahead and just attach this to if we find it height grass, like so, and now once we have it like this, we can hit Apply, hit Control shift in S. There we go. Hit Control Shift ins and we can see that this is what we're getting right now. Oh. Let's just wait for it to load. There we go. So now if we go back to landscape material instance, we can see these options grass stone over here. And we can, well, change, for example, contrast. So if we were to increase it, we can see the way it starts blending it in. And if we change it to a maximum value, you can see that it has much nicer details. So this one can be set as 0.3 of a value, sorry, this is a contrast, so we can set it to 3.2, three. There we go. And the phase can be set as 0.3. Yeah, there we go. So the phase will control basically the blending as well. Just like that. So 0.3, will give us a nice result. And that way, we can have, well, some nice bit of control between how the grass blended in with one another, giving us a very, very nice type of a result, just like that. Now that we have the whole setup, we can go onto the landscape and material and do some organization because we did a little bit of that, and we've not finished it. Let's go ahead and make sure we clean everything up. So this one would be grass, yellow grass. I'm going to click C. There we go. We can call it yellow grass plus distance blend. Like so and change it to yellow because it is yellow. And this part will be stone. Just checking up with it. Yeah. Okay. This part can be just called stone material. Nothing else with it can be brown. And this part, we can just simply select it like so and have a comment saying that this is a what's it called slope mask? And finally, this will be height blend for grass. We can just call it height, blend or grass. I'm just going to make it maybe more bluish, just like that. This one I'm also going to change the color. Just like that. There we go. Alright, so we are pretty much sorted with that stuff. If we go back onto material instance, we have a lot of variation or this type of parameters. So you can see just by using a single single variation out of the controls, you know, changing from distance, changing from the height, masking, distance masking, by just doing it by one time of that, we're getting a lot of parameters. And you can imagine if you're doing it more complexity by just reusing, for example, the distance on multiple of the materials, you would have a lot more parameters. So for that reason, it's best to group them up a little bit. And I think this is the point where we should do that. So here, we have dirt. We can change this to have group of dirt, like so, and that would be it, I believe, actually. Yep. There's no need to do anything else over here. Grass noise, we can change it up over here for a group of grass noise. Like so. And then whenever we find a parameter, which is named float value, we can just change this to grass noise. Grass noise. And I believe the color is as well, grass noise. It's a parameter. So I'm just checking if all of these are selected, so that's it. Yep. And going downwards, we have yellow grass distance. So we can change these up. Low grass distance. And I'm just going to go ahead and not even use this arrow over here instead just copying and pasting the group name, and this will give us that same outcome. Makes it a little bit faster to change up to groups, just like that. And this is also going to be this is a slope mask, so we can set it up as a slope mask. Yep. So slope grass mask. So slope yellow grass mask. There we go. And that's it. And finally, we have stone. Yeah, we can just name this stone. So I think that's only going to be one parameter for the stone. This height blend for grass can probably go into the group for the grass grass noise, there we go. We got ourselves a nice little setup. We can now go ahead and click Control shiftinSO sorry, apply first, then Control ShiftinS. And now within instances, we'll see that we have nice little tabs that makes it so much easier to organize and just go between them. And that's pretty much it. When it comes to the landscape setup. We can now make use out of this entire part to start painting in some values, to make sure that everything is looking presentable for a landscape. So that's going to be it for me. Thank you so much for watching, and I will be seeing you in a bin. 19. Painting Grass with Texture Noise and Color Matching: Hello. Welcome back on to Unreel Engine five stylized night environment, VFX sliding, foliage, landscape design. And in the last lesson, we left ourselves off well with the finalized landscape result. We're now going to go ahead and start using it to make do with the painting. And in order for us to do that, if I was just to paint in a little bit of a grass over here, we'll notice that firstly, the grass itself, well, it takes a little bit of time to update whenever it's being used on a new chunk of terrain. So keep that in mind. And while it's doing that, we can go onto Well, there we go. It's done. Or we can go on to talking about why it looks like it stands out a little bit too much this type of grass. Well, we sometimes need to blend in the textures a little bit. And if we were to go onto the content Textures folder, we can select grass folder, double click on a base color. And within here, we have some options to make use out of, well, additional fine tuning for blending in these values. So right now, it might be looking like it's a little bit too different from this type of grass. We don't want this to be exactly the same, but we want this to fit the same environment. So what can we do? Well, if we scroll down with an adjustment step, we have some options. Brightness controls how bright or dark the grass is. We can play around with it. For example, if we want to increase the brightness, we can do so. We also have an option if it was just to put it off to the side like this a little bit for better visibility, we also have an option for saturation, so this will increase the saturation and whatnot. I think the saturation is quite good. The main one is RGB curve as well as Hue. RGB curve will allow us to control essentially the contrast of the setup. So if we want, we can bleach it out a little bit, and hue will allow us well to adjust and tweak the color. So this has a 360 value, so you can imagine a color picker being 360 for the entire hue of the setup. So if we were to go to 360, it's going to be exactly the same as zero. And if we want basically to adjust the hue, we need to know that because when we are moving it forward, we can see that, A, it starts shifting to blue, then, you know, purple, pinkish, and then it goes back all the way around. So when we want to, you know, adjust tweak the value and we start seeing that, A, it goes in the wrong direction, then we can just go all the way to side and start tweaking the value a little bit, so to get something like this, although this doesn't stand out too much, we need to we need it to stand out just a little bit. So maybe 37. Like this, I think it doesn't stand out at all, so let's go ahead and set it up to 340. And I like this a little more. RGB curve can be increased to there we go, have a darker effect. And just to bring back the brightness, we can bring this up a little bit. With adjustments like that, we can see that we're getting the right kind of value. So I'm just looking with the lighting, just double checking that the game setting is on. And with this kind of lighting, we can just make sure that the lighting that we have for the grass is going to be quite alright. What is happening over here? Well, there seems to be some glitches with the shadows, and I believe it's because we basically need to rebuild the nanite which is, you know, fair enough. We can do that in a bit, though. Now we can just go out of the lit mode for game settings and just start playing around with the values a little bit. For larger scales, what I like to do often is within the paint is just use noise, and whilst using a noise, we have an option to just paint in a value that will give us. And just like that, we can paint in a certain bit of areas. Or additional looks. Tool strength, let's increase this to value of one, and then we can see the effect of this noise because somewhere some areas will allow us to use it, other will not. And that is because we need to change up the scale of the noise. So if we were to change this to well, let's try ten at the moment, there we go. That's more like it. But for the background, we'll need to have, well, more variation, actually. So what we're going to do here is we're going to change this to 100. Let's see. Yeah, that looks quite right. It just helps us to break down this entire shape. Even when it's scaled upwards for the background, it's still going to look quite off for these section. So with this noise set to that, we're going to be able to get nice result, and they're also going to be blending in quite nicely. So that's quite right. You can just do it like this. You get nice patches of grass. I think it's going to be quite right. It does look a little bit off to me. With this kind of colorful grass. So let's go ahead and check if the game settings, the game settings with the game settings actually looks quite nice. Maybe a little bit too saturated, maybe a little bit too much. So let's go real quick and adjust that. And I just realized this is not saved, so I'm just going to make sure it is click Control S, and there we go. Saturation just going to lower it just a little bit more. There we go. There we go. This is going to be perfect. Low saturation type of grass, very nice. I like this quite a lot. A distance, let's not zoom out too much because we don't have any upper detail. But honestly, it's going to be looking quite right. So just using this noise paint, we're going to cover most of the items, and I'm not quite sure what happened, but it seems like my back ended up being flattened out. I think it might be because of the crash that happened previously. So just real quick, I will go ahead and fix it. So just selecting the noise sculpt and I'm going to make brush quite a bit larger ig just kind of quickly tap on the back. To get all the detail that I want. There we go. Just to make sure it breaks down the overall angles. Maybe this one is a little bit too much, but I think it's okay. Just like that. All right. This is looking pretty nice. Maybe this one needs to be more intense because it's more visible. And we are good. Now, let's go on to the landscape details, make sure we have this landscape itself selected, and there we go. That's what we're looking for. When we go back into the selection mode, we're going to see that landscape actor with Nara meshes needs to be rebuilt. If we are redoing some landscape parts, it'll pop up as this error. If this is not popping up, just go onto the landscape details app, find Nanite and just click rebuild data, and this will fix this issue, just like that. Like so, and now we have ourselves the right kind of a look. Of course, when we get to the closer areas, this section might need some additional variation in the grass, so we can also do that a little bit. Let's go on to landscape painting and just again, play around with this value for the grass. Just a little bit like so, so we can start off with the noise that we have over here. And don't worry about the shadows over here because again, this is because of the need for rebuild data. And actually, I'd like to spend one more lesson just to make sure that we're getting some dirt in the areas as well. So now we have the general section of the landscape setup. We're going to move on to the smaller sections with the next lesson. Thank you so much for watching, and I will be seeing you in the bit. 20. Detailing Dirt Paths and Grass Transitions with Sculpting: Hello and welcome back everyone to Unreal Engine five, Stylize night environments, VFX lighting, foliage, and landscape design. In the last lesson, we went over, well, just adding some textured variation for the landscape, using the already pre built weight paint that we have for the grass. Now we're going to continue on with this and just have smaller variation over here as well. I'm just quickly tapping in a little bit with this preset of a noise, although, let me just have a look. Yeah, the noise that we have currently is too large for the smaller setup. So let's go ahead and change something like 50. Just going to check. Yeah, it's still too much. Noise scale can be set to ten. Let's see. Yeah, this is going to be much, much better. So for areas like over here, for example, might need to be, you know, more spread out and can be just used like this just a little bit. Like so don't worry about it too much because we are going to well, populated with trees and whatnot. And we also need to consider the main shot that it's being used with. And that is looking pretty good so far this area on the top, I'd like to also have some bit of variation and grass. Just like that. I think that's quite right. This section over here, you can just tap it a little bit to have some nicer chunks. Just like that, not too much. Even I would say the strength, the tool strength can be set to 0.3, just to make sure that we are just nicely adding in that additional grass variation without it being too intrusive with the rest of the pieces. So just like that. This part is a little bit too much. I'm going to go back onto just adding grass yellow, like so, and maybe over here, we can just ovulate a little bit back, and I'm going to do something similar over here as well. Even with the paint brush, not the noise brush at this point, kind of, that's too much. Let me just click Control Z real quick. I will lower the tool strength to 0.1. And just quickly tap it over, so because it's going to be so close to the camera, we don't need to have too much variation. And we're going to also apply some rocks and grass and whatnot. So that's going to help us out with the setup. In case of this area, we're going to work with, well, the tent. So let's just make sure that we have some bit of what's it called? Dirt type of texture. So we're just adding a little bit of that. In this area, but not too much. So I'm going to hold shift once holding shift, it should invert value and just remove that weight. So that way, we can have just some nice patches, as you can see over here. It's not going to be just completely like dirt type. It's going to have more variation. Although this part over here, I know that it's going to have a camp site. So we need to make sure that we're not making it too grassy. Finally this part over here, it needs to be completely covered in dirt. So I'm going to go ahead and just put it at 0.5 and just start just adding in some dirt like this, and then we can just remove it afterwards. The reason we're doing it like so is because, well, we need to make sure we have a path towards the entrance of the ruins. And that's going to be quite visible. What happened over here? Well, I'm not quite sure, actually. Huh. I'm going to click Control and Shift and as to save it out. And for some reason, this section just glitched out and just lost all of the terrain data for the dirt. So what's happening over here? Well, let's go ahead and just select the mesh terrain and just find the rebuilt data. Hopefully, this will fix us there we go. It brought back the dirt that we had. I'm not sure why there was a glitch before, but there you go. If you're having the same problem, just make sure you click rebuild data on your nanite and it will bring back the well, the texture that you had. Let's go back on to landscape. And finalize this part. So it's going to look like so, and we can just make this smaller, hold shift, kind of click in certain areas. I mean, it's a little bit too much, maybe even smaller or maybe even just use the noise with much smaller setup. Yeah, say, we can use five or the noise data and just hold shift and just tap tap, tap, tap tap, even larger noise tool strength 0.8, and get a nicer result. To make it a little bit more clear on what we're doing over here, I would say what we can do is we can go on to unlit mode and just kind of low down the texture that we have over here. I'll actually go back onto paint mode and see what I can do with it. So just quickly tapping, so just making sure that the dirt is more broken. Just like that. It's going to give us a very nice very nice type of a path, which is going to be partially grassy. So that's going to be quite alright. Maybe we should add a dirt path over here, but it's going to start thinning out a little bit, basically, to make it seem like it's been starting to overgrow and where it starts off, it is not going to be quite as visible and it just goes off onto the side, just like that. I think that's pretty much it. We can also go back onto sculpt mode real quick because I'm seeing that there's a lot of those smaller details which are triangulated, and I don't like the way it gives out the shape. Just in case, though, I will select back onto the landscape and click rebuild data one more time, just to see if we can avoid those parts. And I think actually we can, so that's good. Yep, the displacement is working quite nicely with the terrain. So now we're not getting that same nasty look that we had previously. I will go back onto the lit mode just to check, and Yeah, I'm going to smooth out some of the parts a little bit. The shadows that are hitting it off from this part is not, not the best, not the best. Let's go ahead and just go back onto the landscape mode. Let's hit sculpt, smooth, and just clean it up a little bit to make sure we're removing those extreme values from the sections. So is it working? I'm not quite sure we're going to make it there we go. I need to make it a little bit bigger, and it will work quite well. Going to make full strength to 0.1 and just kind of clean up where the shadow is hitting a little bit in weird places. So this part over here this part over here. This part a little bit, I don't like this part at all. And I think this part just a little bit, a little bit. There we go. Alright. This is looking, this is looking quite alright. I'm quite happy this result. So, yeah, we got ourselves a nice little terrain, which we can we can set ourselves up with a nice lighting, although this lighting is still just a basic form. So let's go ahead and continue on with this in the next lesson. Thank you so much for watching, and I will be seeing you in a bit. 21. Creating a Rotating HDRI Night Sky with Custom Materials: Hello. Welcome back everyone to UnreelEngine five, Stylized night environment, BFX sliding, foliage and landscape design. That finished with our landscape terrain. Let's go back a little bit to the opposite side upwards. Let's go ahead and add some detail to our lovely sky that we're having over here. We're going to go back onto the selection mode just like that. And now we are going to well select the sky itself. Once you click on it, you should have the outliner selected as SM sky sphere. So this is what controls a sphere selection. You can click on the focus button clicking F will allow you to see what exactly this is, and this is just a massive dome going all the way around your scene. So how can we make use out of it? Well, if we have it selected, we'll be able to find ourselves the material being used, and just go all the way to the top. There we go elements. It's using a simple sky dome material, but we're going to create our own version for a night scene. Let's go ahead and use Control space to create a new material. Let's go on to content, and we can just create it over here. Let's right click and select material. This one we can call Sky so sky material. Sorry. There we go. Might be a little bit clear, just like that. We can now double click on it, and what can we do with it? Well, for starters, let's go ahead and find ourselves the texture for the sky. Let's go ahead, click Control Space, find the condon folder, click on textures, and you should be able to see where would it be extra textures? There we go. In extra textures, there's going to be HDR space. We can simply drag and drop it like so, and in order for us to make use out of this material for sky, we need to make a couple of different setups. First things first, we need to change the blend mode, sorry not the blend mode, the shading model to be unlit because, well, it's not going to be used for a shading of PBM material. It's just going to be background texture. The type of texture that we're using, by the way, is something called HDR space. If we double click on it, we'll see the type of setup. And right now, by default, it is set as this. Sometimes when you're using a texture, it needs a couple of adjustments. And before we get to that, I'd like to mention that this is an EXR format, meaning that the compressiveness of this format is, I believe, 32 bits. So the transition from here to here are the lines that we're going to see. Maybe it's not going to be quite as visible on the video, but the lines that we're seeing over here going to be less visible when we have the compression rate higher with Exar or dot HDRI formats. And other thing is that this resolution that we're using over here is set up as eight K texture, and you can see that imported texture is eight K, and then display texture is also eight K. So that's quite important because we are going to be using it as a cube map. Can see by default, once we're using these formats, previously mentioned EXR or HDRI formats, it's going to set itself up as a cube map, which is exactly what we want for a sky map. Then the next thing that we need to know is that sometimes the compression is not going to be quite as nice by default because it's going to try to use MIP maps, meaning that the further the texture is, the less of oil resolution that it's going to have. But because this is a skybox, it's always going to be visible. We need to make sure that it uses the maximum resolution possible. So within the level of detail, we need to make sure that it is using unfiltered. Or no MP maps. If one of those options are going to be fine, I think we can use no MP maps. Most of the time I use that. And we can see right away what it does. It has the transition from one to another way better in terms of the compression. The thing that might well compress these files is the compression setting itself. The compression setting over here, if we were to change from default to HDR precision. So this one over here. It's going to then compile and this type of compression is going to be well, a lot less optimized. But for the use of sky Boxes, it's exactly what we need, especially when we're using for nicenes. We can see the type of blurriness we're getting, the transition between the stars and all of the gases from black to, you know, to lighter color, we're going to have a much nicer softer transition. It's exactly what we want. Now that we have it, so we can go ahead and close this tab down, and it should save this out. Just going to check double click on it again. And yeah, these settings has been saved out. Now we have it like so, we can just simply attach it to a missive color like so, and it's going to say that UV world input required for cube map samples. Meaning essentially that hey, this is not a simple UV UV type of setup because it is a cube map. We need world coordinates, and by default, texture sample we use just simple UV coordinates. So what we need to do is we need to just right click Search for absolute Sorry, absolute world. We can search for world position. There we go. Sorry about that. If we select world position, we are going to find ourselves absolute world position. I'm not sure why the naming is like that, but it is what it is. And by default, it's just going to be like that. It should be kept as absolute world position. Then we can just attach this to the UV, and now the error is going to be fixed. We can hit Control, sorry, we can hit Apply, then hit Control Shift in S and then save it out. Or work, and right away, we can see that the type of a setup we're going to get is going to be this type of a sphere. Now, before we actually apply it onto our sky dome in order to make sure that the performance doesn't drop through the roof, there is one more tiny option to make use out of. When we click back on the material, we need to search for sky and there is an option is sky. We need to make sure we enable that, and this will allow us to well change the setup, and you can see when we're moving, it looks completely different now with the setup. This is exactly what we want. Basically will allow us to save up on the performance of the setup. Let's go ahead and hit Apply again, actually, hitting Control Shift and S, and I'm going to just turn off this a little bit. Then we're going to apply our created material onto this sphere. So let's find the material and create ourselves material insets right away because we're going to have some settings to play around with, of course. So let's right click Create material instance out of the sky material to get sky material instance. We're going to hit Control Shift in S to make sure that the start disappears. And now we can go back onto the sky sphere and select this button over here for materials. So you selected from content Browser. And there we go. We change it up. Now we can go back on to the inside of our environment. You might be scared now that like, Hey, we're way up in sky in space. What do we do? Well, we can select, for example, something like skylight, something that's smaller basically in comparison to SkySphere, which is virtually everything outside of clouds. So we can just select one of those and click F, and that's going to bring our scene back into reasonable location. And now we can see that, Hey, we have we have a sky. We have a sky, a night sky, lovely night sky. Of course, this is not finished. We need some additional setups. So let's work with those additional setups. The night sky requires a little bit of additional work in comparison to the day scene sky boxes. And the reason being is that the night sky will have a bunch of little stars, and if they're just stationary, if nothing is moving in the scene for the space, you know, the glorious space, then it's going to look fake. For some reason, our brains are better at detecting the night sky, making it look nicer. But when it's a day sky, you know, it's just like a nice little gradient, maybe some clouds on the back or something of that sort. And it's totally fine as a static. Here, though, we're going to need some controls, and let's start with the controls for this setup by going back onto the sky sphere, selecting the sky material instance. And let's get ourselves the first control for the rotation. The rotation of this sky texture because maybe, you know, when we are having a moon over here, the little galaxy over here, right behind it would not be quite as nice of a look. So we need to make sure that we are fixing this up with a little bit of an extra touch. So what can we do to have some controls for rotation? Well, there is a very nice node called rotate about axis. This node will allow us to control the rotation of the Skybox. So we can make use out of it by combining it with absolute world position node. So first of all, we'll combine XYZ into normalized rotation axis or sorry no. That's not right into the position. Yeah, because we're telling the position of the UV texture coordinates. And then we are going to have some control. So the way the controls are going to be set is going to be firstly, we're going to determine which axes are going to be rotation axis. And in this case, we want to be rotating essentially on Z axis. So if we have a look over here on the preview, we see that axis Z is facing upwards, which if we use it as rotation, is going to just rotate it like this sideways. So how do we do it? Well, we need to determine that using vector free, Um, we can click and hold free and then just tap on a graph and attach this to normalize rotation axis. And then we just say that, hey, we're using just Z value, which is going to be set to one, which is going to actually give us a blue color like so. Essentially, XY z, vector free can be used as a color picker as well. So that's why you'll see the combinations of the two sometimes with that setup. Anyways, going back to this, we're just telling now that Z axis is the only one that's going to be used for rotation, nothing else. And with that said, we can control what's being used for it. Pivot point, we're just going to use the default value being centered off the mesh. So that means that we just need a parameter for zero to be placed in a pivot point. We don't need to offset it or anything of that sort. Rotation angle, we're going to control it from the material instance. So by clicking a holding S, we can tap on the material graph, and now we can call this rotation like so and attach it to rotation angle, then hit Apply and we can go back onto sky material instance to see nothing because we need to go back to this. And I just realized that we need to now attach the rotate about axis to the UVs. However, we cannot attach it directly because if we were to attach it directly, it's going to offset the original world position axis. We need to basically add the value of this node onto the already existing UV information onto the already existing cube map UV information. So the way we do it is we just use a simple add map node. Like this. So combine X Y Z and the rotate about axis node, and then we output the UVs. There we go. Now we can finally hit Apply and this will give us this setup, which if I wish just to lower it enable the rotation. We can now use this to rotate our skybox, so that's quite nice. We can play around with rotation later once we get the rest of the settings, honestly, because we still have a long way to go to setting this up to make it look like lively, nice type of skybox. For now, though, we're going to leave it as is. Thank you so much for watching, and I will be seeing you in a bid. 22. Creating a Flickering Starfield with Animated Noise: Hello and welcome back everyone to Unreal Engine five stylized night environment, affects lighting, foliage, and landscape design. In the last lesson, we set ourselves up with a nice material for a skybox, although this is not quite there just yet because it's a little bit too static, and the stars themselves are a little bit too big overall. So let's go ahead and get ourselves more detail out of this entire night scene skybox. So going back to the material, what can we do about it? Well, for Saurus I'd like to add an additional um control for the brightness of the sky because if we're adding, well, additional detail onto it, we want to make sure that the main image, we're able to make use out of it to darken it or maybe even brighten it if we so desire. Let's go ahead and do that. All we need to do here is just simply create a multiply node, attach the output of the texture, and set up with a parameter that we can use from within the instance material. So holding S, we're going to tap on a screen, name it background exposure. Like so, and we can just attach it onto the multiply default value being one, so it would give us that same type of result that we already have just like that. All right. Next up, we are going to add a well, sky star pattern that will allow us to add smaller stars onto the texture. Even though if this texture is eight K resolution, all the tiny stars that we see in the texture itself, if I was just to open it, all of those tiny textures of the stars, they're still rather large. They're quite big for the detail. Once we start zooming in, you know, there is a lot of space that could be filled in with smaller stars. But even for eight K resolution, the tiny stars that we see in the sky wouldn't look quite right. So we're going to essentially overlay a starry seamless texture with the already existing Skybox material. Let's go on to the sky material. And for that, we're going to hold T and just click on the material graph. We're going to just simply select the detail Stab texture section, and we're going to search for star. Searching for S star, we should be able to find texture star sky stars over here. Let's go ahead and just simply use it. I think both of them are actually the same, so we can just make use out of it. Just double checking. Yeah, they seem to be the same actually. Let's go ahead and just make use out of it, and we're going to get this type of result. Now we're going to set this up with basic texture coordinates. This is not a cube map, a simple texture, so we're just going to use coordinate texture like so, and we're going to combine this with a multiplier tab, and holding S, we're going to create star scale multiplier. Which default can be set to ten to make sure that it overlaps ten times the amount of this texture, which is, I believe, 512 resolution. So even though it's a lot less than eight K that we're having on a skybox, because we're overlapping this ten times, we're going to get this result. And we can even check how it looks like real quick if I was just to attach this to the end of emission, emissive color just to kind of preview. There we go. You can see the amount of tiny little stars that we're getting out of this is going to be quite large. However, the type of the setup that we're having over here is a little bit too much too bright. We can set up a similar brightness control exposure that we have over here, the BG exposure. We can just do the same for these stars as well to make sure we have a little bit control over the brightness of them. Let's go ahead and hold S, tap on the screen and call it star noise, brightness. Like so. And the default value, we're just going to set it up as 0.5 because default, I think is a little bit too much. So that way, when we are attaching it like this, the brightness is going to be much, much smaller. So nice little basic setup. Now we need to make sure that there is some variation. When we're tiiling this by ten, it's going to give us a lot of noise that's going to be the same pattern. We want to make sure we have some variation within. So for that, we're going to set it up with a multiplier value. And we're going to multiply this with a texture sample. So holding T, clicking on this and searching for a nice little texture called Perlin noise Perlin noise mask. I think the first one, yep, it is. Let's go ahead and select it, and now we can overlay this with a multiply. I'm just going to reattach it real quick, like so, and we can see that this is the result that we're getting. It is going to give us a much much nicer variation, even though we're scaling it in the same kind of way. There is a little bit more of an extra detail out of the setup, which is pretty good. The parlise doesn't have any of complete black values, just some gray and white values. So when multiplying, it's not going to have too much variation. We can leave it as is basically. Now, moving on, we have ourselves some additional setup that we can do. Next setup that I'd like us to do is basically going to be motion for the stars. And what I mean by that, obviously, the stars aren't going to be moving. They're not going to be jiggling on anything. The stars are very far away when considering the grand scale of cosmics. But we need to make sure that they're flickering. We don't want them to be just static like this. We want to make sure that there is some additional Well, how should I put it? Additional light variation. So for us to do that, we are going to create a texture sample. The texture sample is going to be per line noise. This time, it's going to be because it's like, more of an intense contrast, so it has more of those black values over here. That's going to essentially turn off the stars in the section. If we were to set it up with a multiplier right away, we can see the results. So I'm just going to real quick reattach this. So by just using this Berlin noise, we can see that some of those stars are now giving us black patches in the system in the skybox. The default value is a little bit too large. So what we're going to do is we're going to use coordinates like so, and we're going to attach it to the UVs. And this, we're just going to use the value over here. We're not going to set it up with a multiplier that we did before in the past. We're just going to set it up with UV tiling, texture coordinates set to four, and now it's going to give us smaller patches of dark areas like so. Now, the next thing is, this is not animated. We need to make sure it's animated. So the node that we're going to use for that is going to be called Panner. Panner is a very nice node that allows us to essentially move and pan the texture off onto the side. If I wash just to attach it to the UVs like so and get the texture coordinates set to coordinate, just like that. We are going to have some motion, hopefully. I'm not sure if it's quite as visible. But if we look at the starts, we're not going to see any motion because we need to set up the speed. The speed itself is going to be, well, for now, we can just set it up to one to see how it looks like, and there we go. We can see them flickering, but by default, it's going to be quite a little bit too much. Yeah, it's going to be quite a little bit too much. So what we're going to do is I'm going to set this up to be one end value of 0.5 instead for Y, is going to give us some nice liquor going diagonally across, so. The speed itself, I think is going to be quite right because we don't want them to be just going off as stars. They're just going to be flickering a little bit. But in terms of variation, when it comes to the bigger setup, it's going to be not enough. So we need to overlay ourselves with another variant of this. To get more variation out of the spanner. So what we're going to do is we're going to select texture coordinate, panner and texture sample, hit Control C, Control V to make a duplicate, and now we have two variations out of this, but they are identical. So this version text texture coordinate, we're going to make the texture even smaller. So we're going to set it up eight by eight, making this way smaller, like so, and we're going to set this up with a multiplier, just like that. So these two noises will end up overlapping like and we can put output onto the multiplier. However, the panner here is a little bit too fast. So by playing around with values, I found that using a value of negative 0.1 and negative 0.1 is going to basically give us a good result. By having negative value in a panner, we're able to essentially go in the opposite direction of the positive value. So if it's X one and 0.5, it will be going to the right and 0.5 slightly upwards by half the speed. This one is just going to be diagonal going slower in the left and downwards. And that's going to give us this sort of result, which is nice little flickers of star lights, which is going to look pretty good. So yeah, we got ourselves star flickering. Of course, we need to combine it with the original setup that we had for the Skybox. That we are going to use a blend screen. So blend screen will allow us to combine two values, but it's going to essentially overlay the brightest parts of those values with one another. So everywhere where there is a white dots, is going to be kept as is the sky for the sky tiling. And whenever there is a darker patch from the skybox, it's going to just ignore it, basically. And on the brighter spot, it's going to give us where there's gas clouds and galaxies, it's going to give us nice outcome for the texture, essentially giving us this result. So we could technically do some overlaying with the panner or the texture multiplication like we did over here for the stars to make some parts flicker. But because the skybox has those gas clouds and whatnot, those nebulous visible when we are overlaying this with panners, it wouldn't look quite as nice, honestly. Better to just have some flickering from those tiled stars, which gives us just basically some of the stars flickering and all of it will end up looking pretty good. Let's go ahead and apply this. Like, so and have a look at the sky instance. So we can go ahead and click Control Shift and S and see how this looks like, and there we go. That is what we're going to get a nice little skylight of, well, all the nebulous, all the beauty of space in our unreal engine night environment. Of course, we're not quite done. We can play around with all these settings that we set ourselves up with the sky material instance. So for the exposure, let's go ahead and use a value of 1.19 for the background, just to make sure that some of those nebulas, OL are quite a bit brighter, like so. Rotation wise, we can set this up to 2.03, just because it moves the nebula a little bit more off to the side, and it's going to be next to the moon, and I think it's going to look quite nice overall. Then we are going to have star noise brightness set to 13, which is going to give us this. Oh, sorry. This is going to be, um, star brightness set to 0.32. There we go. We're going to lower the brightness of the stars, and the star scale multiplier is going to be set a little bit higher fif 13, just to make sure that they're a little bit smaller when we are combining the skybox, stars and these little stars, they're going to be looking quite nice. So yeah, feel free to play around with the values and whatnot, but I found that these settings are just looking quite nicely overall for the design. And yeah, that's pretty much it in regards to the setup of the Skybox. We're now going to continue on with the setup of making sure that we're getting nice moonlight and whatnot for the entire barment. So thank you so much for watching and I will be seeing you in a bit. 23. Building a Glowing Moon with Translucent Textures: Hello, and welcome back row to n Reel Engine five stylized night environment. We affects lighting, foliage and landscape design. Now that we have ourselves a beautiful scenery for the skybox, we're going to continue on working with, well, the sky itself, we're going to get ourselves the moon in the background. And the way we're going to do it is actually going to be quite simple. We're going to create ourselves a basic plane. So go to shapes plane, drag it onto the scene like that, and we are going to make a material for it. So for the material, we are going to create ourselves a new material. Like so call it the moon, and we're going to right click and create material instance as well. That way, we can check some parameters whilst we're doing this. So we're just going to drag the material that we created, the instance of it directly onto the plane, and this is the type of outcome we're going to get. Now we can go on to the material graph itself and start working a little bit with it. So what we need to get is going to be the moon texture. I already have it prepared within the textures folder. This one over here, we can just drag and drop it into the setup, and we're going to get ourselves texture sample for the moon. This material needs to be not a PBR, but just simply unlit shader that way because it's going to be quite a large object, we're going to save up some of the processing as well. And the other thing that we need to do is set it up to be as a translucent. So right now it is set as opaque, meaning that this entire piece is going to look well as a moon texture. I'm going to actually right now that we're setting ourselves up with a plane, I'm going to change the preview a little bit to be a plane instead of a spherical setup over here. We can click on this spot on the word, like, so in that way, we're getting this blank plane. If we were to attach RGB to theemissive color, we'll get the preview of the moon once it's setting up the shader, there we go. The thing is this texture is also a PNG format, meaning that the image itself has an Alpha Alpha for the moon. So it is quite a stylized moon. We're going to make use out of the Alpha to set it up with opacity. Opacity by default is going to be ticked off because we need to change this from opaque to translucent, as we talked previously. So because this PNG has a mask, it's able to directly set it up like so, but we're still not quite done. We want to have a little bit of an extra control while setting ourselves up with the moon in the environment. So first things first, what I like to do is I'd like us to get ourselves a little bit of a contrast control for this image directly from the material instance. Although we can do some controls from well, the image itself, you know, double clicking on it like we did with the grass. We can do some parameter controls from material graph. So what can we do? Well, we can right click and search for contrast. Contrast RGB or sorry, contrast preserved color. That's the one that we need. There is a cheap contrast version, but the one that we're going to use is this one because we're only using it for the moon. We don't really need to worry about the optimization too much because it's just for a single image. So we can just simply attach it to the color. And the contrast itself can have a parameter, so we can hold S, tap on the screen, and just call this contrast, like so and attach it to the contrast value. And just like that, we'll have ourselves controls over the contrast. So even if we were to set ourselves up onto the missive color now and set the default value to one, we can play around with this and see the type of contrast that we're getting out of the moon. Reason this is quite important as a control for unlit version is because we are trying to set this up to be more emissive. We're going to make it glow a little bit, meaning that once we start making it glow with a little bit of bloom in our post processing, it's going to lose a lot of detail within a texture if we don't have the control or the set contrast. So now that we have the contrast control, we're going to multiply this with strength value. So we can call this missive, sorry, emissive strength. Like so and set it up with a multiply, and that way we'll have control over the glow of the moon. And finally, the last thing that I'd like us to have is going to be a multiplier value of the color itself. That way we have some bit of control over the color of this moon. So we're going to multiply this again with a value for a vector free, which can also be used for change in color. So by default, we're going to want to have this as white, meaning that it's not going to have any effect to the moon, and we're going to set it up with multiply, and this is also going to be set as parameter or color just like that. Now we can attach this to a missive color like so, and hit Apply just like that. And we have ourselves a very nice little setup except there is one more thing that I like to check, and that would be within a detailed step if we were to search for shadow with the material selected. We'll see a couple of options. We need to make sure that the contact shadow is ticked off. Otherwise, it would create shadows which would be performance heavy, cast ray traced shadows. This could be ticked off as well if you're using ray traced rendering or if you'd like to have that. But yeah, that's pretty much it. We can now go ahead apply, close this down and open ourselves up with the material instance. Like, so Oh, that's a sky. That's not a material instance. That's the material instance for the sky. We need the moon. There we go. Now, these parameters, we can play around with them and see how it works. For example, if we were to change this strength to be something like ten, it starts glowing and it's very lovely, and you can see that it loses the details. So we can, for example, play around with the contrast to get the information back. And the color, once we start dragging around the color a little bit, we can get various different shades for the moon. Is also pretty handy. I'm going to go ahead and just put this back to default because we're going to change these values when we're putting this up in the sky. Before putting this up in the sky, though, let's go onto the plane, search for shadow. Like, so we're going to tick off cast shadow. If you don't have this ticked off, it's going to be very performance heavy because this entire plane is going to be outside of the setup. Now, what do we do about this little moon? Well, we'll want to put this moon right over into the horizon. And for that, we're going to rotate this plane a little bit, just so it would be facing us. We're then going to move it a little bit off to the side, just like that. And what we're going to do now is going to be a little bit more interesting because we want to have an illusion that the moon is big. But of course, the skybox is not at the same distance as where the realistic moon would be. If we were to drag this moon past the skybox, it wouldn't be visible. So we want to make sure that it is right in front of the skybox, but we don't want this moon to be too close to us because if we're moving our camera around, it's going to be quite clear that the peripheral setup, the perception of the moon being there, even though it looks quite nice in a stationary setup might then look quite a bit weird. So yeah, what we're going to do the plan of this is just simply move this as close to the skybox edge as possible, and then we're going to play around with the size and orientation. We're also going to just simply double click on the plane to just simply rename this or alternatively, you can click F two with this plane selected, call it the moon, and we have ourselves the moon. Like so. And now we are going to get our camera scroll our mouse down while sorting right mouse button, get our camera movement quite high, so we can just move it outside of this landscape and then drag this all the way to the end, like, so until we get to the very edge. At this point, we might not be able to see the moon. So what we're going to do is we're going to change the scale. We're going to lock in the scale to make sure that everything is being changed at once. We're going to change it to something larger, 10,000 100,000 up to you as long as we see the moon basically, because then afterwards, we can just scroll outwards like so and start seeing where this sky that we have is set. There we go. I'm seeing the edge of the sky. We are going to bring it over to the very edge. Or what we can do is actually we can select the edge, find ourselves where the sky sphere is, and basically go to the top down view. But, yeah, we can just use this one over here. We can click on this button to get four different panels, and one is going to show the top, another one is going to show the back and left side. So we're going to find ourselves at the top. We're going to have the sky sphere still selected, hover over the top section where it has a top perspective, we can click F, and now we're going to have this sphere visible in our viewport. Now we're going to go ahead and select back onto the moon or we can just simply outline our search for moon and find the moon plane. And then we are going to find where this moon is, and there we found ourselves to the little moon then we're going to bring the moon back into the setup. So it's going to be quite close to the edge but not going outside of the setup. This way, we're going to have the moon plane, basically not overlapping. The sphere, we want to make sure it's inside of the sphere, and we're going to have a nice setup. Now we have it like this, we can I'm just going to bring it inwards, just a little bit more. We can go back onto the viewport, original viewpod. We can click one and see what's up. This is the type of moon that we're having at the moment. This is quite big, a little bit too big. For sure, we can go ahead and make it quite a bit smaller. So at this point, I'm just going to take off a zero, and there we go. We got ourselves a little moon. And now, what can we do with it? Well, first of all, let's lower the camera sensitivity. Scroll downwards, like so. Now we're going to do something a little bit more interesting. We're going to set ourselves this moon with additional controls to make sure that we don't just need to move this moon like this out in the setup because once you start moving the moon off on a distance, you're going to realize that the moon itself is flat. So this type of conspiracy needs to be hidden in our game, and we need to make sure that we are definitely having something that well, allows us to make the move make the moon move in accordance to the face being facing landscape. All of that, we can continue on with the next lesson. Thank you so much for watching, and I will be seeing you in a bit. 24. UE5 Controlling Moon Rotation and Layering for Camera Angles: Hello and welcome back everyone to Unreal Engine five stylized night environment, VFX, lighting, foliage and landscape design. We got ourselves a very nice, pretty moon in a distance. We can move around and the peripheral vision is not going to change. So that is very, very nice for us, although we need to make some bit of changes for that. So the type of changes that we need to do is set ourselves up with this moon to be with certain controllable. So we wouldn't just move the moon to the side, and it's going to start looking flat. We need to make sure we have something that will allow us to control this moon. So what can we do? Well, we can create ourselves a little moon control. And for that, we are going to simply create a cube shape. This one over here, we're just going to move it up a little bit somewhere so it wouldn't go in our way. The location of this doesn't matter too much because the distance of the moon is so far away that you're never going to realize that it's, like, offset or anything of that sort. We're going to select this cube. We're going to hit F two, and we're going to call it moon control. Like so. And now we have ourselves. Well, let's go ahead and select it again, Moon controls. We're going to now right click on this and move this to the lighting folder because it's going to be part of the overall lighting setup. So now we have ourselves cube. The thing is, though, that this cube that we're going to be controlling is visible in the scene. We don't want this to be visible. We want to make sure that it's just visible when we are seeing the rest of the icons and whatnot. So what can we do? Well, if we have this cube selected, we can just simply search for game, and it's going to find ourselves actor hidden in game. We have this ticked on, nothing's going to happen unless you click G. And when you click G, it's going to hide all of those game icons as well as this cube over here. So it's quite important to know because if you're rendering, basically, it means that it's not going to be visible within your scene. Now we have this cube that's not going to affect the world. We can select the moon. We can right click on the moon and select move to buy and control. Or sorry, no, we need to not move it. We need to attach to because we're attaching this to another object, and we can find the control setup over here, then select this like this. And now this moon is going to be inside of this little cube, meaning that whenever we are moving this cube around, like this. If we want to make sure that it's not just glitchy, we're going to turn off the rotation snapping. And this way, we can see that moon rotation is nicely set up for us. So that is very, very good to see. So we can have the moon anywhere we want in our world. I'm going to click one now, and I'm going to just position this moon in the area that I want. Which is going to be a little bit more closer to this section. So now that we have the moon position nicely, we can select back onto the moon, and we can just click and hold and then drag or actually clicking and holding and dragon is going to give us minimal controls. So what I'm going to do instead is I'm going to make sure that we have 10,000 as a base scale, and then we can just change one to two to be 20,000 or even two to three to be 30,000. And is that enough? That's a little bit too much. So let's go back to 20,000 and just change it to 2,500. And I think as a moon, that might be quite right. Oh, I changed the rotation of the wrong thing, but I'm going to go ahead and just do it like this a little bit. Little bit of tweaking, little bit of adjustment. We can always go back to the moon if we make some adjustments when we are building up this ruins setup. But now that we have the controls of the moon, everything is shaping up to be great. Now you might be wondering about, well, the clouds being in front or sorry, in the back of the moon, no matter what. And that is going to be partially of the priority. So if we change the priority translucent priority to something like minus now, I know that some of you might want to make this moon way in the background with the clouds being overlapping in terms of, you know, the volumetric clouds being in front of it. In this case, for this particular scene, we're going to do slightly different type of setup. But if you want to have clouds where it's behind it, it's not just enough to move the moon all the way through bag because it's going to still be the clouds still are going to be um well, behind it because that's the way they're rendered. The quickest way of fixing that would be to simply go onto the moon setup and change the opacity from translucent to masked. Then make sure to simply change the opacity mask from opacity to well, opacity mask. Way, when we hit Apply, we're going to have a moon cut out, meaning that translucency issue that we had previously is not going to be an issue. The only thing that we would need to do is we would need to make sure that the skybox that we have would need to be a little bit bigger, so it would encapsulate all of the clouds. So that's pretty much it in regards to the setup of the moon. I'm just going to glick Control and Z and make sure that we have that same opacity that we had previously, like this one, because with this, we'll have the moon always in the front for such a stylized scene. It's I think, much better. Thank you so much for watching and I will be seeing you in a bit. 25. Adding Stylized Glow and Cloud Layers to the Moon: Hello and welcome back everyone to Unreal Engine five stylized night environment, VFX lighting, foliage and landscape design. That we have ourselves a nice little moon with a little bit of a bloom for well, from post processing, we're going to work with some of the overlays of the moon, adding some additional panels to overlay some, well, nicer glow for the moon for Saurus and then we're going to add clouds, small little cloud planes to make sure we're getting a nicer effect instead of just having these uncontrollable volumetric clouds. So what can we do? Well, to start off, we're going to go ahead and click on the moon, click F, and zoom in to the big chunky boy over here. And we're going to go onto the content folder, right click on an empty space. Greater LSE material, and we can call this one Radial moon glow. So right away, I'm going to right click and create material instance, just like that. Now you might be wondering what do we do with it? Well, we're going to create a duplicate out of this moon, select the moon, click Control C, Control V, and we're going to slightly put this moon behind our already existing moon, be slightly behind it like so. Then we're going to increase the scale to be something like six. Actually, let's make sure we have the lock turned on so when we're scaling, all of the axis are going to be scaled upwards, like so. And we are going to have something like this, basically a massive moon behind our little moon in front. This massive moon, of course, needs to have a different material, so we're going to find the material element, and we're going to replace it with the radial moon. Let's go ahead and select the radial moon. Instance, material instance, we're going to go back onto the plane and click this little button to use selected asset from the content browser. So now it's just going to have a pitch black plane behind our moon in front. Of course, we're going to make some adjustments for it. And for that, we are going to go into the material instance, so radial moon mass material, and we are going to start creating some tweaks for it. Rosas, let's go ahead and change this to be a translucent and also unlit, just like we had with the moon. We are then going to make use out of a little node called radial exponential, so radial gradient. Exponential, this one over here. This node will allow us to well get ourselves a nice little mask. If we were to change the preview to the plane and just attach this right away to opacity, we'll see that by default, we are getting this, which is essentially a circular alpha, which is exactly what we want to make the glow. We're going to make sure we have some controls from the instance. Holding S, we're going to tap on the screen. We're going to create a radius parameter, just like that, attach it to the radius, holding S, we're going to create density like, se and attach it to the density just like down. And now we have control for how big this is and the density of it as well. We can set these both to one for now and we're going to control that in a bit. But before doing the controls, we need to make sure that we have emissive controls as well. We need to make sure we have the color controls. We're going to hold free and tap on the graph, and we're going to right click onto this vector free that we created, set it up as a parameter, and call this color. Then we're going to set our selves up with a multiplier value and we're going for this multiplier to be a strength. This color is going to be multiplied with a certain strength, which is going to give us intensity control for the emissiveness. Now, once we apply, we are going to have ourselves a very nice instance control for the radial setup, and by default, this is what we're going to have. Now we can just enable all of these options like so, and first things first, what we want to change is probably going to be the strength itself. Or actually, let's go ahead and just play around with the radius and density once we change up the color. So I'm going to go ahead and change up the color to white for now. That way, we can change up the radius of this, and we can start seeing that, Hey, we have controls for how white we want this glow to be so for this particular glow, we're going to have something like this, a value of 0.37. I think it's a good little start. The density can be smaller, so this will allow us to control the transparency, how much we're getting out of this mask. So we can set this value to 0.8. I think that's going to be a good value, so radius now looks like it's a little bit too much, so let's lower it down by a little bit. Value of 0.28 seems quite right. As for the strength, this is going to control how much the glow is being set. So before we do that, let's go ahead and change the color to make it glow a little bit more of a bluish tint. Like, so let's click Okay. And this is looking much better. There we go. So the strength is going to be a value of 0.26. I think that's quite all right. Maybe a little bit more. 0.26. There we go. Sorry, 2.6. Yeah. That looks very nice. I'm quite happy with the result. Let's go ahead and click Control Shift and S to save everything out, closes down. Click one and see how it looks like within our environment. And that's how we get an additional glow that's more stylized towards the environment setup. Now that we have this lovely little glow. Let's make sure we have some additional setup for cloud system. What I mean by that is let's go back onto the moon and let's create a duplicate out of this moon again. Holding Alt, we're going to make a duplicate by moving it out of the Gizmo, like this. And yeah, the starting point is going to be that we just make it a little bit more in the front, just like that. And we are going to create a new material for the cloud. So let's go ahead and do that. We're going to right click. We're going to right click on the side, create material, call it moon Cloud, like so, and we're going to right click and create material instance out of it. And right away, we're just going to apply it onto display. So that way, we can start working with the master material for the moon cloud. So now we are going to begin by doing what we did with the glow which is going to be making sure that the setup is translucent and unlit like so, and this will allow us to make use out of a missive color and opacity. Or the opacity. What we're going to do is we're going to hold T tap on a screen to get texture sample. We're going to grab ourselves a Cloud texture, which is going to be within the content browser. There we go Cloud texture 02, Cloud texture 03. We're going to just use one for now and we can set ourselves up with opacity. The thing that I'd like us to do now though, is make sure that we're not setting it up with just the normal opacity as is because I'd like to have a little bit more control out of the opacity. What I'd like us to do is simply, well, the color of the cloud is pure black. I'm just going to click on this little square over here, which allows us to also change the color, and I'm going to just change this to white. Instead, that way, we'd have a white cloud more visible for the setup. All right. Now, instead of using the multiply to control the opacity, we're going to right click and search for clamp. Clamp will allow us to well clamp down the maximum value, essentially allowing us to make the parts that are well completely visible to be partially transparent, but it's not going to affect the already partially transparent areas. And what I mean by that is if I was to attach the texture of the cloud to opacity like so, and we're going to get this result, we can change the maximum value to something like for example, at this point, five, just as an example, and we can see that the areas that were completely non transparent are now a little bit transparent. But the smaller areas where the transparency was already partial is not going to be affected. So we are essentially clamping down the value of an Alpha, and we only need to do this minimally to the value of 0.9, just to get a slight bit of result, just to make sure that the moon is always going to be visible no matter what, and a cloud is not going to just overlay that setup and I think that is going to be looking quite nice. We are running out of time, though. I think we're going to continue on with this in the next lesson. Thank you so much for watching, and I will be seeing you in a bit. 26. Animating Volumetric Clouds with Texture Coordinates: Hello, welcome back everyone to Anreil Engine five, stylized night environment, VFX lighting, foliage and landscape design. In the last lesson, we left ourselves off with the cloud setup for the texture, which we're now going to continue adding ourselves up with some detail. And first things first, we're going to make sure we have some control over the color of the cloud because even though the white fluffy cloud looks quite nice, because all the clouds in the background are set up with volume metrics, they're going to inherit the color of, well, the light direction lighting that we're having and we need to make sure we're matching that up a little bit. So these white fluffy clouds wouldn't stand out too much and would look like it's part of the scene instead of just being like cutouts or decals. So we're going to hold M, tap on the screen, and add in the value of the cloud, as well as hold free and add in the value of a color. We're just using this as a base color seta because this texture is basically going to have various values for gray and white, and it's just going to add a bit of detail to the cloud color instead of us using this for just opacity, we're going to make sure we're using this for the color as well. So for this, we're just going to apply it with a simple vector free multiplier value, and default value we can be whatever it wants because we're going to change this to be a parameter, just to make sure that we have some control over the color. Like so, let's go ahead and attach this to a missive color, and right away, we're going to have ourselves some orange clouds. So I think I'm just going to make it a little bit more visible. So we could actually see what's going on. There we go. A little bit of an extra visibility. Alright, so what else can we do with these clouds? We don't want these to be stationary. We want to have some motion because, again, these clouds in the background all are moving. We are making sure that we are matching that a little bit and adding some motion onto this transparent cutouts of the clouds. So what can we do? Well, for Saras we'll need ourselves a coordinate node, texture coordinate. This is going to be the default of DVs, and we're going to add in to this texture coordinate. So right click and find add like so and we are going to distort the UV coordinates to make it wobble a little bit. So what can we do with it? Well, we can get ourselves a texture. Or simple texture color, we can hold T and click on a graph, and we can find a texture called wind noise game wind noise. It's very nice because these are colored in various ways, and every color can be translated to a vector free, which is going to be like this. Red, green, and blue indicates X, Y, and Z values. And because this has a noise of a variety of colors. It's going to be able to allow us to distort it in multiple ways for the texture. So if we were to just simply add this entire piece, it's going to give us an error. The reason being is that this is using RGB, so vector free. Whereas the texture coordinate is using the two vectors, so vector one and vector two. So we need to make sure that we are using that same amount as well over here. We can start off well trying it by attaching simple one vector like this, and it's going to be used onto vector one and vector two simultaneously, giving us some really bizarre type of looks. So right now this is a little bit too much. So first things first, we're going to set ourselves up with a multiply value. And the multiply value is just going to be set as 0.1, and that's going to give us the intensity for offsetting the cloud. So you can see if we have this at 0.5, for example, we have some really strong intensity. So we're going to set this up with animation offset or animation strength. Like so and set the multiplier value of this wind noise texture with a multiplier of 0.1 and adding it onto the texture coordinate, giving us a nice little distortion. But of course, this little distortion is not enough for animation. We need to make sure it actually is moving. And just like we did previously, we're going to use a pattern, which will allow us to, well pan the texture just like we did with the stars if we were to set this up with the UVs and the texture coordinate needs to be texture coordinate, so the time can be set as is because we can just simply control the speed of the timer through X and Y coordinates. So the time being default is going to be reasonable to control the speed to make it a little bit, well, nicer for us. We are going to use vector two. However, there is a bit of an issue with Unreal engine if we were to create vector two and try to convert this vector two into parameter. It's actually going to create vector three, so going to give you all of those RGB values. So we don't need to overcomplicate it for ourselves. Instead, what we're going to do is we're going to create two separate parameters for X and Y, like so, and then we're going to combine them into vector two. So for us to do that, we're going to use a node called append. Just a pen vector, and we're going to use A and B for that to combine X and Y into vector two, just like that. And this will allow us to, well, if we start using the values over here, it's going to allow us to distort the clouds, make them distort while the texture is moving, it's going to add that information to the texture coordinate of the cloud, giving us this very wonky result. Right now, this result is well it's how should I put it? It's not quite right. It's only going to be offsetting it diagonally. The reason being is that we're only using the red channel to make sure we are using vector two, just like we did for the texture coordinate to make sure we're not using just single value. We need to make sure that we are adding red channel and green channel. So previously, we combined the two vectors. Now we're going to basically do the same. We're going to go ahead and drag it out from R, search for append and a pen vector, and we're going to drag it out from G and append. The red and green values together. Now we're going to multiply this. The multiply itself is going to contain those two values. So if you click on the multiply, we can see that we're getting constant A and constant B, which is then going to be added onto the constant A and constant B, two vectors. And just like that, we are going to have a nice wobbly result which we can control. So for example, if we want the white B zero, it's only going to pan this noise in one direction. So, yeah, that's pretty much it with the setup for the clouds. We can now go ahead and just apply this, save this out, and close this and play around with values to make sure that we are getting a nice little cloud lay in front of our moon. So the only thing I just forgot is that we're going to have a second cloud, actually. But let's not worry about that just yet because we can set ourselves up with the first setup of the cloud. And I just realized that there might be a little bit of an issue. Yes. So even though the plane is in front, the moon is still overpowering the cloud because of the high intensity for the emission. So what we can do is with the selection of the moon, we can go onto the detail stab. I'm actually going to close this window down not to overcomplicate it. We can select this cloud and we can go onto the detail Stab and search for priority. Priority will allow us to change the translucency priority. So by changing this to a value of one, it means by default, the moon was set at zero, and this being set to one will give us the transparency, although, looking at this now, we might need to adjust we might need to adjust the clamping value as well. So let's close down the search bar. Let's go back onto the material and fix up some couple of issues with the master material. First things first, the clamp value. Let's go ahead and just set up lamp value, like so, which can be set to 0.9. And the next value is going to be, well, the texture sample. Let's go ahead and right click and set it up to be a cloud texture like so. And now we can go ahead and apply. And within here, we're going to have clamp and cloud texture. So now, if this clamp was set to one, we are going to see a little bit more of that cloud, although it's still not quite as visible. Let's adjust the shape a little bit right away because I just realized that what we're having over here is, well, a blob on the side. I'm going to go ahead and just rename this moon plane to make sure that it set a cloud plane instead, and it's still going to be attached to the mood controls. So whenever we are moving the moon, it's going to be in position with the clouds as well. So what do we have over here? Let's have a look. Well, we have this little shape. So we can go ahead and start playing around with its values, so we can just rotate it, make it look a little bit nicer. And in order to make sure that we are rotating the right way, we are going to change the world space coordinates to be using local space coordinates. That way, when we are rotating, it's not going to change the angle of the plane. But that's pretty good. And I'm just going to now make sure that we are having a nice little cloud in front just like that. And the strength of the moon he's a little bit too strong, I reckon. Although it's looking quite nice. At aber, we make some little adjustments. So we can go ahead and just make this stretch out a little bit. If we want to, where would the scale be? There we go. I'm going to take off the lock from the scale and just change up the X coordinates. So it would be four 2-4, like this. We're going to have much wider setup. And now, if we click one, we can see the cloud is looking quite nicely. The only thing is that the strength for the animation might be a little bit too much. Let's go ahead and lower this down. Value to 0.3 for X and 0.1 for Y, and then we can change the animation strength to 0.01. And just like that, we're going to have a little bit of a wiggle. And that's honestly all we need. We can now change up the color as well. The color can be a little bit more of a bluish tint, and you can see just right away the type of effects going to get. We're just matching up the colors to be the ones, the same color with AverClouds just like that. And the clamp can be set to a value of 0.5 0.95, it's going to be quarter right. And on top of that, we can make a duplicate out of this plane, just like that, and we can change the cloud texture for this one, to use Cloud texture 03. And just like that, we're going to have two little clouds that are going to look quite nicely in the setup. Let's go ahead and just maybe lower the size of this one to be a little bit smaller of a cloud. But maybe set it to free. There we go. That's a nice little cloud. And this one can have a clam value of six, maybe 0.8. So I'm just checking the result. And that's looking pretty good. The strength of the clouds can be a little bit higher up now that I'll have a look at it to make sure it wobbles a little bit more. And I think the color can be a little bit darker up as well. Yeah. That I think will help so small little tweaks just to make sure it better fits in with the rest of the design. There we go. After having a closer look on the cloud setup as well, I realized that it might be best to also have a control for the opacity. And although in the original plan, I did not have that, just having multiplier for the opacity will help us to control the opacity of the mask a little better. So let's go ahead and do that. I apply, and the default value should be set as one, there we go. So now we have opacity. And with this, not only does the clamp work, but also the opacity for this one, and we want to have a little bit transparency. We don't want it to be too much. We can also, of course, set it something like this up where some other cloud will go over the moon, which would be totally fair. I would like this to be small little setup, though. So having it as a value of 0.6, I think we do much better. And with that said and done, we got ourselves a nice little moon with a nice little glow, which we can also go back to adjusting a little bit. So maybe a little bit of a tweak for the radius, just a little more. There we go. Something like that might be a little bit better, although it's a little bit too much. So maybe 0.29 instead. There we go. So feel free to play around with the settings parameters as much as you want to get a nice little glow. And all in all, I think it'll turn out quite nicely. So that's going to be it for me. Thank you so much for watching, and I will be seeing you in a bit. 27. Replacing Greybox Arcways with Latticed Ruin Structures: Hello and welcome back everyone to n reel Engine five Stylize, night environment, FX sliding, foliage, and landscape design. In the last lesson, we finalized our setup for the beautiful moon we see in the background. Now we're going to continue on with the ruins setup. If I was just to lower my camera while folding right mouse button, just to make sure it doesn't fly off into the distance, we can get back onto our ruins grey box. So within here, we can, well, change from the game exposure to make sure we lighten up our environment. We can just tick game settings to make it a little bit more bright, and we can start bringing out the environment pieces. So what do we have? Well, we have a styles ruins kit, and if we go to model section, we're going to have all sorts of asset pieces that we need to use to well, set up with this entire section. So first things first, I reckon we can sort ourselves out with this section over here, making sure we have a nice archway going all the way across like so. And to use that, we will firstly find ourselves with an arch way within the settings. So this one archway B one is going to work quite well for the upper section. Let's go ahead and bring it into the scene, like so. And place it at the very top. I'm going to rotate it, actually going to click Control Z, going to lock in rotation. That way, when we are rotating, we're going to get ourselves to 90 degrees and clicking W moving upwards, now we have a bit of an issue here. What do we do when we have this sort of a setup? Well, there are a couple of ways of fixing this. If we want this to be a little bit wider, we can even even go to scaling and just scale it outwards. So, which might be quite right because, well, it's still going to look quite nice. It's not too stretched out. But if we look at the sides, they're going to be wider, and maybe that's not exactly what we want. So alternative thing that we can do is we can go on to the modeling section over here. And use deformers. Deformers are great whenever we want to make some additional adjustments outside of just scaling. So we can use a lettuce deformer over here. And with lettuce deformer, we can make some adjustments. So once it loads, we're going to get these dots over here. We're going to firstly start by just changing everything to be set to two. Like so, and then we're going to determine which one we need to make use out of. And this is going to be X axis resolution. By changing this, we can see that we have multiple pieces in here, and we're using five as a resolution because it's going to keep the arc on the side, the pillars on the side, not stretched out, but we can move the former in the center area to kind of stretch everything out except for those pillars on the side. And if we were to do that, just like that, we're going to get a nice stretch out section right in the middle. But the part on the side is going to be kept the same, meaning that this part, if we have a better lighting, this part is not going to be as wide as we had before when we were scaling. All we need to do now is click Accept and it's going to change up the mesh. So now this mesh will be it's going to be changed as well, so that's something worth knowing. If you want to have well variation that doesn't affect this kind of mesh, what you would have to do is basically, you would have to create a duplicate out of this mesh. So right now you can see that when bringing this inwards, we're going to have this type of issue. If you don't want this to happen, always make sure you well before doing this operation, you create a version that's going to be an additional one. So right now, I'm looking at the settings. And although here, it says it would autogenerate a new asset with in a folder, there was no option that would create that. Unfortunately, so yeah, always just in case, go to create option over here, form option over here and use duplicate. When using duplicate, you can click Accept, and that's going to create another version in your section. So over here, if I was just to select this button over here, which will browse this item in a content browser, we can see that we made another version. So if I was to make well adjustments, like we did before, using lettuce, for example, if I was to move this upwards and click Accept, this outer part is not going to change. So that's something worth knowing, although for this particular section, we're only going to use this one arc only once, even so it's still good to know. Now, before we continue on with the setup, let's go ahead and make sure that everything is organized properly. And what I mean by that is all of these cubes over here are set up. Well, outside of our outliner, just not within a folder or anything like that. So we're going to make sure we click Shift space, sorry, Shift Control and use in order to organize everything, what we're going to do is we're going to use Control and Alt. So Control and Alt, and you're going to use our left mouse button just like that to drag it across. When using Control and Alt drag left mouse button, and you're going to be able to just make a selection just like that. Make sure you hold Control and just tap out on the landscape to deselect this entire selection for just the landscape. Now I'm also going to click Control and Left Mouse button to make sure I deselect this asset that we have previously. And now we're only left well with this. Let's just make sure we move it off to the side and click Control Z. To make sure everything is moving with us. So that's good. Now we can simply click right Mouse button and select if we go to the bottom, move to create new folder, and we can call this gray box just like that. Now, additionally, if you want to be an extra careful what you can do for the organization's sake, you can select this entire grey box piece or all of the pieces just like that. So we're just selecting everything that's in a folder. And you can make use out of game item actor hidden in the game. We're going to most likely use that for the future. But by using that, we're able to essentially we hide everything whilst in the game, and by clicking G, we can just simply hide and anhyd all the unvited objects. So when we are replacing all of the asset items, by just using the G, we'll be able to hide and anhyd all the pieces. Speaking of which, it seems like the staircase pieces are not selected. So let's see what's going on over here. I'm going to go ahead and just select the folder, right click and select all descendants. Just try moving this off to the side. Everything is selected. So I guess I missed out on the selection for the stairpieces. So just make sure you have everything selected. And again, using this actor here in the game, might be pretty beneficial. Now we're going to go ahead and do some additional setup. Well, of course, we need to because this entire archway is floating. So let's go ahead and grab some use out of our ruins pack. Let's see what we can do. We have some bricks over here, so let's try to make use out of them. I think by just grabbing a couple of bricks, we'll be able to make some nice variations. So let's go ahead and grab a couple, like so. And I think we can either grab all of them like this or we can just have the two of them, so we're going to make some variation by simply duplicating this out and rotating 180 degrees. This way, it makes sure that well, we're having same scaling, whilst at the same time, we can have a bit more variation scaling the individual piece of bricks. And once we have it like so, we can simply set it up to be more in size for this area. So let's go ahead and do that. We're going to start off by just putting it in the center area. I'm going to click GNw so it wouldn't get in our way and we can start thinking about, well, what can we do about it? How can we set this up to be more aligned? I'm just going to double check real quick, and we are simply going to scale them down in only Y and X axis. So Z is going to be still quite chunky. Then we can just adjust Z axis afterwards. And with having this entire selection like this, we can bring out a nice little setup. And I think we can make it even smaller, just like that. So the part at the top is going to be quite a little bit smaller in comparison, maybe a little bit thicker, like so. And let's turn off the grid locking. So that way, we can just place it like so. And again, at this point, we're just making sure that the general setup is somewhat reasonable, which I think it is. We can perhaps maybe make this a little bit out giving us a little bit of a gap over here, just moving the bricks around, making sure that the placement of positioning is nicely set up. And once we have the general setup, we can just select all four of those bricks, make sure we are right clicking, moving them onto a separate folder, just to make sure we keep our setup organized. We can call this one just bricks, archway. So just to make sure that if we do select this piece, when we're duplicating, we can always right click and use select all descendants on the folder and it will just select all the pieces. Afterwards, we can hit Alt and just move this downwards so duplicate the setting. We can also just move these bricks 90 degrees and just reposition them back to be centered. Like this, this way, it's going to look like completely different bricks, just like that. And I'm realizing that this brick at the top was a little bit too chunky perhaps. So just going to make sure we realign this original setup just a little bit in terms of z axis, making sure that none of the bricks are floating like that. Like, so Yep, looks right. Now I can select the bottom pieces. I like so. And we are going to simply actually, we're going to select everything within a fold at this time. So now it's a layer, two layers of bricks, and we can make a duplicate it again, just like that, and it's going to give us a nice little setup, and we're going to duplicate it again until we hit the ground. So I think at this point, can still do it like so, and we're going to get ourselves this nice little setup. Now we can start thinking about the shape, the way those bricks are interacting with the archway. And we could make a duplicate on the outside right away, but I'd prefer to just walk on one side and then just put it onto the outside afterwards. So what can we do? Well, for starters, we can make the bricks at the bottom way larger. And I think that would be very good for us. So what can we do? Well, we can just use Control and Alt and just make selection just like that. Hit Control, we select this entire piece, and still not going to select entire of the bricks. So let's go to the out side. Control Alt, make selection over here, Pol control the select this bricks, and I'm just going to move it off to the side. And I just realized that we need to use Control Alt and Shift to make a selection just so it would it wouldn't lose the selection. So whilst holding Control and Alt and using our love mouse button, we can also hold Shift and select additional selection. Just going to move this off to the side. And I'm seeing this brick over here, just going to click it. Yep, we were missing a brick, so I'm just going to hold Shift and just select Oh, no, going to hold Control and select this part. And that way, I'm just making sure that all the bricks that we have over here are selected. I think, actually, one more brick is missing, so there we go. All of them are selected. Now with the bottom layer bricks selected, we can just click R to go on scaling mode and just simply scale them upwards just by a little bit like so, and then we can just reposition this what we're going to also do is make sure that this in front is going to be quite flat and only the parts outside are going to be well sticking out. I think that's going to look much better. Just making sure that it's nicely positioned. And we are having this type of a look. It helps us to break this down a little bit. And this layer over here is actually floating, so I'm just going to go ahead and select it real quick, make it, scale it upwards a little bit, stick it inside of the bricks, just a little bit. So it's going to look quite nice. Now, we can select this entire pillar for the bottom of the archway. Like this, select all the sentences and slightly readjust it. So this part is going to have more of a gap. The reason that I'm doing this is because I know that once we mirror it to the other side, it's going to end up this entire chunk block of chunks, is going to end up making the path in this middle section just too narrow. So once we have the entire section like this, we can go ahead and select all of the bricks. We can right click and we can use Transform Mirror axis. Actually, we need to make sure we duplicate it. So holding Alt, I'm going to make sure I duplicate this entire pillar. Then we can right click and use transform mirror axis. I believe it's Y. I'm just looking at the Gizmo over here. No, it's going to be X, actually. And what it X? No, it was not, actually. So I'm going to transform YX. There we go. It was YXs. So now, this flat section over here on the inside of the archway is going to be also flat on the overside by just simply using transform mirror with multiple selections of the bricks, we are able to get ourselves a nice little symmetry out of this archway. So that's how we would set ourselves up with all of these brick patterns, and everything is still within this one folder over here. And we can even select this brick archway as well and just simply right click on it and move it to the bricks Archway. And we can leave it as it is. So that's going to be it from this lesson. Thank you so much for watching. We have completed the entrance archway. We're now going to continue on moving on to well, the rest of the ruin setup. 28. Building Platform Foundations with Modular Bricks: Hellon, welcome back everyone to Unreal Engine five Stylized night environment, VFX sliding foliage, and landscape design. In the last lesson, we set ourselves up with this nice little arc over here. We are now going to continue on with the setup for the entire environment, which if you click G because it's in using actor hitting game, it's going to bring back the gray box so we can easily compare well with the setup by just clicking G, turning off and on the gray box like that. Let's go ahead and work with well, the platforms. Let's see what we can do with them. Well, for Cartus, if we have a look at the design, we'll see that the type of bricks that we're using is, well, there are two variations. One type is going to be these larger stone blocks like so, and another type will be smaller brick types, where you can see also them being on the side. So we're going to use larger bricks to create certain platforms on the setups, and then we're going to set the walls up afterwards for this section over here to make our lives a little bit easier. So let's go ahead and do that. First things first, let's go ahead and grab the stone blocks over here. To make our lives a little bit easier, we're just going to make sure we're grabbing all of them at once. So I'm just checking one of them are called Stone block. So I believe these ones will be actually just bricks. I'm going to just bring them over and see. And yeah, these seem to be bricks. I'm going to now delete them, like so, and bring over these blocks from here. Now I'm going to just real quick check, make sure that we are not in the same gray box folder. We're not because it's going to make our lives a little bit easier afterwards. But for now, though, let's go ahead and just use these blocks to well, create a nice little platform. When creating this sort of a platform, it's important to know that it's like it just needs to be the upper section more flat because, well, as you saw previously, the gaps in the middle were harder to set up. But if we have a bit of a flatter top, it's going to make our lives much, much easier. And actually, I think, yeah, there is another brick over here. And let me check if there is another one. Nope, just four bricks. Perfect. All right. Once we have something like this, we're going to basically rotate them around like we did previously to get some extra variation out of them, and we're going to set them up with a bit of a larger platform. Once we get selves a larger platform, we'll be able to well work our way with the entire setup. Into the platform. So let's go ahead and do that. We're going to grab all four of those blocks. We're going to hold Alt and we're just going to paste them out like this. We're also going to click E and just rotate them 90 degrees or sorry 180 degrees and put them back in here, just like that. I think make sure we have these brick setups a little bit more equalized. Yep, we can just simply grab these blocks and move them to the side because we rotated them 180 degree. These longer ones actually turned out to be the longer ones on this end. So just makes a nice little square. If we look at it from the top, it makes a nice little square, so none of the bricks are actually going outwards from this original setup. So with that in mind, we can now grab this tire section, hold Alt and make a brick setup like that. I'm just checking, huh, I noticed something right off the bat that this because of the 180 rotation is actually a little bit higher up, and the most important part is just to make sure that they have more of a plain surface. Doesn't have to be perfectly plain. We can just overlap them if needed. But having something like this will help us out quite a bit. Next up is going to be just simply grabbing all of these platforms like so. And what we can do to make ourselves or make our lives a little bit easier is we can make sure that the next time we're having selection, we are simply selecting all of them at once. This will make sure that well, we're able to manipulate all of those bricks at once. And for that, we can instead of creating a new folder, we can simply click Control G which is going to create a group actor with all of this selection. So now when we select back on this, we're going to see that this entire section is selected and it's going to make our lives so much easier. Now, going back to the setup over here, I'm going to actually duplicate just in case this is going to be off on the side. In case we mess it up, we can always come back to it, and we can see what we can do with it. Well, for Sas we can check on the amount of bricks we need over here. I think honestly, this can be quite a bit smaller, so we're just going to squish it down a little bit. Not by too much, I think keeping this value is going to be quite right, even more actually like this and the thing that we're doing here basically is figure out the default type of brick for these platforms that we're going to use because our boys will need to adjust all of the bricks later down the line, and it's better to figure out the type of brick size that we're using right away, not brick size or, like, stone slabs that we're setting it And because I want the first original path over here to be, well, the same size as the gray box, I'm just going to make the general setup like this. And I think we're going to go ahead and delete one row just to make sure we're having a nicer pattern. If we look back at the reference, we're basically seeing that we have free chunks like that, and I think that works, much better in the setup. So let's go ahead and do that. In order to ungroup everything, we can click Control G again. Sorry, not that. Going to click Control Z. Al G. Or Shift G. There we go. Shift G will work, and now it's going to engroup everything, and now we can delete this row and select the other pieces just like that. Just like so. And I'm going to collet Control G once more. And this way, we have ourselves a very ersilar row. And now I can simply set this up like this to make sure we are having the piece quite nicely set up. I also stretching it out. I'm stretching it out just a little bit in X axis as well, just a tiny bit, making sure that none of the textures are actually stretch out too much, but we're doing it just to make sure that the platform is fitting nicely within the gray box. Once we have the upper section, we can click G to hide the rest of the item, and we can use Alt to move it downwards and well, set up an entire platform like that. To avoid the pattern being the same, what we can do is just simply we can turn this around 180 degrees, and we're going to have ourselves the unique look like that, and we can grab both of them now, move it downwards like this. And even though this is going to look the same as this one, as this layer, these two layers is going to be the same because it's every hour layer, it's not going to be as recognizable, so it's going to be quite right. So we can now grab these again. Actually, we can grab even three parts like this and we can hold Alt and just move it downwards like. So and the other thing we can do is instead of rotating this 180 degrees, we can just simply turn this around basically like this. And by simply turning this around, we're going to get a unique pattern and a texture. But we'll rotate this actually around 180 degrees, the very bottom layer. So now every brick pattern is slightly different. And overall, it's giving us a very nice platform for, well, the ruins. Now we can also have something lower down the line over here. So what I would say is we can grab these parts over here, these four layers. I think that's enough. Yep, it should be enough. We can now go ahead and make a duplicate out of this. I think it'll work quite well. I'm going to click W hold hold and move it all the way to the out side, just like that. In this case, though, we'll want to make sure that let's see. Yeah, what we're going to do is we're going to move them actually off onto the side like this. The reason being is that it makes our selection much easier to do. I'm going to hit Control. Sorry, I'm going to hit shift in G to ungroup everything, and I'm just going to make selection over here and just delete these parts like this. Maybe we can do it all at once, but honestly, it's alright. If I was just to select multiple pieces like this, got ourselves even smaller platform now. So let's go ahead and make sure that we use Control and Alt, use our left Mouse button, select everything. Going to move to outside, select all the outside. Using Cl, Alt and Shift. Make sure to use shift to add onto your selection and not change the selection completely. Go to hold Control and just tap on a screen. In case you're wondering how sometimes I see the landscape being selected very top, we see an orange highlight, meaning that the selection itself is higher than the entire viewpoard screen. So if we look at it from the side, we can see that this orange line is going to the edge of the landscape and then follows the viewpoard downwards, meaning that there is selection that's bigger, it goes out of the viewpoard. We can click while Solding on the mouse mouse button and deselected. Now I'm going to move this out and realize that there is another selection that needs to be done. I'm just going to go ahead and make a quick selection. And this brick is missing. But that's right because it's not going to be visible for us. We're going to go over deleting some of the bricks, optimizing it in a little bit. But now, though, let's go ahead and just move this in the right section. And there was a brick that I'm missing completely. What brick would that be? This one at the bottom, this one is definitely needed. So let's go ahead and select it and just move it so if you make a diselecti by accident, just click Control Z to undo that diselection. And that way, we're able to get a platform in the right place. I clicked H by accident. We need to click G. There we go. And it's looking quite right. But these bricks over here are actually too much outwards, which is not very nice overall design. So let's see. We can probably delete these ones outside just to make sure that the pattern is being kept the same, and we're going to make sure that the gap is closed off. So we're just going to make these bricks a little bit larger, like, so I just close it in. Just like that, maybe this brick a little bit smaller. And just like that, we got ourselves a nice little setup. These bricks can go inwards. I don't really mind because it goes inwards, and we are going to have a staircase over here. So it's not going to be quite as visible. I'm quite happy with this result. Now let's move on to yet a number section, this platform over here. We can pretty much do the same except this time, we're going to reuse this platform. And for this particular reason, we are going to go ahead and, well, rescale it a little bit. We're going to make this a little bit smaller just to make sure it fits the overall pattern, the size of these slabs. So the already existing grouped up pattern of the slabs, we are just grabbing it again, making sure that it matches the already created platforms that we have. And I think that's quite alright. It doesn't need to be perfect because, well, these are quite abandoned ruins and whatnot. I'm just going to put it off onto the side, and we are going to continue on with this in the next lesson. Thank you so much for watching, and I will be seeing you in a bit. 29. Stacking and Randomizing Brick Layers for Visual Variety: Onto Unreal Engine five, stylized night environment, VF lighting, foliage, and landscape design. In the last lesson, we left ourselves off with some basic platforms, basically replacing the gray box that we already have. Now we're going to continue on with this little project, and we are going to, well, bring our ruins set up to life. So, what can we do? Well, we already have ourselves nicely sized up brick layer. We're going to try to reuse it basically for all the major platforms that we have. And we're going to start off with this one over here. I prefer to start working with the tallest ones. The reason being is that simply, it allows us to well have nicer position of the main um patterns, let's say, and then we can just work around it when it goes lower. So that's pretty much it. We're going to position our rocks like this. And actually, this works out quite well. I don't think I'm even going to change the scale, although maybe a little bit on this end might be quite all right. Yeah, let's go ahead and just squish it down just a little bit. The reason being is that we'll probably squish or we scale stretch some patterns out a little bit on the lower section of the platform, which sticks out a little bit. So knowing that, I'm going to go ahead and squish this down. We also have well, let's say, two or more one more brick on this side as well that needs to be added. So for this case, I will get myself these brick layers upwards a little bit, going to hit Shifting G, and we will select another layer. I think we can just grab this one over here since it has a nice straight line. Can grab it from the upper side and holding all bring in from the left to the right side. And that way, we're able to get ourselves this nice little setup. And let me think. We can grab an entire platform and potentially bring everything stretching out everything nicely out. Or we can stretch out these bricks over here a little more and make sure we fill in the right section to be more straight. And I think that's a better choice. The reason being is that we can select these bricks, for example, the shortest ones, and just stretch them out like this. And looking from the top, we can control the straightness of it, because essentially these bricks needed to be straightened out on the edge to be more aligned with the corner of this platform, and we can just stretch it out a little bit. To get a nice look. I think that's quite right. Now we can just simply hold Control Alt using our left mouse button, select the entire piece like this. I'm going to hold Control and just de select the bottom part and just double checking if that's the only thing that we have now holding Shift and G or Sorry. Control and G, Always mix these two up, which groups and which groups, the shortcut. But once we have it grouped up, we can put it over at the top, just making sure that it's nicely aligned. Like s. And once we have this alignment, we can click G and then, well, work on this platform to make sure it goes downwards. Now, doing this kind of way is quite fast and easy, rather easy. But the optimization is not going to be the greatest. And the reason being is that simply there's going to be a lot of mesh in the middle, which is fair enough. But we can always come back to it and just clean it up a little bit. The point with this particular modular kit is that, although, yes, it will use more meshes, and you would, for example, have more texture because if you're working on a platform, all of those bricks have textures, whether they are going inwards or outwards, meaning that every single phase is being rendered. But the nice thing about it is that, well, you're able to easily manipulate these platform layers, these stone slabs, and other thing is that you don't really need to reuse different textures. So these are, I think, using just one material. Yep, all of those brick slabs are using just one material, and by just simply rotating the slabs and everything around, we're able to use one material to get multiple platforms and to make the slabs look very unique in terms of, well, displacement and everything. So all of that turns out quite nicely. Anyways going back to the platform, let's go ahead and continue on with all of these layers. And Mm hmm. You know? What we're going to do is we're going to hold Alt and just move downwards like this, multiple at once, and then we can adjust the map for rolls. So for example, this one over here, we can just rotate it 180 degrees and get this same type of look just making sure that the displacement is not off, which doesn't seem to be. That's pretty good. Then we can grab this platform over here and rotate it in Y axis instead, I believe. Yep, that will work quite well, as well. And we're getting some nice, interesting variation out of this entire piece, which is pretty good. Then we can grab the rest of the layers and just make a duplicate, push it into the ground. Maybe this one at the bottom, at the very bottom is not needed, so I'm just going to perhaps delete it. Yeah, I think I'll delete it, even though I see some gaps over here. I think just getting rid of it is fine. Oh, apply to all. When it's grouped up, you just need to make sure you apply to all, there we go. This gap over here is not going to be visible. There's no way anyone is going to see it. I am not worried about it. So all in all, it's good. The only thing I would say is that yeah maybe some parts need to be rotated. So this part over here, I think, definitely needs to be rotated. Let me just go ahead and do it like so. Oh, this is now being the same pattern as here. Let me rotate it like this is well done, and there we go. A unique type of a pattern. Which is going to look pretty good. Now, there is a bit of a pattern going vertically, but it works quite well. But if you decide that you don't really want this pattern, what you can do is you can grab this entire platform like this. My recommendation is just grab entire platform, making sure that this platform is selected. We can then just simply move this onto a new folder and create a new folder, call it platform. Like so that way, the entire platform is in contained space. That's the key here because afterwards, we can just simply click Shift Ng and that's going to, well, remove this entire grouping. And afterwards, we can, if we want to just rotate some bricks around, make sure we play with that a little bit and well, get a little bit more of a unique pattern, maybe some bricks sticking out and whatnot. And just like that, we'll be able to get an even more unique type of a look. And if you want, you can even play around with them being, like, rotated a little bit if we turn off the snapping rotation just like that. Make them a little bit stick out like this. They don't have to be 90 degrees perfectly aligned. We can totally play around with the design, just like that and get ourselves some really, really nice type of looks. I'm not worried about the insights too much because I know that there's going to be another platform over here, and there is going to be another platform over here. But, some parts, maybe at the top at this point, could be just slightly lifted and whatnot, slightly rotated, really is up to you let's not forget that also when we click one, this is what we're going to see. So it is not going to be too much. And also, let's not forget that the game settings is not turned on, and once we turn it on, this is what we're going to see. So it's going to be rather small detail, but even so we can see the type of focus that we're going to get, especially for this arc over here. There's going to be a lot of light shining through. So we need to make sure that there is some nice detailed variation and also This part over here, perhaps, would need to be done in the same kind of manner where we rotate the bricks a little bit. And I think, yeah, we can do that as well. So let's go ahead and select these entire brick parts. I just realized that this is just a separate brick layer, which we can go ahead and select just like that. I'm going to hold Control Shift and Alt and just select it like this from the top. And Control Shift and Alt. Hopefully, that selects it all. Let's see. There are some bricks in the middle that are not selected. But all in all, it's quite right. Let's go ahead and just move them to another folder. We can just have a selection like this, and we can also just click on this button, by the way, and just simply rename this tool platform. There we go. So now we have platform two. And these bricks can also just be deleted since they're getting in the way. But we don't need to worry about them just yet because we're going to be fixing them later. Now, going back to this real quick, we can click one and see that, Hey, these bricks are quite visible and we can play around this idea that they're going to be more visible by just having some of the bricks a little bit more outwards, having more of a unique silhouette out of these, just like that. I'm going to hit shift in G over here and just kind of make some bricks a little bit more loose. That way, when we're looking at this section, it's going to look quite a bit cooler, I reckon, maybe even have some bricks a little bit more rotated. So maybe even like upwards a little bit. This one can be just ticking out a little bit because it makes it look a little more organic. So clicking one. And yeah, this is looking very, very nice. I'm quite happy with this result. And we are going to continue on with the grey box population, adding detail onto our ruins in the next lesson. Thank you so much for watching, and I will be seeing you in a bit. 30. UE5 Building Modular Brick Platforms with Duplicate Hierarchy: Front 200 real engine five, stylized night environment, Vat lighting, foliage and landscape design. In the last lesson, we left ourselves off, well, we've continuing on with the ruins setup, and now we're going to go ahead and continue replacing the gray box parts with the platforms that we have over here. So next up is going to be this section over here. We can simply go ahead and grab some of the platform pieces and just replace, well, the platform. Let me just go ahead and find the right ones. So looking at this, I believe we only need just a couple of bricks. So we're going to go ahead and actually make our lives a little bit easier. This platform over here seems like it's already nicely placed up for us. I think it might be easier to just reuse this one. Let's go ahead and select it. Right click and we can use duplicate hierarchy. Like so, this creates platform free folder, which we can move it off to the side. Oh, classically control Z. Make sure we're using this gizmo section over here, so it would not affect Z axis. And I'm going to click G to make sure we are well, making sure that the section is nicely placed up for us, so a little bit higher up. And we're just looking at this end part over here mainly. This hour section, we can go ahead and delete it. So let's do that. To make our lives a little bit easier, we're going to go onto the platform folder for platform two and sorry, not platform two, platform one, and we're going to hide it. That way, we can just go ahead and select all of the necessary parts. I'm going to double check which ones need leading, and it seems like only free bricks at the front. So this section over here, we can hold Control and Alt and just make a selection like so, and I'm going to hold, deselect the landscape, and deselect any of the bricks that were selected by accident. So it seems like a lot more have been selected, so it might not be a best option to select it like this. Maybe let's reposition the camera. From this angle, like so, holding Control and Alt, we can make a selection like so, a little bit smaller perhaps. Just a little bit too much. So let's go ahead and see what is happening. A ha. So what is happening right now is that we still had some parts of the group and it was making an entire selection. So what we can do is we can just go ahead and simply select everything, all descendants in a folder, hit shift in G, and that should remove any of the groupings. Now, when making a selection like so, we're going to get ourselves the right selection, just like D. And I think we can just go ahead and Oh, let's click Control set. Let's deselect the landscape. And let's make sure that all these are selected. We can go ahead and delete it, and we can bring back the previous folder. So folder one, platform one that is. I also because I deleted the landscape accident, getting this warning over here, I'm just going to go ahead and click Rebuild, and it's going to give me the right setup. Except the shadows are a little bit off. I'm going to move the sun a little bit upwards, and there we go now it's fixed. Just a quick update. I'm not sure if it's more of an engine glitch or what not, but if you have some issues with the shadow, you can just simply wiggle the direction lighting and then we'll fix it back up. So going back to this, let's have a look. These parts over here honestly can be hidden away. I think that would be the best choice. You can just bring them in words a little bit and maybe even squish them. So to have a nice look. I think that looks quite nice. All right. Next up is this platform over here, which I think we can actually reuse a platform three except we already deleted some of the items. But looking at this back, I might still be worth using. Yeah, let's go ahead and use platform free. So this one over here. Let's make a duplicate out of the hierarchy, like so and move it up to the side. This time, we're going to move it upwards a little bit. And because we don't have groups at this point anymore, we are going to need to well select the bottom bricks and make duplicates out of them too. Create the wall setup. And looking at this, it seems like we're almost reaching this endpoint over here, but it's not quite there. We're going to go ahead and just grab these couple of breaks, so we're going to hold Alt, just make a duplicate out of this. And like that, we got ourselves to the right setup. Maybe we can lower this down a little bit. Like, so we're just squishing those bricks in and getting ourselves a nice stone type of a well, almost like a wall like platform. It's quite a thin one, it's alright. Let's have a look. So this part over here, I'm a little bit worried it out too much, but I think it's quite right. Anyways, let's make sure that we are grabbing all the bricks from the bottom, so we'd be able to well, make sure that this platform is not floating. So, the easiest way for this particular part would probably be to grab this entire platform, actually, and move it off to the side. That way we can make the right selections. And I just realized, Yeah, we also need to delete this entire layer over you, like so, or actually, it might it might look quite alright with the staircase. Yeah, we might even leave this row out because I think it looks quite nicely and breaking down this ruins pattern. Either way, we need to go ahead and just make a selection at the bottom, like so. Click Control, the unnecessary part, holding Control and Shift Alt. We can make a selection over like so. Select any of the parts that not needed. Maybe I may a little bit of an off with the selection. Let's see. Seems like most of it is set up. Yeah, that seems right. Let's go ahead and hold Alt and just make a duplicate alike. So in that way, we're getting ourselves a nice break setup. I just realized that this part over here is overlapping a little bit, so we're going to just slightly reposition the breaks a little bit, re angle them and make sure that there's no large gap like so. Small bits of alteration. I think that's quite all right. This going to be a little bit smaller as well. And there we go. A nice little brick section. Now, we can go back onto, well, selection or platform four, make a selection for all descendants and bring this back in. And I think that's going to be quite all right. Maybe bring this outwards a little bit. There we go. Something like this will do quite well. I'm worried a little bit about this gap being quite small in comparison. What we might do is we might remove this entire brick layer. The reason being is that looking back into the plan, we see that we have a staircase over here, and if we have such a thin narrow setup, the staircase might not fit. So at this point, we are basically refining what we had with a gray box and in comparison to well, usability of the entire ruins setup because we want to make sure that all the bricks are more fitting. So I think, yeah, we're going to go ahead and delete this entire path and just kind of make sure that these sections over here are more pink in this particular case, we're just going to select these upper rows of the brick and slightly move them downwards. Make sure it's more fitting, and we might even move them to the left a little bit and even squish them just a little bit, not too much. Like so. I think that looks quite alright. I'm going to go ahead and select these bricks as well and just re repurpose them a little bit, and there we go. Looks like a nice hypo setup. There are a couple of bricks like this one over here, which will be overlapping and whatnot. But in fairness, when I'm working with such setups, I only make sure that I'm looking at the overall pattern and whatnot. And if some of the bricks end up looking like they're inside of one another, it might not look quite off if they are in the right place. So because this is in such an hidden place in a convex in a cavity, it's not going to be much of an issue. So yeah, that's going to look quite nice. Now we can start working with this section over here. And figure out what we need to do because, well, we don't have any platforms over here. We need to make sure we have something that the stairs will be able to go on. So for that, I think we might as well leave it off as is and start working from the bottom up. So that will make our lives a little bit easier because once we configure the bottom space, we can then just build it up upwards. So we'd get a nice staircase pattern. But looking back at this, we're going to quickly make some additional parts. So for example, this over here can have brick layers nicely set up. Let's go back onto platform four, like so, and just make sure we break up the surface a little bit more with this section for the frontal bricks part. Let's go ahead and make a duplicate. Oh. Right click on a platform folder, select not select duplicate hierarchy, creates platform five. I'm going to offset it a little bit because looking at it, I realized that we only we only need one brick layer, I believe, that's going to be more than enough. Looking at the thickness of these bricks, I think it's going to be more than enough. So holding Control and Alt, we're going to just make a selection like this. Holding control, going to select the landscape. Let's see if that's the only thing that's selected, it is. Let's go ahead and delete it. And no time so and we're just removing the unnecessary bricks to get ourselves this nice layer. Now with this layer, we can just go ahead and delete upper section as well. The reason being that this wall that we're looking for is not going to be quite a stall. And I think that's quite alright with this setup. So we're going to make use out of it. Let's go ahead and grab the platform five, go to select all descendants and remove these little parts, so looking at this, we might also need to remove this layer over here, but before we do that, I'd like to actually make yet another duplicate out of the platform five. Two. Oh, sorry, let's go ahead and click on a folder. Duplicate hierarchy, and we can move this to the sour side. Let's make sure that we have locking for snapping, so we get a 90 degrees type of an angle, and we can put it up like so. Now that we have it like so, let's go ahead and start thinking a little bit about the thickness of these sections. And let's remove the bricks that we're not going to be using. I think there's one inside as well or a couple, actually. And that's fine for now. Let's go ahead and now start thinking about this brake setup, which, honestly, I think is a little bit too much outwards. Let's go ahead and select the entire section, all descendants. And we're going to slightly squish this thing a little bit inwards that way. We can move it a little bit to the right, sort to the left. Like so. I think that's going to be a little bit more fitting. Yeah, that looks right. And now, we can bring this inwards, like so and see if we can have the right type of thickness. So at this point, we can start thinking whether or not we want additional brick layer actually over here, or if we can keep it as it is with the setup for now, let's go ahead and leave it. And if we need to, we can always just bring additional layers to these parts and make a duplicate out of it. But let's make sure we do delete this section over, like so, just to make sure it's not getting in our way. And let's see. So this is looking quite nice. Let's go ahead and grab the platform. Five and just slightly move this to the right. And I think there we go. Perfect fit. Very nice. I'm quite happy with this. We got ourselves a nice little border, nice little foundation, which we're going to be able to make use to make this indoors room over here out of the smaller bricks. But for now, let's go ahead and leave this lesson as it is, thank you so much for watching, and I will be seeing you in a bit. 31. Constructing Interior Rooms with Modular Wall Assets: Alon, welcome back around to Unreal Engine five stylized night environment, VFX sliding, foliage, and a landscape design. In the last lesson, we left ourselves off with this little setup over like so, and now we're going to continue on working with the design, making sure that we're getting every single detail out of this gray box and replacing it with the right prefabs out of this modular kit. So let's go on to the folder for models, and we should find ourselves a wall. This one over here. And we're going to start off by just dragging it onto the scene like so and creating a nice little box for us to use. So let's go ahead and do that. We're going to hold Alt and just duplicate the wall like this. And we're going to select both of these walls now. Going to hold Alt, move it off to the side, going to click E, and using the rotation, we're going to rotate 90 degrees. Let's just make sure that the rotation sapping is turned off beforehand, so we get a right angle. So that way, we can go ahead and just overlap these walls, like so, and we can for starters, before actually finalizing these walls, think about the upper section. The upper section is going to be set up with a plane. So let's go ahead and find ourselves this little plane. So this one over here, is going to be working quite nicely for us. We're going to drag it into the scene. And actually, before dragging into the scene, let's make sure that the grid snapping is enabled. This way, when we are dragging this little plane for the ground onto the scene, we're going to be able to just snap it onto the setup. We're going to hold alt and just move these outwards, like so, and they're going to be snapping nicely together. That way, we can have those two planes. Out nicely staffed up and then duplicate it once more to have a two by two grid of these planes because, well, we have grid snapping turned on, and the unit of this plane is, I believe, 2 meters by 2 meters, giving us a nice little plane like. And once we have this setup, we can then worry about the placement of those set walls before. Let's go ahead and lower these down a little bit, just so it'd be nicely placed inwards, like so. Now we can just move these walls out a little bit like this, and we are going to get ourselves a nice little setup. Actually, this wall, we can leave it in the inside bit clipping. I think that's quite right. We can just scale it down a little bit, and it's going to be much, much better as it allows us to well, remove any of the potential gaps. We're going to do the same thing for this wall as well. We're just going to move it inwards a little bit, make sure that it goes inside of these other walls. Or in this case, we actually need to go outwards because I just realized that this needs to be touching the outer section of the upper ceiling. So it's not going to that plane is not going to be going outwards from the bricks. So now we just need to make sure that this little gap over here is not going to cause us any issue, so maybe we can even move it inwards a little bit, a little bit too much. We can turn off the grid and move them, move it manually, just to kind of slightly overlap it, like so. I think it's going to be quite right. Yep, this is quite right. And this part over here as well, making sure we're getting no gaps on this section. Something like that, I think works quite nicely. These two walls actually a little bit higher up. So I'm going to go ahead and lower them down to make sure it kind of has the same height as the upper planes. Something like this. And that works quite well for us. Alright, now that we have something like this, let's go ahead and start repositioning this entire piece. To make our lives a little easier, of course, we're going to go ahead and select all of these pieces and group them all together. So let's select everything that we have out of this little bunker that we created basically in this little room, and we're just going to then, well, have the ability to make a selection like this to move it upwards. We're going to click G without control. We're going to click G to make sure we are seeing where the grey box is because, again, grey box is set with the game, actor hidden and game option. So that's pretty good for us. And let's see. Let's lower this down to a reasonable amount and see if we can slightly tweak and adjust it. So we're going to place it over, like so. And looking at this, I realized that this setup is a little bit too thin for this room. So there are a couple of ways of fixing it. One would be to simply, well, place it a little bit backwards. This gap over here might be enough for the staircase. And 01, we could trim down some of the bricks. So those bricks make it thinner. So let's see which version would work. The main thing, though, is that when we click one, we need to make sure that this setup is just nice silhouette overall from a distance for our ancient ruins. But yeah, let's make sure that the gap that goes behind it is large enough for a person to go through. So what we're going to do is we're going to grab ourselves the mannequin, or actually, I believe, yeah, we can grab the one from the environment. This one over here, holding Alt, which is going to move it out to the side. We can hit end to put it onto the ground and see if it's enough. So I would say it's quite narrow. It could be enough, but it's not quite there. So what I can do is we can just simply have the selection of the group and just slightly squish it, which might not work quite as well because when we're squishing it, it's going to do local. So let's make sure we fix that up. Unfortunately, there is no easy way of scaling object when it comes to a single axis. The reason being is that well, it's, I think, one of the downslls of unreal engine. If we're just scaling the entire piece like so, it would work quite well. But if we want to just squish it up a little bit like this, each one of the pieces would use local axis, meaning that those walls would end up getting separated from each other, and we don't want this to happen. So what can we do? Well, for Saudus, we can hit shift in G to ungroup everything. Then if we were to do that, it would still work in the same way. So now we can simply create ourselves an empty, which we could use to, well, scale it down, and then afterwards, we can just take it out from it. So what I mean by that is, let's go ahead and actually group it all again together to make sure we have the selection. We're going to create a simple, well, we could create a shape like this, place it somewhere in the middle, like so, and we're going to use this cube as a pivot. We can just call it pivot. We can select back onto the room, hit Shift G, and then we can, well, right click on all of these parts at once, once we have them grouped off and find attachment to the created pivot. And it's a bit of a round of way of doing it, but once we have ourselves to setup with this pivot and now all the objects for it, we can see that everything is attached to this little cube. We can use this to well squish it up in setup. So I believe if we select it like so, we can just squeeze it a little bit, like so, and even so it still seems like it has those local setups, but now at the very least the pivot, attachment of those walls are going to be better kept up. So that's a little better. Unfortunately, we still need to readjust it just a little bit. That is what it is. Let's go ahead and click G, make sure we are seeing the gray box. And with this, we can just reposition this slightly. Like so. We can make it a little bit smaller even. There we go. That is looking much much better. And then we can just select the walls and reposition them a little bit better to make sure it fits. The setup like se I think that's actually quite all right. And this part over here. Oh, this is a gray box. Now, this cube can be deleted. If it is deleted, it's going to, well, give us all of these parts back. So that's pretty good for us. And we can just simply go ahead and select these walls and using Alt we can move it downwards, although, looking at this, we don't need to move the wall here. We just need to move these two walls just in case, so it wouldn't be as visible if we are having an additial part. So this staircase is going to be up to here. This little section is still going to be visible, and we ended up just fixing that. Alright, now that we have the setup for a nice little room, we can start thinking about the staircases and whatnot. We can lower this brick a little bit, so it wouldn't be as visible over here. Same for this brick. And we're just lightly repositioning those bricks that we have at the entrance of the upper floor section just to make sure it doesn't overlap with the floor that we have over here on those planes. And there you go. We got ourselves a nice little room. We're now going to continue on with the setup in the next lesson. Thank you so much for watching, and I will be seeing you in a bit. 32. Designing Walkable Staircases with Custom Brick Platforms: Hello and welcome back around to Unreal Engine five Stylize night environment, BFX lighting, foliage and landscape design. In the previous lesson, we set ourselves up with this little room box over here. We're now going to continue on with the setup. And what I'd like us to do now is firstly, get the staircase out of the way. So let's see what we can do about it. Well, let's see the type of staircase we're working with. We can go in a content folder, ruins and find models for the staircases. So we have two versions, this one and this one. I believe it's quite alright. These versions like so. And that's all we need. Actually, we also need the steps side, I believe as well. Let's make sure we grab it. And that's going to be it. All right. So now let's think about what we can do to the positioning of the gray box. We need to make sure we get the first staircase properly set up because then it'll make it easier for us to to make sure that it's consistent with the staircase sizing. So what we can do is, well, we can just simply make this a little bit smaller, like, so just a little bit. We can look at the human reference, make sure that it looks quite right in comparison. And I think it is looking quite right. We can then place it in here and maybe even squish it just a little bit more. Not too much, though. We don't want to stretch out any of the textures. Can even place some of the stairs a little bit into the wall, which I think is reasonable. Although I think we can get away with pushing it inwards a little bit more. There we go. Something like that, that will do. Now the next staircase is going to be over here a little bit higher up. We can hold Alt and just make a duplicate out of this. We're going to firstly align the staircase with the one that we just created in terms of the height and then move it off and then have a platform in between those staircases. The flat section will be nicely set up for us. In this case, we have a slight bit of an issue. It's not much of an issue, to be honest, but it's something. So what we have over here, although we align the scale or the height of the staircase quite nicely, we have this section over here once we start dragging it off to the side that the platform is a little bit higher up. Even this staircase over here does not reach it. So at this point, we can start thinking about what to do. Well, first things first, we need to figure out whether or not that's going to be an issue. And I don't think it's going to be as much of an issue if we set ourselves up with this platform over here. It might be quite alright. The reason being is that, well, it's going to look just like another step over here onto the platform. As long as the height is reasonable, it's quite right. And I think it is. The alternative thing of what we could potentially do is simply get ourselves the shorter staircase from here and basically combine these staircases together, maybe lower this down quite a bit, like so to make sure it goes into the ground, something like that would be quite alright as well. But I think again, over here, we're going to be able to get away with just this setup. Uh, next step is going to be, well, this normal platform, this platform between the staircases needs to be just straight. So let's go ahead and get ourselves a nice little straight platform. We can either use this plane over here that we had for a wall or to make sure that the brick section matches up with the platforms, we could get some bricks from the side. I think getting some bricks from the side is more reasonable. And I think what we will do is we'll get five rocks from here that are already nicely set up for us. We're going to make a duplicate out of it, and we're going to move this to a new folder. So we're going to click on a folder with the selection, fold this platform Mini, move it outside of the platform original, and we're going to have ourselves a folder somewhere called platform Mini. There we go. That's the one. So now we can make use out of it and set ourselves up with some sections. And in this case, we could either keep it as is with the size or we can also make it a little bit smaller because even though the scale and the size of these platforms are same, we could definitely make this just a little bit smaller to make sure well, it is a little bit better for a walkable surface. We kind of differentiate from these larger platforms on the side, and I think it fits a little better overall. Okay, now I'm going to go ahead and make a duplicate out of this mini platform and then move it out onto the side. Like so. And here, we're just going to match up the height a little bit, like so, maybe even move it a little bit off to the side, making sure there is no gap in here. I think that's quite all right. Yeah, that looks quite alright. We can actually just grab these a little bit, make sure that the stone has a little bit of gapping in here. And I'm going to go on to unlit version just to make sure we're seeing the pattern a little better. And just double checking if everything is right with this base, this platform between the staircases, which it is. And we don't actually have a platform over here, so let's go ahead and fix that up real quick. We can grab I think we can grab a platform one, perhaps, this one over here, although I'm worried that it's going to be a little bit too big for this. But I think it's a nicer starting point. Let's go ahead and just make a duplicate out of this hierarchy to make yet another platform like so, and we are going to, well, work our way opposite of what we had. Just going to check the width of this. So I think three bricks is going to be more than enough. Just going to check real quick. Quick check, like so. And yeah, free bricks is going to be more than enough. We can control Z to undo this part. Now we can go ahead and just grab a couple of bricks like so. Just like that and going to grab some bricks from around it as well. Like, so this way, we have this type of platform like that, we don't need bricks underneath, so that's okay. And then we can simply make another platform folder, platform. Small. We can call it like that, put it into just a scene, not a folder without a folder, and we can go ahead and select this and all descended like so and hit the lead. That way, we're only having this little tiny platform, which is nice, which we're also going to be fixing up a little bit to make sure nothing stands out too much. None of the bricks stick out. And just by selection and reusing already existing platform pieces, we can quickly make a smaller platform that goes in front and helps us to break down the overall silhuee little bit although from this angle it's barely going to be visible. I think it's still quite alright. From the composition angle, it's going to be still small little detail. And let's reposition the height and everything to make sure it's nicely set up. There we go. And I think we also need to remove, well, these bricks over here. So let's go ahead and do that. It late. And in cases where we are not able to see the setup like this, what we can do is, well, we can click G to make sure we hide our gray box, which we set up with, again, hidden game. And then we can click H whenever we select the staircase to kind of make sure we don't have those bricks in the staircase itself and slightly readjust all the platforms when needed. So the bricks are a little bit too inconsistent with its variations. I'm going to make this a little bit smaller. And just reposition these a little bit, like, so now we can hit Shift I believe, or patrolling There we go to get the staircase back. Alright, so we got ourselves nice little setup. This part over here is not it's not fully placed up, so we do have a gap, which we can fix by holding Alt and just moving this downwards leg so to fill in this little gap. And like that, we have ourselves nice little platforms. Everything is going nicely, and this staircase is looking up quite nice. And we can even check it up to see if our character is able to walk up and down on this little ruin setup, which it can. And yeah, it's quite nice. Alright, so next up, we got ourselves, well, continuation with the staircase setup, which we're going to work on in the next lesson. Thank you so much for watching, and I will be seeing you in a bin. 33. Fixing Stair Collisions with Convex Collision Settings: Hello, welcome back everyone to Unreal Engine Five stylized night environment, Vec lighting, foliage, and landscape design. In the last lesson, we laugh ourselves off with a nice little staircase, which we can play in our real engine and use it in our first person to kind of run up and down this little ruined setup. Now, with this in mind, we're going to continue on with weld layout, and we're going to work a little bit with the rest of the staircase, seeing how it's set up. And first sings first, I just realized there is a little bit of a gap over here. So what we can do is we can grab all of this little piece over here and slightly move it like so. Hopefully, it will help. Then we can just scale it outwards a little bit and see. So, for some reason, whenever I scale it outwards, it just decides to deselect, so I just need to click Control Z because I do not want to. There we go did it again. I'm not sure why it's doing that, but for a quick fix, let me just realign this a little bit better. Yeah, that seems much better. And going to maybe make these bricks even larger, like so, making sure there's no gaps or too many gaps. Even when we're seeing gaps like this where we are in a game view with a lit mode, they're not going to be visible. So that's right for us. And that is looking much, much better. Going to go back into unlit mode. The reason being is that, well, we have a better view for this section. We can make a duplicate out of this larger staircase like this, hitting R for rotation, moving at 90 degrees, putting it downwards like so, and just checking. How it's going to look like. So this staircase is floating a little bit. Can we fix it? Should we fix it? That really depends on the little staircase, because if we look at the reference, we still have this little staircase over here. So we're going to try to replace the little staircase with this platform. And we can see whether or not we can hide the platform inside or not. Because I think this is just a couple of stairs and we have quite a bit larger of a platform. So I will try to actually move it to the side. And now at this point, actually, before we continue on with the placement, what we can do is we can select the previous staircase. We can right click on the scale, hit copy, go back onto the smaller staircase, right click on it, and hit paste. The reason being is that these two staircases, were created to be well, similar scaling with the bricks and whatnot. But we wanted to make sure that these bricks over here when we rescale the larger staircase matches with, well, the smaller staircase. And now, because we copied and paste the transformation for the scaling, they should fit quite nicely. So just like that, you can see it looks quite alright. The other thing now that we need to think about is how to fit all of this together because we can have it like so, and haha we can see that this part over here is actually just a little bit higher, and that actually works in our favor because we can lower this down until it touches the ground. So Does it actually touch the ground? It does not. I'm going to lower it even more. We get something like this, and we can just slightly reposition this a little bit, so and get ourselves a very nice little staircase, just like that. Over here is going to be yet another staircase. Let's go ahead and just make another staircase, like so, put it on the ground. And actually, this is going to be quite the right fit. We don't even need this brick over here. We can go ahead and delete it and reposition, like so. You can notice that one step is actually inside of those bricks over here, but because we're just clipping it inwards, we don't need to change anything because it's not going to be visible. But just like that, we got ourselves, well, a nice little staircase. Let's just make sure that the gap is not going to be visible, like so. And slight reposition. I'm not worried actually about this gap over here. I think it is quite fitting, especially since on the other side, there's a larger gap. We just want to make sure that, well, this is quite fitting with one another. So I think I'll just lower and a little bit more. Like so. And yeah, this is looking quite right. Except I'm not too happy with this actually being stuck out a little bit. So what I will do is I will just lower it just a little more to make sure it better fits in with this. And I think that works out quite nicely. We can reposition some bricks, and it's going to look like it's part of the inside. Those staircase is, well, underneath is not going to be quite as visible, especially in such a dark lighting, so it's going to be quite alright. Away, we have ourselves a nice little staircase with well, some splitting over on the side to give us a real nice design. We can have a look at it, preview it and see that it's looking very nice. The only thing that I would say is that maybe this brick over here is going to look a little off because, well, it's sticking out like that. So what we can do is we can make this actually a little bit smaller and kind of fit these bricks that are on the side of the platform, which are connecting to the staircases. We can make the bricks a little bit smaller and make sure it better fits in this section. I also want to make sure that this larger brick over here perhaps is going to be touching the edge on the staircase on the side. So maybe we can even stretch it out a little bit more like so that way. We've got a nice little setup. We might be worried a bit about, well, the texture and how these cracks, for example, on a normal map, are visible on this brick. But honestly, if we are worried about that, we can make this a little bit smaller. We can push this to the side and make this up brick a little bit larger, as well. And that way, we can avoid making a single brick too large. And just like that, we're going to get ourselves a very nice connection. Maybe even just a little bit off the side, a little bit pushing. There we go. And I think that's looking very, very nicely. Let's make sure we maybe re angle some of the bricks a little bit, just like that. And there we go. Alright, so now we got ourselves staircase going all the way to the top, and it's quite nice. This staircase doesn't seem to want to work for some reason. Which I wonder why. It works over here but not over here. So if there is an issue with the staircase not working quite as well, as you can see over here, maybe lowering this a little bit lower might work. Or alternatively, we can go into the third person character and adjust it. So I think we need to, we'll need to adjust it a little bit. So right now, we can grab our third person blueprint, which is going to be in content browser, third person per person folder, blueprints for person character. We can go into here and there are some options, and it's quite a complex blueprint. So let's scroll down and simply within a detailed stab, we'll find something that says steps. I believe There you go. We can just simply search step in the detail stab and find Max step height. From 80 centimeters, we can change it from 45 centimeters, we can change it to 80 centimeters, hit compile, and now it's going to be, well, a little better when it comes to the steps. So now, this should so I tried a maximum value to be quite extreme. And yes, it is working for, well, something like this, but it's not quite there with the setup. Some reason the staircase is still not working. So what we're going to do is we're going to quickly fix the physics for it. So if we were to select onto those staircases like this, we can double click on it, and we're going to see a collision option. The collision option will allow us well to create a collider on what your character is stepping on, and I would really like us to, well, change this up. If you want to preview the collider itself, you can click on this i button over here and you can simply click on simple collisions. And there you go. This angle is a little bit too steep. So what we're going to do is we're going to go into collision section and use autocvex collision. On the bottom right hand corner, we're going to have some options. Increasing the hull count, vertex count and whole precision would increase the setup, but I think that using default one will work quite well. We don't need to have a collision on each one of the steps, but we just to have a nicer, steeper or less steeper type of a design. And with this done, we can go ahead and now close this and check the staircase again. Hopefully, the staircase, there we go, works quite nicely. So we'll go back to my first person character and put this back or the steps onto 80. Because honestly, it works much, much nicer. So Max deep height, 80, like so, hitting compile, and just double checking. There we go. We got ourselves a very nice staircase going upwards. And just like that, all is good. There is some issue with collision here, and I think I know why. The reason we have issues with collision is because our gray box that we set ourselves up with, although they're not visible in the game, they are still active in our scene. So what can we do about it? Well, we can simply go onto our grey box. Let's find the gray box. Like, so let's select all of the descendants. And within this search box for the details, find collision. And within a collision, it's not showing the option. I believe I know why because we have the Quinn part of the setup, holding control, I'm going to deselect it. They collision preset, we're going to set no collision, and that is how we'll just remove the collision. So we have a playable character now that ignores the gray box. Alright. So that's going to be it from this lesson. Thank you so much for watching, and I will be seeing you in a bin. 34. Balcony Design & Destroyed Stair Placement with Plane Cut: Hello. Welcome back our own to Unreal engine of five, stylized night environment, VFX lighting, foliage and landscape design. In the last lesson, we pretty much finalized the entire platform for our little ruin setup. We're now going to go ahead and continue on well with enhancing this overall design. So what can we do? Well, for Cas in the reference, we have a little balcony over here, which ends up dropping off onto the side. So let's go ahead and sort that out. We also just realized that we don't have a railing over here. We can go ahead and fix that in a second. But let's find the required balcony. So in the section over here, we're going to find this little piece. Like so we can go ahead and just rotate a snide a grease with the rotation lock turned on, like so and position it to be nicely placed up in this area. Like so. And now, of course, this is going to be a little bit too big, so let's go ahead and make it smaller, just like that until it starts to fit Wethin the section. So almost there, we're just going to make sure it's nicely positioned, like, se, put it in a front just like that. A little bit overhang can happen. Like, se and a f we can actually keep this a little bit higher. Now, this is going to look still too big, so let's make it even smaller. Like, so just like that. You can even just squish it up a little bit, and that's going to look quite right. Yeah, that's looking quite nice. Okay. Let's have a look. If the scaling is right, we just need a tiny little platform like so. I think it's going to be quite alright. In terms of, well, the staircase setup, we can work with that as well. Or this side, we can make a duplicate of the already existing staircase, little piece over here. We can turn this 180 degrees and lower it down a little bit until it is placed in the ground, which by doing so, we're going to get this type of a look. I think that's quite nice. For this part, however, we need to get ourselves an additional staircase set up. So what we want to do is we want to make sure that the staircase that we set up over here is just going to be slightly sticking out. Like so. And that way it's going to look like it's just a little bit broken off of a staircase. So that would look very, very nice. Just like that. So what can we do about it? Well, we can go ahead and make a duplicate out of this. Mesh, we can go on to modeling mode, like so, make a duplicate using X form, so that would be a separate static mesh, just like that. And now we can grab ourselves pieces that we need. I'm just checking which pieces exactly we need. So these parts over here. And we can go ahead and just cut the shape out a little bit by going onto the modeling tab, and there is a nice little option called plain cut. Plaincut will basically let us to bisect the entire piece on our setup. Let's make sure we have the rotation properly aligned. So this way, like, so we're just going to remove the unwanted parts until we get something like this. Afterwards, we can go ahead and click Accept and we got ourselves a nice little staircase to make use out of. Now, the extra thing would be to make sure that the pivot point is offset as well. So we're going to go on to the X form at pivot point, and we're going to set it to be back. There we go, and hit Accept and that way, we have ourselves nice little staircase, which has cut out planes, but we don't really need it because we're going to set it up in this section over like zone. We're going to set it up a little bit higher up to make it seem like some of the parts are a little bit destroyed, just like that. Going to move it off to the side. And a little bit too much. There we go. This is quite nice. We can now go ahead and grab the platform from the base and actually move this upwards like this. That way, it's going to well, not interfere with what's underneath. But at the same time, it's going to look like this is I staircase that's slightly destroyed. So there is missing steps over here, and I think that's going to look quite nice. Go ahead and slightly move this to the side, so slightly downwards, like so, and that's going to be quite alright. This little piece can be slightly smaller, so it wouldn't overlap with this stone and maybe even more to the left, just like that. Slide repositioning, making sure that there's no gaps, basically. And I think that's going to make it look quite nice. This same staircase actually can be reused over here as well, because I don't really like this way of an overlap, so we can just quickly make a duplicate onto the side, and it's going to look quite right. Yep, that looks pretty good. All right. We got ourselves a nice little setup and the staircase over here, and everything is shaping up quite nicely. We also should grab ourselves a nice little archway. And, of course, before doing that, let's go on to the selection mode and grab the staircase over here to place it on the side of a so. I think that's going to be looking quite nicely. So looking at it from inside, it's going to just add that bit of an extra detail, making sure that not everything is 90 degrees. This diagonal setup for the railing on the edge of the frontal staircase, is going to look quite nice, maybe a little bit off to the side, like so, and there we go. Next up, we have ourselves a little extra. So this archway over here, this one over here, we can just place it in our ruins setup, like so. And I think we have the same type of issue as we had previously, where this staircase is it unneeded at the front, so we're just going to go ahead and remove it, actually. As we position this more in the center, make it a little bit smaller, so going to make sure that the human reference is going to still fit through this setup, which I think it is. Yeah, seems like it's right. So let's go ahead and make it even smaller. Something like this. Yeah, that looks quite nice. And let's see the staircase is over here now. So let's make sure that from this frontal archway, from this portal that we have over here, it's called portal because we have some ruins out of front, and we are going to have a nice ruin in here, nicely glowing in a bit. But for now, let's make sure that this front section has these little staircase removed. We can do so by going into modeling mode. And going to model plane cut and rotating this plane, L so and then just removing just the skip staircase part. Like so. And I'm going to remove it until we actually get to this part, just like that. That way, we're going to remove it until we get to this part. That way, we can go ahead and hit Accept. We can go on to mesh, use triangle select, and just kind of grab with a smaller size, grab these trangles at the front and delete them manually. So something like this. Just grabbing all of the pieces like that. Oh. Yep. Okay. And then afterwards, we can click grow, and that's going to allow us to, well, grow this or flood fill. Doesn't seem to want to work, though. Let's see. I'm not too happy about these pieces, not going with the selection. So in order to fix that, what we can do is we can go on to let's see. Mesh, weld. And if we have the tolerance like this, we should be able to hit Accept. And now, hopefully, if we go back to triangle select, make selection like this, flood fill, and there we go. It's going to give us a better option. So most likely some of the triangles were not well welded together. But if we were to use the welding tool, as I showed you, we're able to then go back onto the triangle selection, select what are the triangles use flood fill, and this gives us the entire selection, which now we can make use to well, delete these spaces. And this way, we clean up the topology a little bit better. We can hit Accept and that's basically another way of cutting up the topology and repurposing it for our use. And in this case, I think it's quite nice, although I would like to move this a little bit to the back. So it'd have a nice little notch on the side, and I will check real quick at the same time to see if we have visibility collision properly set up. It seems like it's properly set up. Let's see if we're able to well, walk through this gate. Da da da da da. Of course, we're not because there is a human reference inside. Let's see now. So going up the staircase and it does not let us do that. Real quick, we're going to go ahead and just change up to collision. We're going to select the piece, go to view simple collisions, like so, and, yeah, we need to fix up the collision. By hitting this, we should be able to get ourselves a nicer collision, but it's not enough. We need to increase the vertex count and hull count. This will allow us to get a better hole for the setup. Like, so, we might even increase it even more, but this hull precision shouldn't be used as much because it just gets the collision a little bit closer, but something like that will work quite well for us, and now we can go ahead and close this down and hit play and see that we can actually go through this gate we should be able to go through this case. So what's going on? Well, let's see. Cole count increase, max vertex increase. And I guess, let's increase the whole precision a little bit to make sure we increase the processing time, but hopefully this whole will be a lot better to go through. Let's have a look. And there we go. We're able to go through just like that. Okay, so we're now going to continue on with the placement of everything that needs to be placed on the upper sections of ruins to get even more detail and make sure, especially that the silhouette is looking quite nicely with the setup for the ruin setup. That's going to be it from this video, thank you so much for watching and we'll be seeing you in a bit. 35. Interior Optimization with Hidden Geometry and Brick Cleanup: Hello and welcome back on to Unreal Engine five stylized night environment, FX sliding, foliage, and landscape design. In the last lesson, we left ourselves up with this nice little piece. We're now going to go ahead and control ourselves the setup for, well, a little bit of optimization. We have all of these bricks, but if we look inside, all of it also includes the volume, and we don't want this to be the case. We want to optimize this a little bit. So what can we do about it? Well, we can do a little bit of trickery. We can go ahead and select items from the top, click H and just hide them out of the way, just to make sure that everything inside is hollow. The thing about these building blocks is that on the inside, they're also going to have mesh render of the faces, but that's something that we're going to just keep as is, since we did use module pieces to create this. And the thing that we want to do to make sure is that on the inside, all of these bricks will get removed. So let's go ahead and just hide everything from the top, like so and then determine the type of bricks that we can remove. So looking at this, these are actually part of a group part. Just going to make sure that they are part of a platform, which I think they are. Yep, they are, okay. So we can go ahead and just click Control G, I believe. There we go. Make sure that everything is ungrouped. And then we can just delete these parts. These bricks on the side are going to be visible. We're going to make sure, we're going to make sure that we well, not delete them, we hide them. Using this, we're going to actually click Shift and G. There we go. Now it's fine and just unhide some of the parts. Going to go to unlit mode just to make sure that everything is nicely set up. So this one over here could potentially be deleted and just slightly stretched out, like so. That's going to be much, much better. This one is hidden. These ones on all the angles are going to be hidden as well. These ones in the middle are going to be deleted, and I think we can just delete the ones just right in the middle, just like that. Until the very bottom part. This part over here of the bricks can also be deleted slightly. These are not going to be visible, also can be deleted. And I'm not sure about this one. I believe it can be deleted. So just like that, we are essentially making sure that less items are rendered in this section. And I think this part over here can also be deleted. Yep, it can. And that's pretty much it. From the bottom, we can also check if there are some pieces that are unnecessary. So for example, this entire section over here, it's never going to be visible. We can go ahead and delete it, apply to all because it's a group. We need to make sure we take this option on. This wall over here, is a little bit visible. So we're going to go ahead and leave it same for this wall. Actually this brick wall can be deleted. This piece can be deleted, and that's looking quite right. So let's just go ahead and check on the inside is going to be quite okay. This is definitely not going to be visible. We can go ahead and delete it. And yeah, just like that, we're able to hide things from the top and make sure that we optimize the mesh. So all of these parts on the inside will probably be needed to be deleted. Yep. All right. We can go ahead and just start by deleting this parts, this, this, this and this. And in a way, it feels like playing minecraft, to be honest, because we are just removing blocks out of the way, mining deep into the ground until we see grass or lovely grass. These parts can also be removed, I reckon, not going to be visible, nope. And just like that, we got ourselves a nice little setup. But and I think that will be enough, actually. Maybe this one over here. We're digging into our ruins, getting a nice little space. The upside with this, well, it's going to be more optimized, but the downside is that if we have a little bit more of an extra gaps, it might be visible so much. If we get, like, super close, we'll be able to see through the gaps. But if there's no light sources or anything of that sort, it's realistically never going to be visible, so that's right. We can hit Shift H or sorry, control an H to bring everything back and control an I think I might have made a slight mistake. So we have a bit of a gap over here because I deleted the wrong blocks. As a right toe, we can just go ahead and make a duplicate out of these blocks, so to make some variation, we can just even rotate them around just like so and place them in the right position and then upscale them a little bit to better fit into these goals, like so, and it's not going to be noticeable that we essentially had to replace the slabs, just like that. So now, it's going to look quite alright, and it's going to be a little bit more optimized. So that is pretty good for us. And honestly, that's all we need. Now we can just start figuring out what to do with the additional parts. So these couple of pillars over here. And if we look into our Puref we have smaller slabs over, like so. We also have some bricks going on the side. So we'll start working on making sure that it doesn't look like just a simple flat surface. We're going to be breaking this apart a little bit more. Otherwise, it's going to look a little bit too flat. So start with the most basic ones, and that's going to be these pillars over here. Let's go ahead and find the right pillars. We have two options for the pillars. I this or this, this one is going to be broken up pillar and this one is going to be the full one. Let's go ahead and just simply make use out of the full one, se and place it right in the section like so. Now we need to consider the scale of it. It has to be the size that we want. And this right now is a little bit too big, so let's make it a little bit smaller, like so. And once we scale the uniform scale, we're also going to squish it downwards a little bit like so because I want to have a little bit more of a thickness out of these pillars and that way, the shape is going to be more visible when we look at it from a distance. I think that's going to be quite alright. We're going to be reusing the same pillar on the upside. Let's go ahead and do that and placing it like so. Right where this gray box pillar is, essentially replacing this little piece. And in this case, we can even leave it or make it smaller. Let's go into our silhouette or sorry, into our preset camera by clicking one and seeing if that's right. And honestly, this needs to be a little bit more to the right because it's a little bit too close to the archway. Let's go grab this and move it a little bit more to the side or we can click one and with this selected, we can just simply click G to remove the Gizmo and now let's look at this camera view, and at the same time whilst the obelisk is selected, whilst this little pillar is selected, we can just slightly move the X axis and that's going to offset it a little bit. We want it to be somewhere in the middle in between the archway and our pillar, and that's going to nicely break down, I think, the surface. Quite right. And looking at this, I can see that we have a bit of an extra small issue, which I would say isn't too much of an issue, but this part over here is a little bit too flat. In comparison, it doesn't help us to break down the surface. So what we can do is we can select this part over here and slightly raise this either upwards or scale it upwards, even so just by a little bit. Like so kind of help us get more shape out of this. Just like that, and this one is actually in the way. So I'd like to move this reset platform just to see what's going on over on this side. And we are missing actually one more platform over here. And since I just realized that just now, we're going to go ahead and fix it right away. So the easiest fix for that would be, well, to grab ourselves a platform which I completely missed, and that's going to definitely help us break down the surface. Let's go ahead and grab ourselves at the platform from the top. We actually just need one layer from this section over like so. We're just going to go ahead and select it like this. We're going to hit Alt, Holt Alt, sorry, and just move it out of the way, make a duplicate. We're going to click on plus for the new folder, so it creates a new folder like this, and we can call it plot form low or something of that sort. Move this entire folder into the scene so it wouldn't be a folder within a folder. Now we have a separate little folder like this. We can go ahead and right click, select all descendants and start playing around with the positioning for it. So let's lower this down. Let's see if we can make it fit in a little bit more. So I'm quite happy with the way the bricks, the two bricks over here are fitting exactly to the setup over here. I'm going to make sure that our bricks basically are placed next to each other, so it doesn't overlap too much, and we get those nice little bevels out of the way. Um, so to do that, we're going to go ahead and well quickly click G, select back on one of the bricks, right click back on a folder on the platform loaded, we just created and select all descendants. And that way, we can just slightly move this inwards or outwards. We can also go click Unlit just to make sure that these bricks are nicely placed up, which I think they are. Except for this one over here, I'd like this brick to be a little bit more outwards, perhaps, something like this. It's going to be quite alright. And looking at this, from a distance, I think we can afford it to be a little bit higher up. Actually, I think it would be best if we had this a little bit more to the back. I would help us break down the overall angle for this. Let's see over here. This is looking much better, but even so we can slightly push it backwards, like so. Let's have a look. Maybe towards even like this. Let's have a look if this would be better. Yeah, I think this would be way better because it helps us to break down the surface even more. And if I was just to raise this just a little bit higher up, we're going to get this a look, which is pretty nice. Now we can go ahead and select this platform section for the top, hold Alt and move it downwards, like so. We can also rotate it around a little bit, actually. Let's go ahead and do that. And move it back in place, just like that, already looking pretty good. Now we can go ahead and select this entire platform and select all descendants, hold and duplicate it. To save our time, actually, we're going to go ahead and slightly optimize it. So we're going to try to remove some of those pieces. I think that would be the best choice. Let's go ahead and do that. We're going to go ahead and select all descendants. And then whilst folding control, we're going to select all the ones that we don't want to be selected. So all of these parts, so we are going to deselect. Just like that, I'm going to go onto it mode to show you what is happening a little more. So basically, I'm only selecting these parts in the back and the ones that are underneath, we don't really need them. You can go ahead and hit the lead, and this should give us a real nice brick setup which we can now go ahead and select all descendants for. The inside of it will be empty as well. It's quite right, and let's go and lower this down until we get ourselves a nice little platform, and to finish it up, we can also add in this tiny little staircase over here just to make sure that, well, it's a little bit more fitting for a walkway, like so, And let's have a look from a distance how this looks like. This looks like this. I think it turned out quite nice. We have this vertical type of line that we've broken up using this little tiny platform, and all in all, it's looking much better. So we're going to continue on with the ruins setup in the next lesson. Thank you so much for watching, and I will be seeing you in a bit. 36. Vertical Silhouette Polish and Glowing Summoning Circle Setup: Hello and welcome back everyone to Unreal Engine five stylized night environment, VFX, lighting foliage and landscape design. In the last lesson, we left ourselves off with this lovely little setup, a little bit more optimized, a little bit more of a vertical silhouette, making it look nice in the moonlight. Now we're going to continue on working with this and make sure that we are getting more out of this. And I just realized looking at this, we might have a slight issue with this little bit of a gap in our previous brick design. So I'm going to go ahead and just real quick fix it, just like that. A little bit of adjustment with the scaling. And finally, on the inside, we had a bit, I believe, couple of bricks that I wanted to delete. I'm going to go ahead and just have a look. Yep, on the inside, these two over here. Think will be better to have it deleted. Now we have a little bit more optimization out of the way, and we can continue on with our little setup for design. So we have some ruins out of front over here to help us distinguish the entire setup, and that's pretty much it, honestly. We can then place the ruins portal over here and have ourselves a little bit more detail out of it. So let's grab all of these ruins that we have over here. Just like that. We're going to, well, make it a little bit more interesting. So what I tend to do usually when I have multiple props like that is I tend to have ares one in the middle. Then on one side would be, well, middle size and the smallest one would be on the other side, giving us, like, a zigzaggy pattern, so it goes from this to this type of a setup. And that's what I usually like to do. So let's go ahead and just do that. So we're going to make this a little bit smaller, like, so and that's going to look quite alright. And this one can be the smallest one. Like so maybe a little bit too small. She asked a little bit bigger. Like, so now we can just work on a little bit of rotation. So one facing to one side, one facing to another side, maybe even have some rotation itself in a vertical axis, like so slightly tilted. We can do all of that. And this one as well in the middle. Let's make sure it's not completely straight. So we have something like this, and already it's looking quite nice. Let's go ahead and grab it. Place it on our little platform at the front. Like so and we are going to have ourselves a very nice. So a little bit of an issue. We can't scale it up like this, so we're going to do the same technique as we did previously for this room on the top of the ruins, which is going to be, we are going to create ourselves a shape cube over. This way, we can use this cube as a pivot point. I'm going to call it pivot, select all of these three ruins, right click and put it to attach to pivot. Like so now we have this cube over like so and scale it all at once, just like that. Maybe we could have done this in this section right away, but I prefer to do it like this. I think it's going to be quite alright because we can now rotate them all at once, as well, and it's going to look quite lovely. Let's click one, see how it looks like from a distance. I think we can bring this inwards a little bit towards the camera. So let's go ahead and do that. And at this point, we can just go ahead and delete the cube. Let's see. So how does it going to look like from a distance, looks quite alright, but we can have a little bit of a gap over here with this one and even more rotation. So this way, it is broken up a little bit more, just like that. And also, this can be facing towards the camera as well. Just like that. And that looks quite nice. I'm happy with the way this set up. We have a nice variation looking from a distance helps us break down this overall silhouette, and the glow out of the emission that comes from these ruins end up well drawing the eye towards itself. Speaking of drawing the eye, we're going to find ourselves yet another thing, something called Semonin circle. So that looks pretty nice. It has a very nice glow, which we're going to place it right in the top section over here, and it's going to look super nice and super lovely. Something like so. In this case, we can start deciding whether or not we want partially of this to be in the archway that we have over here or slightly lower it down and made smaller. So we can just slightly make it smaller f. Something like this is going to look superb. It looks like the staircase goes to the center, and I am quite happy with this design. I'm actually happier than this. Over here, we had, will the setup be more outwards from the staircase. But setting it up like this is much nicer, I believe. We can now work on the side wall over here that we have at the very top, the broken aspect of the ruins. So this section on a corner is going to help us out with breaking down this little bit of a pattern. And right now it looks a little bit too flat, of a wise. Let's go ahead and grab ourselves the broken walls that we have over here. We have two walls. This one over here, and this one over here. We're going to make use out of both of them. I'm going to bring them closer to the walls. Going to actually select the walls that we already have underneath of this well seminated circle. A small load of bricks and going to grab the transformation scale this way. These both variations of the walls are going to have the same size as we have over here, which is going to be good for us because we can now go ahead and make some nicer loaded setup. So what we have over in this section, we have in the back the one that has middle brick out, so we're going to go ahead and just set that up as well, although it's not going to be quite as visible in our overlay, it's going to look quite nice over here. Like so. And this up one is going to be facing towards the corner. Let's make sure we have the rotation snapping turned on, so we can get it set to be 90 degrees, just like that. And at this point, we can grab ourselves the pillar that's broken down. So this one over here, I'm going to grab the pillar from the side, just copy its scale, paste it in here, work from this as a default, see if that will work out for us, although we can, of course, change it out with the setup. Let's see. I think this one can be, well, slightly stretched out a little bit, like so, and that's going to look super nice, actually. Let's make sure that the pillar itself is not floating and is being supported by the weight at the bottom, like this. And now the brick wall over here can actually be pulled into inside of this section. I don't want the bricks to be sticking out from the side of the arc entrance. So we're going to slightly squish out the bricks, like so, maybe push it inwards a little bit more. Just like that, we got ourselves very nice little setup, like so. All right. So let's have a look at what else we have. We have some bricks laying around. But other than that, the setup is quite right. Looking back, the railway that we have is over here and not higher up, but turned out much better in my opinion, because looking from a distance, this little setup works really well visually looking from this angle, which I'm quite happy about. And yeah, the only thing that we do need is, I believe, just the bricks. The brick setup, we can start off by, well, just grabbing ourselves smaller bricks. So these four bricks over here, we can just place it in the world and just kind of unpack them a little bit, making our own little wall or just a cluster of bricks, for that matter, something like that. I think that's pretty much it. Yep. You can have this brick a little bit higher up. And once we have this amount of bricks, we can just grab them, leave them on the top, and we are going to continue on with this in the next lesson. So thank you so much for watching, and I will be seeing you in a bit. 37. Simulated Physics for Natural Brick Scatter and Wall Damage: Hello, welcome back everyone to Unreal Engine five stylized night environment, VFX sliding foliage and landscape design. In the last lesson, we left ourselves off with this little setup, making the ruins blow a little bit, but now we're going to add even more detail, especially when it comes to well laying bricks on the side. So these little parts over here, we're going to make sure we have all of that nice little setup. So for us to do that, we already have a selection of bricks, like so. I'm going to go onto the side a little bit and make them a little bit smaller. So it would better fit the wall section over here. We don't need to have too many variations. We already have the stone slabs, and we have those little brick walls over here. So we're just going to make sure we match them up a little bit like so, and there we go. Much, much better. No. In terms of the setup, all we need to do now is just select these bricks, like so. In the detail sub, we're going to search for physics. And before doing that, actually, with the selection, we're going to create a new folder so it wouldn't get messy because this can be quite messy, quite fast. So with this, we can go ahead and just call this bricks. So now, again, with the selection in a detail sap searching for physics, we are going to simulate physics. What does it do? Well, we can, well, simulate physics with it. Essentially, we are going to make sure that enable gravity is also tick tone. And if we click on these free dots over here, we can use Option to simulate. Essentially, this is going to play the entire environment. Only difference is that when we simulate, we're not going to be put into the first person character that we already have, so we can click Simulate. And then it's going to start falling off the setup. Look at it go. Lovely little setup, except if we want to save it, these positions, once they're fallen, once we click Stop, it's going to go back to the original placement. What can we do to save the position? Well, if I was to duplicate these bricks and hit simulate again, and then wait for them to fall. The selection that we have over here of the bricks, if you don't have a selection, whilst simulating can make selection like this and you can click K, and that's going to at the bottom right and quarter says, saved the position of those bricks. And now when we hit Stop, this position is going to be saved, essentially. So that's all it is. We're going to go ahead and make some nice little variations of that. The only thing I would say, though, is that we should have some damping. The default type of brick set up once we hit play, not hit play, sorry, once we hit simulate the bricks are going to be bouncing around. They're going to be, well, quite light weight type of setup. One way of fixing it, we could change up to mass for the bricks over here to make sure that the weight, overall weight of them is going to be much heavier. That would thing, the best fix would be to use damping. Is one for linear damping, meaning the transformation. Whenever it's falling, it's going to speed up and slow down. We're basically going to determine that by increasing this value, we're going to determine that it's not going to be bouncing up and down too fast, not going to change its momentum too fast. D one is going to be angle damping, so that's going to be rotation, essentially the same as the linear damping, but for the rotation itself. So it's going to make sure that it doesn't change up to rotation too fast. If we were to change both of these 2.5, like so, we can simulate the result. Oh, I just completely forgot. We need to have all of these bricks selected, and now we can change it to 0.5. Like so. Now we can simulate. And now we can see that these bricks still quite fast. If we want to have more of an extreme value, we can do so. We can just change these to ten, just to kind of showcase this, and there we go. It's going to be much slower, and you see no bouncing, nothing like that. It's going to be so much better. For this particular setup, having 0.5 of a value is going to be reasonable more than enough because it's just going to make sure that we don't have, well, random bounces like that. And here, it might be still right, but again, 0.5 will do just well enough for us. If we don't want to have such extreme values for bouncing, just lower down these values over here, and it's going to be quite right. Now that we have setup like this, we can make a duplicate out on the side of the bricks. We are going to now make some duplicates out of this, and this really depends on how many bricks you want in this area. If we have a look at this reference over here. The amount of bricks, let's say that we have is around 20 or something of that sort. I think that would be reasonable amount. So we're just going to duplicate this five times. So two, three, four, five, I think that's a reasonable amount like that, going moving this upwards. Like, so we're now going to go ahead and select this entire folder of the bricks and see how it turns out if we click simulate, something like that. The thing I'd like to mention is that when the simulation is done, if you want, you can just grab one of the bricks like that during the simulation and just move it upwards, for example, and just flung it into the setup and then it can be used to, well, knock some bricks down if we want to. All of that is fine as well. Once we like this setup, we can go ahead and just select the entire descendants like so, and we can hit K, although holding control, I'm just going to make sure I select these parts, like so, and now hit K. And hopefully, when we stop, we have this entire piece of waltz. And to make sure we are finished with this entire setup, we can go ahead and simply tick off simulate physics with this brick selection that way. When we make a new simulation, it's not going to be affecting this little piece. And the main part though of this is when we click one, it should hopefully help us break down this little piece. So maybe over here, we can go ahead and just make sure that we are breaking it up, breaking this entire piece a little more, having some bricks like this. Or artistic value, making sure that during the scene from a distance, we have more exaggerated type of look. Maybe it's a little bit too much. It's a little bit too much. We rotated this brick a little bit too much. We're going to make sure we tick off the angle snapping and just kind of bring this back a little bit. Like so. Now, from a distance, I think it might look I don't like the way the angle is facing actually for this brick. So we'll go ahead and just slightly rotate this like so. Now let's have a look. There you go. I think that's much better, actually. Yeah, it looks much better. So I'm quite happy with this. Now let's go ahead and add a little more bricks overall. So let's see. Where else should we add bricks? Let's have a look. The top down view will probably be the best setup. And we have a lot of bricks on this edge. A lot of bricks on this edge, make it seem like there was an entire wall that's broken up. And we can do that. We can definitely do that. Let's go ahead and just grab all of these little bricks, hold lt, move it off to the side. And now we can just, well, move the character, the mannequin for the scale reference off to the side. The reason being is that it's going to have collision and we don't want this to be affected too much by this collision. So now we can just simply make some duplicates of a wall setup over here, like so, maybe even another one over here. And it's going to be handled quite well. Now we can even move this to the other side over, like so, have some bricks falling down over here. I'm going to make sure they don't fall too much downwards because we want to have some of the bricks being placed on this section. And I'm just going to go ahead and make some duplicates, like se maybe have a couple of brick sections like this, and I think that should be enough bricks. Let's go ahead and simulate all of those little pieces. Bom bom, bom. There we go. Nice little simulations. And honestly, I think quite happy with this result. I'm quite happy with this, indeed. So let's go ahead and keep it. Let's go ahead and select of bricks, select all the immediate descendants. Click K. At this point, I don't think we'll be needing this patch, so let's go ahead and just click K on it all, and we can click Stop, tick off the simulation, and we are going to be just fine. Although, actually, we need to make sure we select it all, Deselect these bricks over here, perhaps. Click off the simulation, and there we go. We're going to have ourselves very nice little set of the bricks scattered all over the setup of our environment, and I think that looks quite nice. So, yeah, that's going to be it from our setup. Let's go ahead actually and grab these little bricks that we had from a template, and I think we can even just put them off on the side over here on the front. I think that's going to work out quite nicely. Like so. So just playing a little bit about with the bricks when the simulate physics is ticked off. Actually, these bricks do have simulate physics ticked on. Let's make sure we have them disabled. That way, we have ourselves some nice little bricks in the corners well just like that. Just kind of helping us fill in this little space. And I think it's pretty much finished. Let's go ahead and play it out. See how it looks like. We got ourselves a very, very nice type of and that's it. So I think we are pretty much finished with the overall design of the ruins. Thank you so much for watching, and I will be seeing you in a bit. 38. Optimizing GLB Imports from Blender to Unreal Engine 5: Hello and welcome back over to Unreal Engine five stylized night environment, VFX lighting, foliage and landscape design. Now that we have a general setup of the ruins, we're going to talk about exactly what we use in the setup. And what I mean by that is the items that we use here are not just a simple import. If we go onto the item itself, we'll notice that they are slightly interestingly set up, especially with the material itself. If we'll double click on it, the material itself is already set up with a bunch of parameters, and the reason for that is because we set these up with GLB Import. So before we continue on, I'd like to talk a little bit about what GLB format is and how it's being used in unreal engine. We're going to primarily focus on the theory work. So if you feel like you want to just go on with the practice, feel free to skip this lesson. So first things first, what is a GLB format? Well, when it comes to GLB assets around different programs, GLB is one of the best formats we have right now is basically binary version of GLTF. That's another name for this type of format, designed to be lightweight, portable, and fast. A GLB file can wrap your geometry, materials, textures, and animations into a single package, which makes it super convenient when you want to send assets straight into the engine like real engine five without dragging along dozens of loose files. So the GLB format is basically allowing you to have a single format that allows you to import various of different free D items, including animations, geometry, and items like materials and textures, all of which can be packed up in a single GLB file. So just like FBX format, which allows you to have a free D version or an FBX, also have animation inside of it. But GLB is a one step higher. It is a uniform threeD format that allows you to basically get an entire scene. And I believe it also allows lighting to be imported, as well. So if you create an asset environment already in Blender, for example, you can directly move it from blender to unreal engine. That said, the GLB is not perfect. Different programs do not always treat the format in exactly the same way. For that example, if you export it from blender, you will notice that ambit occlusion texture does not automatically get you wired into the shader. So PBR materials often would include roughness, normal base color, and ambien clusion. However, with something like blender, it does not automatically give you that option. This can catch people out because it looks fine in one software, but suddenly in another software, you are missing important shading detail. And that's quite important because if we have seen something like this, you'll have ambit occlusion set up from something like substance painter, and all seems to be good. However, the default shader does not allow you to have amber occlusion. So in that case, you would have to have another shader output, GLTF material output, which you can get it only by enabling an add on for GLTFal setup. That will allow you to then grab the ember occlusion and put it onto the shader itself, like so. The other thing that I'd like to mention is that items like color mixing or color ramps, color grading or anything like that you do with the shader itself is not going to be transferred. It's not going to be transported using the GLB format. It basically only allows to transfer the texture data directly with the setup for PPR values. So meaning that this multiply over here is not going to be transferred. Whenever we have shader additional setups, usually what the program does is it grabs the A value, the original value of whatever is being input, and just skips this node entirely, just puts it into the base color output, giving you that information within the GLB format. So that's something worth knowing because if you're trying to do more of shader work and you're considering about putting it into real engine, this might not work as expected. So that's something worth knowing. And in reel engine, the setup for GLB formats is a lot quicker. So you can directly input it in and just drag it, hookup material instance, which this will be done for you and already have sliders and options tweak things like roughness metallic and even ember clusion strength. It is far more streamlined than building every shader from scratch. It's faster because you can just directly grab a format and place it into the engine. However, because it is automatically generated and standardized, it is not always as optimized. So if you're working on way larger scenes, you might want to consider creating fine tuned shader with as little parameters as possible because the more data you're using, the more shaded setup you're creating, the larger the file is. If we look at the format for this material over here, we can see that it has a bunch of options, and those options, well, they need to be set up. If we look at the master material itself, we'll notice if we go on to the master material, we'll notice that this is the type of setup that we're talking about here. So all of this requires to be processed, and if used properly, it's still going to be rather optimized, but it's not going to be the same much just plugging in a couple of textures directly into the material shader itself using our own custom material setup. But this does have its own uses. Although it's not going to be as fine tuned as you had built a material network yourself by hand, the big win in Unreal Engine five is that once your GLB is imported, you can create material instances. So again, going back to the original material instances, all of these options can be nicely configured and adjusted within your settings. So that's pretty good. You can adjust the parameters nicely with already existing textures and tweak it to the values of the game engine. So it is built for iteration. It is really handy when you're testing looks quickly or testing setting up variations of the same asset. In short, GLB is fantastic for speed and portability. But if you want to keep an eye on how different programs interpreted, real engine five makes life easier with its materialized system since. But if you're chasing absolute optimization, you still want to dive in and refine the hadas manual. And just as a quick show, I'd like to showcase a little bit how it looks like when you are importing a GLB file. So I have an option for a GLB centered over here. I'm just going to go ahead and drag this into the scene, and it's going to pop in with a menu asking me about the preset setup. So the default asset pipeline interchangeable generic assets pipeline is the one you want to go generally for. And we have a lot of options, for example, if we want to insert asset name for general offset, on the setup and speaking of translation and offset, the thing is with the assets being imported into the scene for Unreal engine, you need to consider how you are importing them. Generally, I would recommend you to grab all of the files. So for example, this whole scene is just placed into one GLB file, as in I had. Let me show you real quick. This scene over in the setup, all of the parts would be separated like so and I place them all in the center of the world and real engine not real engine, sorry, Blender file. The reason being is that if I was to try to export this file as GLB file as is. So using GLTFEporer, it wouldn't work quite as well because these origin points, although they are set up like so, and Blender is able to pick them up, real engine, unfortunately, is not able to pick them up. So what we'd have to do is we'd have to use ShiftinS to put cursor through world or and then right click or sorry, shift again to use section to cursor to place all the objects like this. So you'd basically have to export all of these assets, so to make sure that the origin point is as intended for the assets, moving all of the parts with the origin points in the areas of the world position just like that. That makes sure that well, when we have items like bricks over here, for example, all of these parts would be properly set up. Otherwise, if the GLB format would be exported with this kind of offset, the origin point of this would be in the center world over here, and this is not something that we want to have. The other thing is you ideally want to export all of the items at once because if multiple items use the same material, you wouldn't want to have multiple duplicates of the same material. You want to make sure that the textures are being used with frou as many different objects as possible, meaning that once you're done with the setup buildup, you'd be able to, well, import the GLB format all at once. Uh, next up, it's pretty much some nice options that we have over here. We have a vertex color, which would also be allowed to be imported. We have some skeleton animations. If you do have some animations in the scene, although I would recommend you if you do have animations, to import it as a separate GLB format. We have static meshes options. So combine static meshes. Make sure this is ticked off if you're importing multiple files at once. And then as for collisions, sometimes I try to, well, have the setup for building collisions. But in most of the cases, you would not need it in terms of building. Building as Nite objects is quite interesting one if the objects are simplistic. You don't exactly need it, but it's still good to have. Generate Light Map UVs is quite important. I would recommend you to keep this on if you want to avoid any glitches if you're doing any light map baking, although, again, something like this can be generated afterwards, so it is up to you. And there are some additional options, honestly, to go through, but most of it will be just this default setup. If you're using, for example, EudimS, you would want to make sure that this is TikTon and also another thing is if you set yourself up with the normal materials in blender, you would definitely want to have flip normal map green channel TikTon. The reason being is that the normals being used in Blender is something called GL, sorry, OpenGL. And Open GL uses a bit of a different normal texture format. Unreal Engine uses something called direct X, and that would require the option to be ticked on if you're converting from one normal texture to another. And that's pretty much it in regards to the setup. You will then be able to get yourselves real nice options out of these items. So another thing that I'd like to mention is that once you have these options, you can make some nice control. So for example, you can go on to the base color tab, which allows you to set up the color, and you can control, for example, base color factors. So you can make it, for example, the entire scene with, like, a green tint for the ruins, maybe more of a reddish. If you'd like this, you can totally do so you can see how much you can bring the color. For a setup, maybe even yellowish bricks, do that. You have the option. If you don't want to use that, you can just click on the reset to default properties, and by having this as white, it's going to just make sure that it has default color. It has options, for example, for Alpha cutout. If you have some transparency in your items, this would be an option to, for example, increase if you want to make sure you tweak some of the values, and that is pretty much it. Those are the main options. We have some options, for example, for a tiling scale over here. So these would be more for if you're using seamless textures, we are not using seamless textures, so we don't really need to worry about that, but we are using emissive. A emissive has option for emissive strength. If we turn on if we go onto these ruins over here and we select the material for it. Just wait a little bit. There we go. If we select the material for it, go into emissive, we can increase the strength for it. So if we change four, it's going to glow a lot more. If we change this to 0.1, it's going to remove that glow just like that. And if we set it to 100, it's going to be really glowing in our scene. So that is something to consider. If we're looking at it from a distance, maybe having this as a higher value might be quite a nice use of this emissiveness. So I think by default, we're going to keep it as one. But if you want to play around with it, please feel free to go ahead and do so. The final couple of options that I'd like to mention are going to be the normal seclusion and specular. Specular in most of the cases, we're not going to be using. This setup does not have specular, but we do have roughness and they kind of interlinked roughness and specular values. If we want to have increased shininess, for example, we can do so. We can go ahead and go on to roughness factor. And let's say we are trying to make a wet type of scene, we can lower this down and make it quite shiny. And if we do it for all of our materials, it's going to be really nice as a setup. Because we can have maybe some rain or something, and just like that, we'd be able to make a wet environment. Then next up we have, well, ambient occlusion, ambient clusion we can just increase the strength, and it would give us a higher value. We can also just write in our own value, so if it doesn't go past this certain parameter, if we want to increase it and make sure that we have of a setup. Normal value is very interesting one, because if we were to increase this by ten, something like that, we'd get more bumpiness out, well, stones over here. So that's something worth to consider. If we want to, for example, have more roughness out of these stones, which some might consider to be a little bit too flat. Personally, for a stylized scene like this, it's wonderful looking, I believe. But if we want to have additional options, we can have well, we can go on to normals, click on the scale and change this up to be something like 100, maybe 100 too much. That would be quite nice, though. You can see you get more bumpiness, the cavities and everything get a little bit harsher, and all in all, it's looking quite nice. So just something worth to consider. Of options, a lot of control, but again, maybe the optimization might not be a best if you decide to make ruins throughout all of this terrain, maybe you might consider to rebuilding the texture, sorry, rebuilding the material out of the textures that get imported into the GLB format. So, yeah, that's going to be it. From this lesson, a little bit of work in terms of the GLB setups. Just as a quick summary, the GLB format pros and cons. It packs geometry, materials, textures, animations into one file. It's great for portability and quick inputs into unreal engine five, but it is not always perfect. Blender exports leave ambit inclusion needing a manual input. Unreal engine import is a faster setup, but less optimized than building shaded by hand. And finally, material instances in Unreal Engine five leads you to quickly adjust parameters such as roughness, color, amid clusion et cetera without duplicating the materials. So that's going to be it for me. Thank you so much for watching, and I will be seeing you in a bit. 39. Creating Magical Portals with Niagara Particle Effects: Hello and welcome back over on to UnrelEgine five Stylized night environment, VFX sliding foliage and landscape design. In the last lesson, we went over a little bit GLB format. We're now going to continue on with the setup and start doing a little bit of the particles, and then we're going to come back to well, adjusting a little bit more of that GLB assets for our environment. But just to break it down a little bit, we're going to work with this little portal over here. So what can we do with it? Well, if we go on T content Browser and onto content, we can create ourselves by right clicking Niagara system. The one that we're going to use for the basis of the Niagara system particles is going to be Buntin. This one over here is a very nice base type of a template. Let's go ahead and click Create and we are going to have ourselves a brand new Niagara system. So we can call this portal underscore VFX. So, and we can even place it in our scene. So let's go ahead and drag it onto our portal to get this type of result. Now, of course, this type of result is not quite there in regards to the setup. Let's double click on it and see what we're working with. And we are going to have a graph like this. So what I'd like us to do is I'd like us to simply move this window a little bit off to the side. This way, we have an option to work with the VFX itself whilst we are creating it for the environment. Reason I like doing this instead of just working with this window and the preview on the top left hand corner is because this way, we're able to see the scale within the settings itself. So that will be way better for us. Let's go ahead and just simply find ourselves this fountain graph. And just like within a material graph system, we can use right mouse button. We can use our mouse wheel to scroll up and down and find everything that we need. So we're going to go ahead and just slightly reposition our window tab just like that. To get everything we want, which is going to be the detail stab and this fountain setup. Alright, now that we have it like this, we can start by changing up the emitter itself. So the emitter is going to determine how the particles spawn in terms of, well, if we want them to spawn more or if we want them to spawn less all of that good stuff, and we're going to go ahead and select it, which will allow us to see both a mirror state and spawn rate. So both of these items within the stab are going to be visible for us. So we can go ahead and just simply select the stab to see everything within a detailed stab, and we can check the setup. So if we were to change the spawn rate to 300, it's going to start spawning a lot more. There's also something called loop duration, which we are going to keep it as is by default, it's going to be quite right for us. Next up, we're just going to go ahead and go into the particle spawn. This will determine how the particles are going to be affected at the base at its default values. So we can tell, for example, when it's going to disappear, what kind of values they inherit by default velocity and whatnot. And yeah, all of that good stuff. So first things first, what I would recommend us do is going to be changed up to shape location. This is basically going to determine the particle spawn, the spacing of how it's going to be spawned. By default, it's just using a shape location sphere. If we were to find it within the tab over here, when again, particle spawn is selected, we are going to find shape location. So let's go ahead and find it over here, this one over here, shape location. So this will determine the spawn point, basically. If we were to change this to something like 200, for example, it would give us this type of result, which means that if we set this to a value of one, it's going to spawn from this spherical object by default, spherical object of the center. But what we want to do is we want to make sure we're getting a nice radius ring around our well, portal. We're going to make it so much nicer with that. So let's go ahead and change up the setup. So we're going to go from a shape primitive from sphere to a ring disc set up with circle, and the radius we can play around with that. Let's have a look first. It's a little bit hard to visualize this radius of ring. So what I'm going to do is going to go scroll up until we find sprite attributes. And within here, there is something called sprite. Now, these are sprite sizes. We want to find and we go lifetime. That's the one in point attributes. Lifetime, if we were to set this 2.1 to all of them, we are going to be able to basically say minimum and maximum value set 2.1. It's going to determine when the particles are going to be deleted. So with that in mind, will see the particles themselves, the shape of how they're being spawned. Now we can go back to the ring radius and slightly tweak up this setup. So for SRs, let's make sure that it's properly centered, just like that. And I think that's quite all right. And now, in terms of the sizing, we can change up, for example, this to be 200 and have it. Well, this would be too big, 150, still too big, I think, and we can change it to 120. And I think at the edge of this blue glow, it's going to be much better. One thing that we might consider is that this is going to be starting spotting from where the stairs is. So maybe even less would be better 110. And I would even consider to move this particle a little bit more to the side from the staircase. So that way, we're going to have something like this for the shape of the default setup. So next up, we have ourselves, well, going back to the lifetime. We have this option over here. I would say, let's set this up to a value of 1.8 and two, and this is going to give us this result. By having more of a variation, we'd have more variation between how far these go up and down and whatnot. Next up, we have ourselves, well, within the particle spa, we have option to control the color. If we were to change this, we're going to be able to change the overall color of our setup. And I would say we can just have it more of a bluish tint, something like this. It will work quite well for us. We're going to have a very nice type of a blue result coming out of this little setup. Next up, we have options four size. We definitely need to change up size because the size for these little blobs over here are way too big. So what we can do is we can change this minimum value to three and five. And I believe it's going to be quite nice. It's going to give us seemingly large option, large size particles. But when we click one, this is the type of a particle that we're going to start seeing. So we always need to consider, like, the main shot that we're working with. And the size for these particles will be just right if we're using this size from that distance. So that is quite nice. Next step, we have an option for add velocity. Add velocity will help us if we were just to find it. So shape location, add velocity, there we go. So this is the tab over here, basically. We're again, seeing all of these tabs at once. Add velocity will allow us to determine how fast the particles initialize, how fast they start going. We definitely need to lower this down because the original speed is just flinging out these particles up just very high. Let's go ahead and lower the minimum speed to 50 and maximum speed to 200, and that's going to have this type of eration. But what we're going to do now is we're actually going to remove gravity because they're being flung upwards, but we need to make sure that they're also not going to be dragged downwards by the gravity. We want to make sure that it's more of a magical feeling. So within a particles update, showing that every time the particle is alive, it's going to be updated with a certain value. In this case, gravity force is an option as well. Meaning that the moment it gets flung over, the gravity is going to start constantly be affecting it and it's going to start bringing this to a halt a little bit when it starts going upwards and then afterwards, starts going downwards, no matter the velocity, it's going to get gravity force being applied constantly to it, meaning that at some point it will start going down. So with that in mind, if we were to turn off gravity force, we're going to have these lots of particles starting going magically up in the air, and it's going to be super nice like that. Oh, going back to the velocity option over here, we are going to I think actually add velocity is done. Let's check out the particle update. Yep. So what do we have with particle update? Well, we have option for particle state, meaning that the that we have a graph option over here for Alpha. And this Alpha graph will allow us to basically change when it is zero, it's going to start, initiate the life of the particle, and when it's one, it's going to be the end of the particle. Meaning that this graph over here indicates that when the scale of Alpha is at the very start, it's going to start the value of one, and once it starts going to the end of its lifetime, at the very end, it's going to start slowly fading out, which is quite nice, but we want to make sure it doesn't just pop at the very start. I kind of just fades in and then fades out. So for that, what we can do within this Alpha scale is we can use toolbar to grab a template, and we're just going to use pulls out, meaning that it's just going to appear quite fast from instead of just popping into existence, it's going to fade into existence and then slowly diminish. So the starting point is going to look more like this, which is pretty nice. And finally, one thing I'd like to talk about is that we can add additional options onto our setting. So by default, these are the settings, the type of setting setups that we have. But let's say we want to make sure they are wobbling a little bit, and every time the particle is alive, it would try to go one way, then another way. We can add a certain force called Vertex force. If we were to click on This plus symbol over here on the particle update, we can search for vertex force. And we should find ourselves. Oh, let's go ahead and just simply search for force. There we go. Vertex force, this one over here. If you're not seeing it or are simply overwhelmed, just make sure you are library only. This should give you the right option. Let's go ahead and click on Vertex force, which would create as this force over here, just like that. And I believe by default, this should be placed nicely for you. Just going to test it real quick. So vertex force, yeah, should be right. Should be placed right above solve forces and velocity. If it's not properly placed, just make sure you drag it like this and place it in the right area, just like that. Now with this, we can see that, hey, we have some nice little controls. And one of them would be vertex force amount. If we were to set something extreme, Oh, we have a lot of spinniness and all is nice. By default, having a value of 200 will work quite well, though, and we just want to make sure that it's not spreading out. We are being pulled in to the center. If we change to something like 1,000, we can see that now the item is being pulled towards. But having a value just a simple 50, I think will work quite well, making sure that it's not going outward too much, maybe setting it to a little bit of a higher value, something like 80 will do quite nicely. Or 150. Let's see. There we go. Such option, please go ahead and play around with it. If you want to have it merging towards the center, even more, you are free to do so with this option. But all in all, from a distance, this is what we're going to see a nice little setup of a vortex of magical particles coming outwards. So that's that and I believe we are pretty much finished with that. We can go ahead and just make sure we compile this, close this down, and we have ourselves a nice little particle system. Final thing, I would say is that we should add a bit of a lighting system over here. So for that, we can simply click L and tap on the screen to get it this because these don't glow by themselves quite as much. We're going to make sure we are having a nice bluish tint in our scene, just like that. In this way, we are highlighting some of the ruins. The default value might not be quite right, so let's go ahead and fix some value sub. So 5,000 is a little bit too much. Let's go ahead and change it up to 2000 instead, a nice bluish tint. Then we have attenuation radius. Attenuation radius is basically showing how much it affects the scene. Lowering this down, it also affects the intensity a little bit, so keep that in mind, but we want to make sure that we're just setting it up to something like 500. So it basically just gives us a general lighting in this section and nowhere else. And also it's less performance intensity, the less of a value you use here. Next up is going to be the final thing, the source radius. So I would say the source radius should be quite a bit higher. So something like 300. Make sure you don't make it too high. We want to make sure that these walls aren't getting affected with the back lighting. So if we make it too light, it's going to look like it's just glowing straight through these bricks. So just make it big enough, so it's barely touching the walls. The reason we want to do that is when we hit play, and we go on to the setup with the character if you choose to, your character is going to be nicely glowing, but the shadow itself is going to make it look like it's coming from the portal this area over here. If it was a smaller source radius, it wouldn't look quite as nice. And also, you can play around with the soft source radius a little bit. If you set this to a value of 50, it's going to just soften up some of those shadows, and I think that might be quite nice in comparison to the hard contrast of the moon from those shadows that we're getting over here. And that is pretty much it in regards to the setup for this little portal that we have. Thank you so much for watching, and I we be seeing you in a bit. 40. Realistic Campfire Scenes Using Cascade and Point Lighting: And Hello, welcome back around to Unreal Engine five stylized night environment, VFX sliding, foliage, and landscape design. In the last lesson, we left ourselves off with a nice portal glow coming out from our ruins. We're now going to go ahead and continue on with the setup and add in some detail to the bottom left hand corner. So first things first, let's go ahead and create ourselves a nice little setup for our cam site. So if we have a look at our entire setup over here, going to have a nice little campsite with some benches over here and a fireplace. Let's go ahead and set that up real quick. So within the meshes, I believe, section, there we go. We're going to have campsite, tent, and a wooden stool. That's all we need for this little part over here. Let's go ahead and just drag all of our items like so and position them accordingly. So all we're going to do is just place one over here, place another one over here and rotate the angle of our tent. I'm going to go ahead and go out of the game setting so I could actually see the directional a little bit more like so. And I think we can just rotate it a little bit more so we could see more of a side going to click F 11, actually, so we could have a proper proportions. And just drag this a little bit, so hit end, so it would go down onto the plane. Let me just go ahead and do that. There we go. And something like in this area, I think might be quite right. Like so. Then I can grab the fireplace, put it off a little bit to the side, just like that. And finally, the couple of stools can be placed in a section over, like so, and we can just rotate it and maybe put another one over on the other side as well. Let's say there's two people making use out of this fireplace, and there we go. We got ourselves a nice little setup. Now, what can we do about the fireplace itself? Well, let's actually drag this down a little bit so we'd get it more in dirt into the ground, like so. And the next part will be making sure we're getting a fire. For the fire, we are going to make use out of a nice little functionality from the start content. Before doing that, let's go ahead and just save everything out. Let's make sure we have everything saved out. Now let's go onto Content drawer and click on this plus Patternov here. Then import or sorry, add feature or content pack and search for content, start content at project. This one has a lot of basic type of content to be used for our scene. But honestly, the only thing that we need is going to be in particle section fire. So if we were to close everything down, ourselves to fire particle, we can drag it into the scene, and that's what we're going to get a real nice type of a fire. However, this fire is not the same type of particle system as we had with the fountain or not the fountain. Sorry, the teleporter type of ruins setup up there, we have an older fire particle setup, meaning that we have to set ourselves up with some couple of extra parameters. Before doing that, let's go ahead and fix up the size of this fire. If we were to just go back to the game settings lighting just to kind of see how it looks like. We're going to need to make sure we adjust some parameters of this particle system. Let's go into the particle itself. So let's find ourselves this particle, go into the template, pee fire. Like, and this is the type of options that we're going to get. So they're somewhat similar to what we had with Niagara system, but this one is, well, old school type, let's put it this way. It is quite nice to make use out of though. So let's go ahead and find ourselves the right parameters. The way that we need to set ourselves up with is when we click on the flame, we're going to have all the parameters over here on the bottom left hand corner for the details. So this is the main part that we're looking for. And we are looking for in this part, the option to control the size of the flames. So where can we find the initial size? Let's go ahead and find that. I think actually in this part, we need to make sure we have selection for the initial size itself. So, start size distribution, there we go minimum, maximum, all of those angles. And I think let's try setting this up by this value just to make sure we are playing with the right values. We're going to click on this panova here, which will isolate everything. So that way we are seeing what is going on with this setup Like, so. So this is what we're getting right now. Let's put this at 60, this at 90 back up to the vault and 40 and 70, just like that. Okay, so this at say, can be had. Let's go ahead and put it to 50% less on everything. And The flame is quite right, but it gets off to the side. So we're going to go onto the sphere section. We're going to find velocity scale. And if we put it to 100, let's see what it does, and there we go just shoots it out. So that's the one we're looking for. We need to make sure we put it to 1.1. That is, that way it doesn't get spewed out too much, like so. And the starting location, let's see. That's not it. We're going to go on to initial velocity, start velocity, and velocity radio. So if we put this to zero, I believe this is going to just keep the flame in one place, which is good for us. The maximum can be set to ten, I believe. Yep, it's going upwards slightly. And then in terms of the upper value, so we're only affecting Z value now, minimum maximum being between zero and Z ten, meaning that some of the flames will go upwards, and some of the plane flames will be kept stationary. The other thing that we can control is going to be, well, the direction of which the flames are going. And honestly, I think if it was to go out from the tent, not into the tent because that would look like it would catch on fire really fast. Let's go ahead and make sure that it goes towards the ruins. That would look pretty cool, I think, the wind blowing towards the ruins. So for that, let's find the right value. So we're just going to put ten to both of these, see which way it's blowing now. Let's put 100 to both of these, and there we go. We know that this is flowing towards that side, meaning that if we put -50 and zero, we are going to have flames going outwards like so. And this, we can also check. So 100 goes positive value in that direction towards this area over here, meaning that we can probably put this at 50 and zero, and it should go diagonally. I think that looks quite nice overall. Now, one more thing that we should check in here would be going back to the sphere, I believe, start radius. There we go. So this one, if we set it to 100, it's going to control where the spawn point is. The default value was 30. We definitely need to lower this down by half, I believe will be right, just to make sure no random flames spawning in this section, and I'm going to actually bring this a little bit to the front, just like that. Alright, we're getting ourselves nice little flames. That's good. We can even just lower this down just a little bit, like so. So that's good. Checking back with the rest of the particle system by just clicking off this a button over here, we should be able to see the rest of the flames. There we go. So we still have some way to go in terms of adjusting this flame. Let's go ahead and click on the a button over here for the second flame part. And this part can be done in the same kind of way. So for Saras the sphere, star radius, set it to 15, that initial size, we can set it by half. Like, so we are getting this kind of setup. And honestly, it seems like the velocity is already going in that kind of area, so I'm quite happy with this setup. I don't think I'm going to change anything. Let's go ahead and just simply click on this button over here, disabled soling to perform the following tocalnable, yes. So ideally, I would like to disable everything else, just to kind of see what it looks like. So we still have smoke and ambers and sparks and distortion for this particle system of the flame. But already, it's looking quite nice. Let's go ahead and continue on. So this time with smoke. The smoke is a needed one, a very needed one because we want to make sure it looks quite nice within the setup. So let's go ahead and see what we can do with it. So first things first, we can make this smoke a little bit brighter, but I'm not sure about that because we should put in a light source like we did with the runes. Let's go ahead and hold L tap on the screen just to kind of see how it will affect. The smoke and I think. Honestly, because it gets shined with the light, we're going to keep the default smoke as it is. Maybe just a little bit smaller though. Let's go ahead and make it smaller because it looks like it's just puffing the entire thing, the entire campsite. We don't want this to happen. We want to make sure we go to initial size and lower it by let's say 30% or something of that sort. 40 over here and 25 over here might do the trick. Let's see. There you go, that looks much, much better, otherwise, again, it looks like it's a little bit too much, a little bit too much. I would say that the spawn rate is a little bit too small now. Let's go ahead and increase it to four by clicking on the span over here, changing the constant. We can get ourselves this sort of smoke, and that's looking much, much better overall. So I think we can leave it as it is, as long as we make the motion of the smoke go in the same way as the fire, we will be good. So let's go into initial velocity, and that's let's see. I believe we should be able to just copy the entire setup of the flames of the initial velocity. So I'm just going to go ahead and try that. So copying the distribution from flames onto smoke like so. And now the smoke is going in the same direction, which is pretty good for us. We want to make sure that some of the smoke is always going in that direction. So we're going to go and change the zero value to make sure that we always have that sort of a direction. It's going to look much, much better. Although now it's a little bit too fast, a little bit too fast. I will be honest. Let's go ahead and lower this to 30 and -40 and this to ten and minus ten, and this should slow down the smoke for it to go very, very slowly. Like so. And I believe we are pretty much done. We have a smoke acceleration plus, by the way, which if we were to increase it to something like 1,000, you'll see that it starts off quite slow and then speeds it up like that. So that might be something worth looking into. But honestly, this is an option that is, well, if I was to make the smaller, it's a joint type of a constant, meaning that the entire part will have the same usage. Although, well, stylus effect, it might be best to leave it as is because, well, it's better to just have a simulation of it pulling upwards. Like, so if we were to try to well change up the smoke, for example, going a little bit more in direction, play around with the shape and whatnot. We start playing around with this value and whatnot. It tries to well adjust the smoke and fire that we had. So it might be best to leave it as is finally, we have embers and spark and distortion. These are quite nice options. Let's go into embers real quick. So the embers themselves are looking well, quite nice. Let's go ahead and just make sure we have the sphere or the star radius, much smaller so something like two or even one, I would say, some wise, it's way too big. There we go. Let's turn off the sparks. It was turned off. This is still seems too big, actually. I'm not sure. Why? It's so far off. So let me go ahead and just put it to 100. And yeah, this is too much, something like one will be quite right. We just need to put this to one as well, and believe we are getting a nice little result. Now, I would say we should go onto a spawn setting over here, and there is a little option called burst. Burst will allow us to basically determine the consistency. If we were to set something like that, you'll notice that it starts, well, giving us let's see. Maybe 100 would be better to showcase. Oh, sorry. I think it's actually 0.1 that will give us that setting that I'm looking for. One more final thing that I would say is if we were to go to spawn, we have an option for burst. And if we were to change this, I'd leave to 100. I'm sorry, 0.1 or Ambers, Let's click S to just isolate this so we can actually see what we're doing. And we should be able to see in spawn for a burst. Once we have ourselves with this amber, I'm trying to make this a little smaller, and I just realize another force that's acting up upon it, that's going to be orbit. If we were to disable it, it's going to give us this. Well, let's go ahead and play around with the settings. Let's go into offset distribution and just set it to ten, ten, and minus ten minus ten. Like so, and this way, there we go. We're getting some Amber that's actually coming out of the setup. Maybe it's a little bit too much. Let's go ahead and put it to 15 15. Like so and there we go. Except this time because it's smaller, I don't think we need 30, we can just set up to ten, and that's going to look quite nice. Initial velocity, I think it's going up or I think it needs to go up faster because if you consider the amber heat, you would have the amber to be going up and out. So let's go ahead and increase that a little bit. We can change the max to be 20 instead. So that way, there's going to be more variation. And I think that is going to look quite nice. Maybe the span rate now can be 15. Let's have a look. And the sphere can now be set 2.5, so just to make sure we have more variation and where it spawns and looking lovely. Now, what about sparks? Well, let's have a look. The sparks themselves, I think they're going to be quite right, even for this tiny setup. Let's just have a look at the sphere, starting rotation. Let's put it as two instead, and that is it, actually. And then distortion distortion is an interesting one. It basically distorts the way the camera is, so we can have a look. Isolated version, you can see it like so. And honestly, we can just set up the sphere a little bit to be smaller, set it to 20, and there we go, very, very nice type of look. And we got ourselves a whole blame everything that is required from the basic starters content to get well and nice design and nice look. Just need to make sure that the light that we created over here is going to be a little bit more set up for this design. So let's go ahead and just put it over. So let's make it orange to make sure we are getting a warmer look. I do recommend you highly to make sure that the orange that we're using is going to be quite saturated, quite a large extent, because we are going to lower down the saturation in a post processing a little bit for the night scene. And that means that what we have over here needs to be quite high saturation because when you go to the fireplace, the fire itself should bring out the light, and it should make the scene a little bit more warm. Overall, of course, if we lower the saturation for this part, it's not going to look like that. And I think we just need to make sure that this is set to smaller value. This is actually let's have a look. This actually needs to be much larger, so the attenuation radius, let's see, can be the same. The source radius, however, needs to be a little bit higher up. And whilst doing this source radius, we're just going to look at the way the shadows are casted on the chairs. We want some softer ones as we get closer to the source radius. So something like that is going to work out quite well for us. And I would say that's pretty much it. So that's going to be it from this video. Thank you so much for watching, and I will be seeing you in a bin. 41. UE5 Natural Terrain Detailing with Foliage Tool and Rock Clusters: Hello and welcome back on to Unreal Engine five stylized night environment, VFX lighting, foliage, and landscape design. In the last lesson, we left ourselves off with this little fire going off on our campsite. We're now going to make sure we enhance this little details. Well, make sure we don't have just an entire flat section in a terrain. Let's go ahead and start working with something called foliage. This foliage section over here is not only for plants, I also can be used for things like stone, rocks, and pebbles to enhance your all terrain. What's good about it is that it allows you to place multiple objects in a more optimized way. So it's really good for having a larger quantity of items scattered in the scene. So within the mesh stab in the contents folder, we're going to find ourselves three little rocks, which is going to be the default size of this. I'm just going to go ahead and just place it real quick in the scene just to kind of have default scaling ready for us just so we could know what the main reference of these rocks are. Now let's go on to the foliage, back onto the foliage, and now we can hold um, mouse, lab mouse button, whilst all of those three are selected and drag it into the foliage type over here to have it selected. Now, by default, you should see all the icons to have these blue ticks, make sure all of them are ticked on, and then we can work with them a little bit. So let's make sure we have all three selected. This allows us to go lower and use certain parameters to work with them all at once. So what can we do? Well, if we were to just place it like so to just tap it, we're going to have a bunch of rocks. Holding Shift, we're going to switch from paint to erase, like so, and then it's going to remove it. And the main option for that will be over here for painting. We have radius, density, and and that's it, actually. Density will allow us to control how many rocks we're spawning. So like so, and radius should control the size of the brush. Oh, sorry, the one option for the size of brush is at the top, which also has paint density in it. Let me just take you through it. Also use closed square brackets and open square brackets to change the size for the brush, just like that. And now in terms of paint density, this is basically a multiplier of the density over here. For each individual rock, we have its own parameters. So if I was to change this to five, and the rest will still be set to ten. If we were to select all of them at once, it will say multiple values. Having that in mind, the upper section for the pain density will allow us to change the density of all of them at once as a sort of a multiplier value. So having this set to one will give us just a default value, but keeping it as 0.5 is best as a default value because then you can lower it, you can increase it as a last density value. Other couple of options worth noting would be filters. Landscape and static measures will essentially tell you when the items will be placed or where they're going to be put on. So if we have landscape turned on, it's going to allow you to place it on the landscape. But if let's say we don't want the rocks to go on on a tent like this, which is a static mesh, we would probably want to have static mesh turned off. This really depends on the type of setup. Sometimes the terrain itself is a static mesh, so that would be turned on. Again, all of that depends on the setup that you have. Also, things like translucent would mean that if an object has transparent material, it will not go on it. So stuff like that worth knowing. Now, going back to the settings for the rocks. Let's make sure we have all of them selected and start working with the scaling setups. I like to do is by default, I'd like to keep those rocks reasonably sized. So let's say we pick the type of rocks that would be the largest in our scene. So I think the default size like this would be considered to be largest that we're going to use, and I think that's going to be quite right. Now in terms of the scale, we can change the minimum to be a little bit smaller to a value of 0.8. So that way, when we're spawning, they're going to have certain bit of smaller variations. And as a starting point, what I'd like to do is, well, I start by applying it onto the setup. I think we're going to go ahead and place it over here. Some of the rocks just to kind of get used to it with the placement. We can start placing it like this holding shift. We can just remove it. And having some of those rocks like this will help us to break down this surface just like that. So when we are placing it, we don't want to just scatter it randomly. We want to cluster them up. Honestly, having it clustered like this will help us to kind of direct the eye a little bit. And when we're looking, we don't just see a noise of rocks, but instead, we are seeing that, there is an area of rocks over here, area rocks over here and such. And we can also use it too, if we go out into unlit mode. Can also use it to well, kind of hide some of the parts over here, for example. So where there is more of a steepness or the terrain is not quite with the setup, we can use it to well, kind of hide some of those little parts like so, and some of the parts can be just simply placed like this, having a very nice type of a setup. Now, if you're wondering why it's not being placed on the steeper side, well, well, we have an option over here where it says, ground slope angle. If we were to change this to 90 for maximum value, here we go, we're going to start being able to place rocks in the higher sections. So that's something worth considering. We can put it to 60, and I think it will be a little bit better for the placement, especially for rocks. Upper fing to consider would be offset. This offset would allow the rocks to go inside a little bit if we have the minimum value set to minus ten. I believe that would be a better option. You can see the rocks going inwards. If we were to set it to -100, we can see that the rocks now are going inside a terrain completely. So minus what was the last value we used? I cannot click Control Z to get that last value. I believe it was minus ten, so it's going to go between the value of minus ten and zero to get to the right setup. So that is going to be quite nice. And I think those are the main options that we need to know. Random Yo will allow us to, well, rotate our rocks in a random direction, but it's only on Z axis. To make sure it rotates in any direction, we can just change this angle over here, and we can just use, I believe, 360, like so and just start placing it. So that means that it's going to be in any type of angle for the setup. And that's going to be a little bit better. And with this little setup, we can just start placing some rocks. And I think that's going to be quite alright. Some of the rocks might be overlapping with one another, and that's going to be partially because of the pain density. But I honestly think it's okay to keep it as it is. And the other thing I'd like to let you know is that when working with rocks, I start off with larger rocks. Larger pieces and then go back with smaller rocks to kind of enhance the clusters. And just like I talked about with this trio, this ruins over here where we have larger in the middle than smaller. With rocks, what I do is I get a larger chunk, like in section over here, for example, and then we get some smaller ones to kind of help us enhance these larger parts of rocks. And with that said and done, we can just go ahead and add a couple of rocks over here, a couple of rocks over here, maybe even here. And if we'd like, we can even add some next to this pillar, although not too much, something like so, maybe on this end as well, quite would like this to look like it's blocked off a little bit. There we go. And then we can start playing around with it a little bit more. We can start adding in this area, in this area, in this area, like so and just a couple of clusters. So it's not going to be quite as visible with dark lid mode just like that, but even so it's going to look quite nice. The main section of it though of our setup will be, well, this area over here. So I'm going to raise the rocks that we have over here just for now and start putting it on into the setup. Or actually, we are running out of time, so I reckon we're going to continue on with this in the next lesson. We do have just enough time to allow me to play with more of the chunks of rocks in here in areas where it's a little bit less visible, but in areas that would still look quite nice at the bottom of the cliff in areas where it's maybe next to the mountain over here, this place doesn't have much, so we can just go ahead and start adding it in nicely, like so looking at it from a distance, how it looks like, looking pretty good. And just a little bit of a couple of chunks, there and there, and that's pretty much it. So yeah, we're going to continue on with this in the next lesson. Thank you so much for watching, and I will be seeing you in a bin. 42. Rock and Pebble Placement for Natural Terrain Detail: And Hello and welcome back everyone to n real Engine five stylized night environment, VFX, lighting, foliage, and landscape design. In this case, we are focused more on foliage. We already started off with our little rock set up. We're now going to continue on with areas where it matters the most, especially this section over here where the tint is, tent where the tent is. And I'm going to move the mannequin out of the way because I realized that the mannequin was a little bit too close to the tent and we can start, well, using these rock formations. So, we are going to start off by getting some nice rocks over in this section over here. Like so. I think that's quite all right. Is it right? I don't think it is. Just want to remove one more. There we go. Something like that will work quite nicely. Maybe a section over here. Let's have a look in a lit mode. That looks quite right. Let's have a look. We can also add a couple of rocks over here. Couple of rocks like this, a bit of a rock over here. It's going to look quite right. Maybe a couple of rocks over in this section. Let's not be too stingy with them, and that is pretty much it. I just a little bit over here just to make sure it kind of breaks down the surface a little bit, and all is nice. We can also have some rocks over here on this section just to make sure it's a little bit more rocky. And now we can move on to while creating smaller versions of the rock. So what we can do is we can drag them. Oh, sorry. That's not going to work like that, actually. So what we can do is we can just select If a boy, we can sort it out by grabbing all three rocks like this, then going on to scaling like this, and we can make the rocks smaller, much, much smaller. So sorry, from 0.1 to 0.5, let's see what it gives us, and this gives us this type of rocks. Perfect. That's exactly what we want. So now we can start thinking about the density of them, because they are smaller rocks, we can have the paint density a little bit higher up to a value closer to 0.8. And let's see. And that might still be a little bit too little, so I'll just put it to one. Let's see. That looks quite nice. We can start using it to basically brush around our rocks like this to get some nicer way of breaking them up. And over here, well, let's get some little rocks. And while holding shift, we can remove the type of rocks that we don't want. And that's going to give us some nice results throughout the settings. I think that's going to look quite nice. So just quick brush, brush, brush, maybe take off the lit mode. There we go. Now, in case where there is a setup like this, if we were to hold shift and erase it, it's going to erase probably this entire rock as well. In this case, we can use the option to select and we can find the rock over here. Hopefully, if it lets me select it, which it should let me select it. What's going on here? Oh, we can use single. There we go. And using single, we should be able to there we go, delete it just like that. All right. Let's go back to paint and paint in some of the rocks. I think the density, honestly, is a little bit too small. We can go to 20 and just kind of bring in more rock. To a setting. Or, I think, honestly, this area over here, the slope might be the issue, so going to put it to a value of 70 or smaller rocks is a little bit okay. There we go. We're getting some nicer variations out of rocks. Over here, we can just place it around the The fireplace, although it's a little bit too high. I think it's a little bit too much, actually. We're going to go ahead and add even smaller pebbles, I think in this area. But overall, in all the other places, we can just simply just brush around the rocks a little bit, and that's going to give us a very, very nice type of detail, like so, and just a little bit over here, just a little bit over here. So I think that looks reasonably nice. Let's go ahead and just keep on tapping, keep on playing around with the overall patterns. And honestly, I really like working with lit mode in those cases because it helps us to kind of distinguish the specific objects from one another, helps us identify the entire patterns from a distance. And all in all, it turns out like it's quite nice. So maybe over here, a couple of rocks, a couple of rocks over here from a distance at this point, it's going to be quite right. Maybe over here. Maybe over here. So and some over here and just quick tap, step, steps. But even so it gives us such nice variations. I really like the way it's turning out. And, you know, we can even use it on its own just a little bit, couple of taps to help us just help break down the overall surface over here, you know, making sure it doesn't look too flat, but we're also adding a little bit of grass, so we don't need to worry ourselves a little bit too much with this entire design. And even so just adding a couple of rocks, medium sized rocks in the area is always nice to see. So again, where those larger rock clusters were, we are just simply placing smaller versions around it, making sure that the overall cluster of the shape is being kept, and we're just enhancing those larger rocks to make it seem like it's well, maybe falling apart. Some of the rocks maybe broke off or something, or the wind has blown the smaller rocks onto the larger more once or maybe it has fallen off the cliff or something of that sort. Let's go ahead and have a look at the setup with the lit mode. There we go. So this part over here has too many rocks right away, can be seen. So let's go ahead and remove it. And now the shape overall is, I'm not quite happy with it. Mainly this little piece, there we go. Let's see. It looks quite nice, but now it looks a little like it's not enough little tiny rocks. So maybe we can fix that. Let's have a look. There we go. Something like that looks quite nice. This on its own is not quite as nice, so I'm going to go ahead and just probably remove this larger one, kind of lay some cluster in the side, which looks nice, perhaps. Yeah, it looks quite nice. And this little rock, let's not forget to add in some little friends and over here as well, because the camera is definitely going to be visible. We want to make sure that it looks nice. Alright, so the final piece is going to be the tiny rocks, the tiny pebbles. Now, we might be thinking like, why are we adding tiny pebbles? It might look right for the medium size. Well, for the tiny pebbles, it's going to be quite important. Let's change it to 50. We're using tiny pebbles where there is larger light source, so we're here to kind of help us break down the overall surface of this well terrain. Just make sure we are enhancing all the right details. The thing that we need to consider though, is the placement offset. In this case, it has to be very small number, so a value of -0.1 is going to be quite right, and the scale itself can be set to 0.05 or even 0.03, 2.2. Let's have a look how this looks and it looks like it's not enough. 0.1 and minimum 0.03, scatter some bit of pebbles. And here as well, we can just go ahead and just scatter it all like so. It's looking pretty, pretty nice. And in areas where we had rocks as well, might as well scatter them, scatter, scatter scatter, just like that. And right away, we can see the detail's coming out. It looks really, really great. So that's pretty much it. Now, when it comes to this path over here, we can also enhance it a little bit, have some bit of rocks to kind of help us with the setup. If you're still having with the glitches like that, just, you know, move the sun a little bit. Let's see if we can fix it. Part over here. I'm not really happy in the landscape. I'm just going to go onto the landscape mode, hit smooth and just kind of help us ease out those hard shadows because I really don't want any of the hard shadows being in here. Let me just go ahead and fix it. Like so. And I believe it will start saying that I need to update and rebuild the mesh because it's nanite because we need to make sure everything is nicely set up. But now it's going to be looking pretty good. Now that we have this setup, so let's go ahead and update the sun real quick, there we go. And we got ourselves a nice light source. Now that we have our setup like this, we just need to consider the grass and the trees. We're going to continue on with this in the next lesson. Thank you so much for watching and I will be seeing you in a bit. 43. Animating Wind Effects on Stylized Tree Materials: Hello. Welcome back a run to Unreal Engine five, stylized night environment. VF sliding foliage and landscape design. In the last lesson, we finalize some parts with smaller rocks, going within or seen, making sure that clusters of rocks look a little bit more natural. Now we're going to continue on with yet another item for our environment, which is going to be this tree over here. So what do we do about it? Well, for starters, we need to set ourselves up with a nicer design to make sure that is not just a stationary object. And what I mean by that is, well, let's make sure we turn off the game settings for now to get a brighter scene. Like, so at the moment, we have this little tree over here, which we're going to make use out of. But it's not animated. There's no motion in it. It's going to look too stationary as an object as is. So what we're going to do is we're going to create ourselves another material just for the tree. So first of all, this is an LGB format, meaning that this is indeed the type of texture we talked about previously that contains many, many, if we go onto the master material, that contains many, many things, and this is just going to be quite complex, but at the same time, it's going to be quite easy to set up. We're going to make use out of our unique system created. We're going to add it onto the already existing material, and we're going to make sure that everything works to make a nice win system. Oh, how can we do that? Well, we're going to for starters make a duplicate out of the tree just to have it nicely set up for us. And then the next part is going to be we're going to make use out of one of the materials for now and create ourselves a new material. So let's go on to the content. Although we're going to create a brand new material, call it system. This is going to be temper setup, and we're going to well place it onto the tree itself. Let's go ahead and just drag and drop it onto the element one. And we can also click this button over here. We should be able to click on it to make sure that both the bark and the leaves are using the same system. So yeah, this tree over here is using two materials, one for bark, one for leaves. This is quite important because well, we need to set ourselves up with system that will affect both of these materials. So let's go into the material setup, like so and start working with this. And just like we did previously with the cloud system, we're going to hold T, get ourselves texture sample, and grab ourselves wind. System game with noise. It's very nice. I like this texture a lot because it gives us a noise that allows us to offset into multiple directions for the setup. And so it is really, really good for that. So we got ourselves this. We're going to set it up with a panner, of course, like so, which allows us to pan the setup. Now next step is going to be we'll need to grab ourselves a pen. End not many, sorry, Penn vector. Like so. So we get A and B, for speed, X and Y, and we can create values for these. But now we're going to just set it up with load values, set it to 0.1 to both, like this. And that way, we got ourselves some panning out of the setup. Now, this setup is going to be plugged into the world position offset. So we can right away try that with the RGB being placed into World position offset to get a wobble effect. Hopefully, it seems like we're having an error, and let's have a look. I just realized that this was not connected, the append vector. There we go. Now we can go ahead and see what it looks like, and this hopefully will start wobbling, but it's not, and I just realized the reason for it because we don't have the coordinates. So for coordinates for now, we can go ahead and just quickly grab ourselves a coordinate, texture coordinate. We're going to replace that because we need to make sure that the entire motion of the wind system is affecting all of the trees at once in a nice way instead of just the trees individually. But for now, though, we can test out the setup, make sure that the system is wobbling because we need to make sure that well, we are offsetting the setup. And it doesn't seem to want to work. So that's interesting. Let me just have a look with just this. If I were to save this out, let's have a look. Les it have an offset? Doesn't seem to have an offset. So this might be. This might be because we need a multiply value. Let's go ahead and set it up to 100. Let's see if it works now. This should work. So I crashed and ended up needing to sort a lot of the stuff out back with rocks. But I'm finally back and just a quick reminder, make sure you always save everything out. Control Shift and S is your friend. All right, so what I wanted to do was firstly, make sure we test out the offset. And for us to do that, we're going to click M, use the RGB over here, which is going to be used as a vector free. Then we're just going to set it up with value of ten to multiply and put it onto the world position offset. And let's see. Is it displaying the setup? Is it working? I believe so. Let's put it to 50. Just a check and yep, it is working. Perfect. That's exactly what we're looking for. Well, not exactly because we have this entire setup, so we previously created this little panner. Let's go ahead and attach it over like so and now we should have, there we go in a time mesh, moving, wobbling and stuff. If we were to click Control it as we are going to see the results of our labor, which is going to be a jellyfish of a tree. If you're making a nightmare fuel type of setup, feel free to use it. But let's talk a little bit about what's wrong over here. And, where do we even start? Well, for starters, we have a thing that we are using, which is going to be texture coordinate. This is displaying the offset that we have over here. If we have a look at this as a base color, like so we'll notice that we'll have some irregularities. The reason being is that it really depends on the UVs, this setup. So what we need to do is firstly, we're going to use something called, well, absolute war position. World position so lovely little node. We're only going to use X and Y because this is a two D plane, so we only need that. Let's go ahead and attach it to the coordinate and right away, you'll delete this texture coordinate, like so click Control Shift in S or Apply in this case, and let's see what it looks like now. Now I believe by default, it's going to be well a little bit too big. Yep, so it's actually pretty hard to visualize what this looks like when the outcome is this. Let's go ahead and make ourselves a multiplier. Like so and attach it with a value of 0.001. Hopefully, this will be enough for our little preview. Just like that. And now, there we go. Absolute world position requires a smaller value, much, much smaller value. So by multiplying it with 0.001, we're getting the entire result. Now you're seeing that we're not having any of the issues when it comes to, well, UVs what we had previously. So we have that. If we were to now apply this setup, onto our world position. We are going to hopefully have a nice wobble that's not going to look like a nightmare fuel. So let's have a look. There we go. A jellyfish type of a tree. So definitely a progress. We need to continue on working with this. But we are running out of time, so we're going to do that in the next lesson. Thank you so much for watching and I will be seeing you in a bit. 44. UE5 Animating Wind Effects on Stylized Tree Materials: Hello. Welcome back a run to Unreal Engine five, stylized night environment. VF sliding foliage and landscape design. In the last lesson, we finalize some parts with smaller rocks, going within or seen, making sure that clusters of rocks look a little bit more natural. Now we're going to continue on with yet another item for our environment, which is going to be this tree over here. So what do we do about it? Well, for starters, we need to set ourselves up with a nicer design to make sure that is not just a stationary object. And what I mean by that is, well, let's make sure we turn off the game settings for now to get a brighter scene. Like, so at the moment, we have this little tree over here, which we're going to make use out of. But it's not animated. There's no motion in it. It's going to look too stationary as an object as is. So what we're going to do is we're going to create ourselves another material just for the tree. So first of all, this is an LGB format, meaning that this is indeed the type of texture we talked about previously that contains many, many, if we go onto the master material, that contains many, many things, and this is just going to be quite complex, but at the same time, it's going to be quite easy to set up. We're going to make use out of our unique system created. We're going to add it onto the already existing material, and we're going to make sure that everything works to make a nice win system. Oh, how can we do that? Well, we're going to for starters make a duplicate out of the tree just to have it nicely set up for us. And then the next part is going to be we're going to make use out of one of the materials for now and create ourselves a new material. So let's go on to the content. Although we're going to create a brand new material, call it system. This is going to be temper setup, and we're going to well place it onto the tree itself. Let's go ahead and just drag and drop it onto the element one. And we can also click this button over here. We should be able to click on it to make sure that both the bark and the leaves are using the same system. So yeah, this tree over here is using two materials, one for bark, one for leaves. This is quite important because well, we need to set ourselves up with system that will affect both of these materials. So let's go into the material setup, like so and start working with this. And just like we did previously with the cloud system, we're going to hold T, get ourselves texture sample, and grab ourselves wind. System game with noise. It's very nice. I like this texture a lot because it gives us a noise that allows us to offset into multiple directions for the setup. And so it is really, really good for that. So we got ourselves this. We're going to set it up with a panner, of course, like so, which allows us to pan the setup. Now next step is going to be we'll need to grab ourselves a pen. End not many, sorry, Penn vector. Like so. So we get A and B, for speed, X and Y, and we can create values for these. But now we're going to just set it up with load values, set it to 0.1 to both, like this. And that way, we got ourselves some panning out of the setup. Now, this setup is going to be plugged into the world position offset. So we can right away try that with the RGB being placed into World position offset to get a wobble effect. Hopefully, it seems like we're having an error, and let's have a look. I just realized that this was not connected, the append vector. There we go. Now we can go ahead and see what it looks like, and this hopefully will start wobbling, but it's not, and I just realized the reason for it because we don't have the coordinates. So for coordinates for now, we can go ahead and just quickly grab ourselves a coordinate, texture coordinate. We're going to replace that because we need to make sure that the entire motion of the wind system is affecting all of the trees at once in a nice way instead of just the trees individually. But for now, though, we can test out the setup, make sure that the system is wobbling because we need to make sure that well, we are offsetting the setup. And it doesn't seem to want to work. So that's interesting. Let me just have a look with just this. If I were to save this out, let's have a look. Les it have an offset? Doesn't seem to have an offset. So this might be. This might be because we need a multiply value. Let's go ahead and set it up to 100. Let's see if it works now. This should work. So I crashed and ended up needing to sort a lot of the stuff out back with rocks. But I'm finally back and just a quick reminder, make sure you always save everything out. Control Shift and S is your friend. All right, so what I wanted to do was firstly, make sure we test out the offset. And for us to do that, we're going to click M, use the RGB over here, which is going to be used as a vector free. Then we're just going to set it up with value of ten to multiply and put it onto the world position offset. And let's see. Is it displaying the setup? Is it working? I believe so. Let's put it to 50. Just a check and yep, it is working. Perfect. That's exactly what we're looking for. Well, not exactly because we have this entire setup, so we previously created this little panner. Let's go ahead and attach it over like so and now we should have, there we go in a time mesh, moving, wobbling and stuff. If we were to click Control it as we are going to see the results of our labor, which is going to be a jellyfish of a tree. If you're making a nightmare fuel type of setup, feel free to use it. But let's talk a little bit about what's wrong over here. And, where do we even start? Well, for starters, we have a thing that we are using, which is going to be texture coordinate. This is displaying the offset that we have over here. If we have a look at this as a base color, like so we'll notice that we'll have some irregularities. The reason being is that it really depends on the UVs, this setup. So what we need to do is firstly, we're going to use something called, well, absolute war position. World position so lovely little node. We're only going to use X and Y because this is a two D plane, so we only need that. Let's go ahead and attach it to the coordinate and right away, you'll delete this texture coordinate, like so click Control Shift in S or Apply in this case, and let's see what it looks like now. Now I believe by default, it's going to be well a little bit too big. Yep, so it's actually pretty hard to visualize what this looks like when the outcome is this. Let's go ahead and make ourselves a multiplier. Like so and attach it with a value of 0.001. Hopefully, this will be enough for our little preview. Just like that. And now, there we go. Absolute world position requires a smaller value, much, much smaller value. So by multiplying it with 0.001, we're getting the entire result. Now you're seeing that we're not having any of the issues when it comes to, well, UVs what we had previously. So we have that. If we were to now apply this setup, onto our world position. We are going to hopefully have a nice wobble that's not going to look like a nightmare fuel. So let's have a look. There we go. A jellyfish type of a tree. So definitely a progress. We need to continue on working with this. But we are running out of time, so we're going to do that in the next lesson. Thank you so much for watching and I will be seeing you in a bit. 45. Gradient Based Tree Animation Using World Position Masking: Hello and welcome back, everyone to Unreel Engine five stylized night environment, VFX, lighting, foliage, and landscape design. So at this point, we are within a low foliage field. We have ourselves a little squiggly type of a tree, which looks quite interesting and unique, but we're not quite there with the setup. So first things first, what do we need? Well, we need is we need to make sure that it's only offsetting it in X and Y axis, so it's not moving upwards. That's going to make sure that it wobbles just, you know, sideways the entire tree. We're going to go ahead and fix that. The way we do it is somewhat similar to what we have over here with absolute world position using only X and Y instead of X Y and Z. This wind noise has RGB, so three vectors basically as values. We need to make sure we only grab two. So for that, we are using a Penn many. A Pen many will allow us to just grab R and G, like so and B is going to be the fault value of zero, zero, which once we apply it, we can even just use RG over here. So once we apply it like so, it's only going to start wobbling in X and Y directions. Making this tree less like a jellyfish and more like a wobbly creature like so. So it still looks like a jello. We need to go ahead and continue on fixing it. What can we do next? Well, for starters, we need to make sure that only the top section is mainly moving and what I mean by that is that, well, the bottom needs to move less. Well, to fix that, we are going to go ahead and create a little bit of a mask. And by mask, I mean we are going to grab ourselves an absolute world position world position alike. So this world position, we're only going to use a Z value. If we grab a Z value of the world position, we can try putting it into base color believe it will work to showcase what it does. It basically will grab an entire setup. Of the value from X and Y and give us an outcome for the color. So if we start lowering this down into value of negative, it starts turning black. So the axis of zero, if we put it over here, actually, this is an axis of zero. So if we lower this tree down, so you can see where this mass is and we can use this mass to basically tell the gradient of this object. Now, first things first, we need to make sure we clamp this value. To make sure it is either zero or one or anything in between. This way, we avoid any of the artifacts that we're going to continue on creating with. And the first thing that we're going to do is going to be, if I was just to put it over here to the side, the first thing that we're going to do before the clamp is going to be using an ad adding a value over here will allow us to, well, change up the value of this gradient. So by allowing ourselves to move it up and down, we will be able to if we said ten, for example, I think, should be enough. We'll be able to offset this little parameter, maybe 1,000 just to kind of showcase it, really kick it up a notch. Now there we go. We have ourselves value much lower. So this allows us to basically control the height of the setup. The next thing afterwards, we'll want to have is going to be divide. So this will allow us to control the strength of this gradient over here. Although it looks like a line, it does have a value in between, and this divide will allow us to well control it. I think if I set this to 100 and apply, we are going to get a nice little value. Let's see. There we go. More of a gradient allowing us to basically getting ourselves a mask that transitions from dark to white, so it wouldn't be as strong of a mask when we're going to be using it with this offset. So the only thing now is to make sure that this is not just a world position because we don't want the trees to be lined up in one z axis. We want to be based on an individual position of the object. So for us to do that, what we can do is we can make use out of this absolute world position and subtract let's go ahead and just subtract it. We can subtract a value from it. The value from it can be object position. Object position, world space. And if we subtract this value over, and I believe these values will be way too high, but let's go ahead and click Apply and see how it goes. There we go. We got ourselves a blue tree. Okay, so the reason we're getting a blue tree perhaps, is because we need to change these to make sure we get a default value like this. I have no idea why it's blue, but there we go. E away. It's going to give us this. Okay. And I just remembered why it's a different color. That caught me off by surprise, I'll be honest. But I completely forgot one tiny thing. And that will be to mask out a value because this is object position, meaning X, Y, and Z coordinates. So we could potentially see multiple colors in this tree. But what we need is, in order to mask this, we need to use mask component mask. This little guy will help us out. And if we attach it like so, by default, it's going to be R and G, which would be similar to X and Y, but we need Z axis, which is going to be blue. So let's go ahead and go into its detail stab and make sure that we have the selected only take on on blue. And now it's going to give us a proper mask for z axis, meaning that if we hit Apply, we are going to get ourselves a very, very nice type of a mask that's going to be attached to an object directly onto an object. This is very important because we're now able to, for example, divide by ten to make sure we get ourselves a nice little gradient onto our object. If it were to show it to us, maybe 100 don't worry about the values. Don't worry about the parameter Jessier because we're going to get to that point. But again, over here like this, using divide, we can get ourselves a nice little gradient and using AD, we can tell it where to move it up and down based on these values. And just like that, we got ourselves a nice little setup for a mask. So now, how can we use it? Well, the use of it is going to be quite simple. We're going to grab this, move it downwards like this, so we wouldn't confuse ourselves, and we are going to use a larp value. So let's go ahead and hold L. Let's put it on the larp and the world position offset, we're going to hold control and put it on A. As for B value, we're going to put it as zero, meaning there's going to me no movement, nothing like that. Now, this mass that we created is going to be attached onto Alpha, just like that, and attach to the world position offset. And once we have everything attached, hopefully, everything should if we had apply, everything should move only on the top. So let's have a look. And the opposite happened, which is reasonable. We can just simply switch it out. So holding control, we can switch out the learn value for B and A. And now the A is zero, zero. Let's hit Apply. And hopefully, there we go. Only the top is moving. If we set up a nicer little divide value over here. So let's say 400, we're going to have a more gradual motion as it goes downwards. So that is pretty nice for the setup we can go ahead and make use out of this entire setting. Let's go ahead and make sure we hit Control Shift ness to save this project. And that is a good place to stop. We got ourselves the offset setup with some animation, which is attached to well position offset. But before we attach it, we get ourselves a mask, which we then use with the mask component, all of that good stuff, we then use it with LRP and attach it to Alpha or world position offset. Of course, right now, we still have the base color attached to the mask just to make sure that we are able to visualize this mask. Later on, we're going to detach it and just use the world position offset, but we are still not quite there in regards to the setup. We still have some work to do. So we're going to continue on with this in the next lesson. Thank you so much for watching, and I will be seeing you in a bit. 46. Controlling Tree Wind Motion with Global Material Parameters: Hello and welcome back an n Reel Engine five stylized night environment, effect lighting, foliage, and landscape design. In the last lesson, we left ourselves off with this wonderful little motion for the wobbliness of the tree. We're still not quite there yet because we have some of the things that we need to set up as global parameters. What I mean by that is, if we look back on a default tree we had two materials, one for bark and one for leaves. If we simply set ourselves up with the parameters to control these values over here, it would mean that every time we are changing up the parameters, we'd need to change the leaves parameters and we'd need to change the parameters for the bark. And that would be very long and tedious. We need to make sure we have the ability to control the parameters for both. And that's also quite important if we're having different objects as well. So let's say we have not only one tree, but multiple trees or I don't know, something else that requires wind motion, you would need to definitely have global parameters. So what can we do about it? Well, if we go onto content Browser that we created with the wind system, I just realized the wind system I created was within a meshes folder, which it's actually correct. I'm just a little confused. FingertpT should not say game meshes. This should say content folded. There we go. That seemed like it was glitched out. It is what it is. It's right. Anyways, going back to this, let's go ahead and right click and search for parameters or material. Yeah, I see what I did. Material. Here we go. I moved my mouse onto one of the folders, and that was the case. So when you right click, just make sure not to hover over one of the folders because you will only be searching that specific folder. Anyways, we need to get ourselves material parameter collection. This is going to be very nice. We can call it wind parameters like so, and get ourselves this little array. Now, what does this array do? Well, first of all, we're going to click Control Shiftins to save it out to make sure we don't lose it. Next up, we're going to create multiple indexes in scalar parameters. So we're going to create a total of seven array elements. Let's go ahead and create it. And then once we open it up, we can just open all of them up just like that. We are going to be having this. What is this? Well, we can essentially create parameters that can be imported into materials and use them. So the first one is going to be the divide option 400. We can set up default value 400 because that will work quite well and we can call it gradient. So that's going to be, again, the divide setup. Next up is going to be the additive, so offset, and that can be set to 200. Like so these will be great default values. Afterwards, will be strength. We'll need to set ourselves up with strength for the multiplier of the offset, so we can set it up as default 50. And then we will also have windscale. We'll just need to set ourselves up with the multiplier for world position to get that. But we'll work on that wind scale, and we can set it up to a small value. So 0.0, zero, zero. Actually, let me just grab this copy paste. How many zeros are there? One, two, three, four, five. So five zeros and then three. So 0.5 zeros and then three. This will be a good value because the scale of the noise will be quite large, exactly what we want for the noise. Then we go ourselves X and Y values. X and Y values for the panner and we can use point minus 03, like so, so the wind would be going flowing in one direction. We can always change that, but these default values will work well. For Y, it's going to be 0.02. And finally, the last one is going to be a little bit more of an interesting one because this is going to be motion in the visual randomizer. Uh huh. What's this? Well, we are going to sort it out. Let's not worry about that just yet because we can now go ahead and hit Control shift in S to save it and close this down. Let's go back onto the material for the wind system and work with it. And first things first, let's go ahead and set ourselves up with wind scale. So that is going to be within where would it be? There we go. Absolute world position. We need to just simply grab a multiplier, which we already have over here. And then we're just going to Right click. And in order to use the collection parameters, we just need to find parameter node, this one over here. And within here, within the node, we got parameter name. So if if we had this already selected within our content browser, when creating collection parameter, it's going to automatically pick the collection. But if you don't have it, just go onto the detail stab and you can just select it from here within this node. Next up, we are just going to go ahead and we find ourselves the wind scale like Zo we're going to attach it over here, just like that. So that's going to be the wind scale. Then next step is going to be X and Y. So that's going to be we can just go ahead and copy this actually. Makes our lives a little bit easier. Why not? Uh, just like that, we are going to attach X and Y. Lovely. Right? That is looking pretty good so far. Then we have the strength. So strength is going to be over here. I'm just going to hit Control B to again, phase this in, get the strength, plunk it into the value of B, and there we go. And these two values over here, let's not forget about them. So we're going to grab a Offset? Yes, adding is offset, like so. And then, again, I' hitting just Control V to paste it in. Makes my life a little easier. Why not? Let's go ahead and grab gradient, put it onto the divide, and we are going to have some lovely parameters, lovely values to make use out of. Now, I think we are pretty much done except for one thing. By the way, we can just minimize these tabs. Like, so if you choose to, doesn't really matter. The functionality will not change. But let's talk a little bit about what we created on the last part, which was Dudu motion individual randomizer. So that's the last parameter that we created. How can we use it and what we need to use it for? Well, the thing is if we have multiple trees, this little freaky tree, let's go ahead and just quickly make some duplicates out of it in a row, just kind of highlight the point like this. We'll notice that all of this ends up moving in the same kind of way and the texture of the setup ends up being very, very visible. Good to go ahead and hit Apply because we just set ourselves up with some collection parameters. That's going to work much nicer. There we go. And we can see that all the swaying, it is going just back and forth and there's no variation. They have even though the noise is being larger, if it was smaller, that same noise would be very repetitive of a voice. So what can we do to fix it? Well, there is a little node called per instance random. Random, there we go. If we were to plug this into the base color just to cut a preview what it is, let's go ahead and do that. Unfortunately, it does not work with the base color. It is what it is, but we don't need it to work because we are just going to go ahead and set it up nicely with the per instance random with motion individual randomizer parameter that we set up. Collection parameter, node. Let's go ahead and just simply multiply these two values, just like that, and then we are going to add it to the value of absolute world position. So this will offset the coordinates for each one of those objects. So let's go ahead and just simply grab add node like so, add in the nodes like this and put it into the coordinate and we'll just go ahead and fix up the mass so we can preview this a little better, hit Apply and let's see how it looks like. Okay. Now, the trees are going to look like this and they are swaying nicely, like so. Yeah, it doesn't work with just placing objects like this. But if we grab ourselves the objects with foliage setup, so these ones are placed with foliage, which we're going to do for our trees, you can see that some of them end up moving one way, some of them moving another way. This value that we're using right now is a little bit too extreme, so it just looks a little off. But when it comes to larger scale, you'll see that this value helps to get a very nice type of output. With extreme values, it can be a little bit buggy, but you can see that yeah, they do indeed work with offset. Again, the scale of the noise is quite small, meaning that the overall scale is, well, quite large. And if we want to, we could example this down a little bit, and that would give us there we go individual wobbles. So just a quick test, putting it back values to as created, and there we go. So now we can go ahead and focus on making use out of this wind with our already existing textures. So that's going to be it for me. Thank you so much for watching and I will be seeing you in a bit. 47. Animating Forest Trees with Wind Shaders and Foliage Tools: Hello and welcome back everyone to Unreal Engine five stylized night environment. VFX sliding, foliage and landscape design. In the last lesson, we left ourselves off with this little wiggly thing that we're going to make use out of for our amazing forest. We're in this lovely flat terrain that we have. I call it flat because, well, we don't have any trees to kind of break it up. We are going to go ahead and fix that now. We're going to make sure that this material that we have over here, ends up using the right wind setup. So how can we do it? Well, we are going to first identify where this master material is. So this is going to be M clear coat. 1 second. I believe. I'm not sure why, but I believe, these are using different ones. That's interesting. There's not going to be much of a change. But for some reason, this is applied as clear code. Hm. That's I've never seen that happen before, to be honest. When importing GLB format, you should be able to just get away with one, and there was no coding to make use out of it. Okay, let's go on to the leaf section. Sorry about that. Let's go onto the leaves, find ourselves the default and default. This one over here, we can grab. That's for sure. So let's find it within a default setting. Over here, we can hit Control. Sorry, we can just right click and we can make a duplicate just like that. And we can call it MM underscore GLB copy. There we go. And we can move it onto our content folder. There we go all the way to top. Move here. If you're not able to access this by the way, when clicking on this button, make sure that within the settings, you have engines content and plug in content enabled. Both of these, well, although honestly for this case, we only need engined content, but both of these are good to have it enabled, but make sure to not really do any adjustments for the master materials or any of the items in here because you're not only going to be changing the projects settings, you're going to be changing the engine settings, permanently, meaning that whenever you create a new project, these settings will still be kept. So that's why we're making a copy. That way we can change this with ease and not worry about it and set ourselves up with a nice parameter. So what do we have? Well, we have this at the very end, and that's pretty much the same as what we had with our Wi material. All we need is just this little world position offset. So what we're going to do is we're going to just move it off to the side and have ourselves some little space. And with this little space, if we go onto our wind, do do do, wind system material. There we go. We can simply just grab this entire thing outside of everything oxy sorry, everything outside of this main material node. We just grab it, hit Control C, hit Control C, like so, and let's move back to master material GLB copy to hit Control B, and it puts everything into our setup. Let's just make sure we have enough space to make it a little bit more tidy. Now, the end of arp, all we need to do is plug it into pixel depth of sorry, not that. I always mix them up, although they don't have the same naming world position offset. There we go. Once we have this plugged in, we can hit Apply. And now the beautiful thing is that to do, do, do do. The beautiful thing is that we wait for the shader to load. Of course, that is what we need. Hopefully, this hasn't crashed my project. There we go. Going to hit Control shifts because I'm getting paranoid about it. But once we have it, we can just go ahead and relocate our tree because I think it will be just easier, find the tree bark, open up this part over here, and replace this parent with our created master material GLB copy. We can just select it like this, hit this pattern over here, and we are going to do the same or leaves as well. So that is going to be pretty good. All right. So this is the master material. Yes, it is. We can just simply go ahead and replace it and close this and at shader is loading up. We got motion within our tree. So, yeah, that is pretty cool. I love creating the system because it's interesting. It's unique, and it gives some life to the scene with such stylized trees, honestly, it makes it look so nice with the shadow of the moon. I think it looks very, very nice. Anyway, enough of that, though. Let's go ahead and just delete the acid in the back. And I just realized we have these little things in the back, as well. Let's go ahead and delete them. They're not needed for us anymore, so. And we set this tree up now with the foliage, although we can put these trees over here a little bit. If we look at the reference, we have a couple of small trees over so and sometimes I prefer to just make some of the work a little bit more manual. So the two trees that are going to be visible over here, I think we can just leave it as not foliage, and that will just give us a little more control because I think this is going to be the main part of a what's it called? A main part of the silhouette? So we're just going to move it up like this, and that's going to look very, very nice a thing. Maybe a little bit rotate. There we go. Maybe a little bit to the front. Oh. Like this, small little twigs. Just like that. But I think that looks I think that looks quite nice. Alright. Now, going back palm to the lovely foliage that we use with rocks. Going to hit Control Shift. As an example, I already had this on. Don't worry about it because we're just going to simply bind the tree that we had it over here and wait a second. Why is it previewing like that? Ah, Mm hmm. Okay. So I've not updated the main I've not updated the main material for it. My bad. Or I used an example for this tree and ended up leaving, this off. So that should be leaves like that. Sorry about that. There we go. I thought it was compiling shaders, but it was just a quick little mistake. Now we have this tree properly set up with the foliage. We can put it into our foliage type and make sure we have these rocks ticked off. This is a must because we only want to work with the trees. Now, let's see the size of these trees. The size of these trees is massive. We want to make sure it's way smaller. So let's go ahead and go with the scale of 0.7 and 0.8, perhaps. Let's see. Uh huh, looking much better, but I think we don't have enough variation on it. And also another quick thing in regards to deleting. If we're only having the tree selected, we can hold shift and erase, and the rocks are going to be kept the same. In order to erase something, you need to make sure that the tick mark is ticked on. So it's only going to be erasing whatever is ticked on. So that's a quick little information for you guys. And what did I say? Oh, right, the variation. Let's set it to 0.5. Let's see how that goes. Africa that looks like a nice little forest. We can go ahead and play around with it. I think we're going to start off with the area in the back over here, and this density is, Oh, this is too much. This is not quite as nice. Another thing that we need to consider is, well, the positioning of these trees. This is not how it's supposed to be. The trees need to be going upwards because, well, they will look quite off if all the trees are just, you know, at an angle. No, no, no, it's not good. We need to find ourselves setup, where is it reached normal. There we go aligned to normal. If we were to take this off, now they're going to be properly placed upwards. The upper thing is going to be the density. Let's make sure that the density for the trees is set to well, 100. We can keep it at a 100. Pay density, if we lower this, we should be able to lower this as well. Or let's lower the density painting to 20, and there we go. We got ourselves nice little trees. And I do recommend you just like with the rocks, to make sure we are simply having just some variation in setup. We're not going to have just, you know, brushing all over. This is not going to look quite as nice. I recommend you just tapping it in certain areas, holding shift, delete some, at some and just have like a bit of variation. The top over here is very important for us because we are going to see the silhouette of it. So we need to make sure that set up the trees quite well, and it's going to look nice, for us. If we have some trees in the back, maybe that would help as well, let's have a look, and that looks quite well. I think in this case, we can increase the pain density a little bit and just start adding a bit of lusciousness to certain sections. Like, so, I guess, from a distance, it looks like it's not enough. It didn't look like it is enough. Let's see now. That looks much better. That looks quite alright, actually. I'm quite happy this result, but the trees, these three trees over here, I'm not happy about them. I'm going to go ahead and remove it and maybe add some over here. Let's see. And that looks much better. I'm quite happy with this result. We can also add some in here as well, of course. I think the density over here should be a little bit higher. There you go, because it can just fill in this little gap quite nicely. And we are running out of time. So we're going to continue on with the placement of trees in the next lesson. We're going to make sure that it looks very nice when it comes to, well, the silhouette setups. And yeah, thank you so much for watching, and I will be seeing you in a bit. 48. Optimizing Grass Materials and Placement with Foliage Settings: Hello and welcome back e one to UnreelEngine five stylized night environment, VFC sliding, foliage and landscape design. Now that we set ourselves up with some nice, lovely trees in the background, we're going to continue on with the setup, and I'm just in my unlit mode just to make it a little bit easier for us. We're going to find ourselves some grass and start working with D. So we have four different grass variations within the mesh folder, content mesh, and we can just drag it out into the world like that to have the pieces set up like so. This default setup is not a GLB file, so it's going to be a little bit different. Let me just go ahead and grab all four of them like this. And if we look at the material, it is simply an Alpha setup, an Alpha texture with, well, just a general texture for the grass. Using that, we're going to be able to get ourselves this type of grass buds, which is looking pretty nice. One of the things that we're missing right now is that these grass pieces are set up, so it would be only visible from one side, meaning that the grass that we're seeing over here, if we look at it from the other side is going to be invisible. So let's go ahead and fix that right away. We're going to select on the material, scroll all the way to the top and find ourselves with a detail stab to sit it. Let's go ahead and select it, hit Apply like so, and that's going to be the first fix that we're going to have like so. Next step is going to be the fact that this right now is, well, it's just a simple plane. We need to make sure it is using an alpha. So let's go ahead and make sure we are using that. We're going to change the blend mode from opaque to mask. This way, we can make a cut out out of our grass buds like so. So the end pieces are going to look much nicer. Let's go ahead and have a look before and after. I'm going to also change up the game setting so we'd actually see a little better. So we can now see the end bud. Let's apply, and there we go. Alright, so that's a number thing to fix. And as a preview, let's go ahead and straightaway, grab these into our foliage system. That way, when we are working with this entire setup, we can actually see what's going on with the grass buds. Yeah, let's go ahead and do that. We're going to go ahead and save it all out and escape. Then we're going to grab this grass and put it into our foliage system. The grass foliage system needs to be slightly adjusted because it's not such large objects. They need to be made sure that these grass pieces are a little more optimized. For us to optimize it, we are going to go all the way until we find there we go. Until we find cast shadow, we need to make sure that cast shadow is turned off otherwise. It's going to be, well, every single bud is going to try to cast lighting and performance is going to drop. If we have this ticked off, we can now go ahead and place this a little bit like so, and we're going to have ourselves nice little grass. So that's a good little start like so. The other thing that we need to consider is going to be, well, optimization for culling. What I like to do personally is I just like to add this maximum set to 200 and just play around with it. So now we can see that it appears and disappears when it gets closer and further, which is pretty good, but maybe it's a little bit too little, so let's set it to 2000. And now when we are in a distance, we are going to see these disappear. And looking at this, we ideally want to set it up so it would disappear only when perhaps it's reaching, let's see. When it's reaching this point of the setup. So if I was to put my grass over here on the side, we can then play around with value and see where it starts disappearing. So let's go ahead and do that. Let's put this 28000. Oh, there we go. It appears. And disappears at this point. And I think that's going to be quite all right because we need to make sure that the grass is not going to be visible roughout the entire scene, but only to when the camera is close by. So that's another thing to fix, which we did. Other thing, by default, this should be turned off, but no collisions for a praise like this should definitely be turned off. Make sure it is. And that will be that. And the rest is okay. We also have option from what we had with the trees to align to normal, which if we have a look at it, the grass might be quite alright with this alignment to normal. But we also have an angle over here, which we can change, for example, to 15. And now it should only try to align when just a little bit off with angle. So I think that's going to be quite a little bit better. And I think we are done with the main premise of the foliage setup, placement, we're going to go ahead and just play some inside of this little area and then talk a little bit about well, general setup for it in material. We're going to go back to the material mode. Let's go on to selection, find ourselves this little material that we had. Let's actually just click. These are the four grasses that we had previously placed manually. Let's go ahead and just click on one of them, select the material, and this is what we're having. So what can we do now? Well, for Sarus, we need to know that this material setup is using all of the grass vertically, which is really good because we want to locate the bottom section of the grass. The reason we want to locate the bottom section of the grass is we want to imitate contact shadows. Right now, the shadows are disabled. So the grass itself is going to look a little off for the setup. If we have a look, it's just going to look like, well, just glowing and out of place. So for us to fix that, we are going to make use out of the texture and multiply it with a gradient. So let's go ahead and do that. I'm going to go into the preview mode and just go to plane so we could actually preview what's happening. And now we're going to make use out of something called linear gradient. This one over here, linear gradient. We'll use UV channel by default, so it's all good, and we can choose either U gradient, which is going to be horizontal or vertical gradient. And using the vertical gradient, if we have a look on how it looks like, if I was to put it in the base color, we're going to get ourselves this. It's going to be darker on the top and whiter on the bottom. So let's go ahead and adjust this mask for the sake of the preview, I will just also disable opacity mask so we can actually see what's going on a little better. And now we're going to start off by using Add to offset the mask a little bit, like so, we can set it up with -0.5, just like that. And this will just drag the mask a little bit lower, so the transition will be a lower pace, lower area. Then we can set ourselves up with multiply, like so, and multiply by two to sharpen up this mask, just like that, already looking better. And of course, we need to flip the mask around. So how can we do it? Well, there is a nice little option called one minus or minus X. There we go. And we can just use this one minus X function to invert the mask. And just like that, we got this type of a mask. So now we're going to make use out of it by simply multiplying with the main color. So let's go ahead and do that. Like so. And we are going to get this type of result where the bottom is darkened, and that's exactly what we want if we were to put it back onto the setup with opacity mask and all we're going to get this type of result and if we were to see before and after. So let's apply onto our material. If we were to see before and after, we're going to get darker bottom bases. So it's going to look like more contact shadows. So that's already looking much, much better. Next up is going to be something a little bit more interesting, which is going to be subsurface, subsurface color. So what subsurface color is, we need to firstly enable it. And that's going to be oh, it's actually going to be within the shading model. Let's go ahead and enable this to be subsurface, which will allow us to make use out of a subsurface color. And what this does is basically when the light shines through the object, you're able to basically get an indirect lighting back out of it. So it makes it look like more of a thinner object. Right now, if we look at it from this angle over here, for example, we're going to see, well, all the grass is quite dark and whatnot. And we are playing with, you know, the silhouettes and whatnot, but we still need to make sure that the grass is visible when we are, you know, from this angle over here, where the light is shining towards us and not behind us. So what can we do with it? Well, subsurface color will help with that. We can go ahead and grab ourselves a nice little option. And as a quick showcase on what it does is we can hold free, tap on a screen, and we can just put the subsurface in, and we could even Oh, we could even change this color to be red, for example, just as a quick little sample. So let's apply, and then we'll see that we'll have a little bit more of well, translucency out of the grass. When we're looking at it from this angle, it's more of a greenish. But essentially, when looking from this angle, we're going to see that the grass is starting to be more translucent with this color. If we set it up with a multiplier color, so let's go ahead and do that. Like so with a value of 0.1. We can just lower down the intensity for it. Let's it apply. Again, we're just using color, multiply by 0.1, and we're going to get this type of result. Now if we look at it from this angle, it's going to be quite all right, but if we're looking at it from this angle, it's going to start bringing out the color from the grass and from a distance, it's going to be a lot more visible. Of course, the color that we're using right now is not quite right. We need to slightly adjust it, let's go ahead and do that. Let's go ahead and change this to be more of a greenish yellow. Let's see. Something like this value will do quite well. Yep. And multiply with 0.1, we can hit Apply, and now it's just going to be a little nicer for this thin type of grass, just like that. Yeah, there are options to use subsurface color with manual textures and whatnot, but honestly, using it like this will work quite well. The only thing, though, is that we need to, well, grab ourselves the ability to make sure that the contact for the bottom is not going to be as visible because, again, we're getting the same result as we had previously, where the grass is just green and the bottom darker parts are non existent. So we're going to reuse that same mass that we already have we're going to hit multiply. We're going to combine it with the gradient that we had over here. So yeah, the same linear gradient that we had, we're going to combine it together, and we're going to put it onto the surf surface color, just like that. And this will help us to kind of negate the entire bottom piece, making sure we're not lighting up the base. And just like that, we're going to get a very nice little color set. So next step is going to be to adjust the grass itself. We're going to go onto the texture. We're going to double click the texture, and we're going to play around with these parameters. So while we're playing around with them, we can just maybe move it a little bit more off to the side like this, so we could see the grass itself. And now the grass texture that we're having opened up, we're going to go to adjustment stab Let's have a look. There we go. So first things first, brightness, we can lower this down by quite a little bit until we get more of a darker look. So value of 0.28 will work quite well for this setup. Next up is saturation. So the saturation that we're having right now is a little bit too much. By lowering it down, we could get more towards a closer version of this grass, which would be pretty nice. Let's go ahead and lower this just 20.9, like so. Next up is going to be hue. So what we want is a color that goes in the opposite direction. So towards this, there we go. If we are starting to lower, we get some interesting results. Let's go ahead and change this to a free free one for the hue, and that's it. It's going to give us a nice little grass setup for our entire terrain. Now as a real quick check, I will go ahead and grab the human reference and place it on the ground. Like so just to see how it looks like with the scale of the grass. So some of the parts are quite a bit taller. Our parts are shorter, and I think that's quite right. I think it works out quite nicely. So we're going to be able to continue on with this in the next lesson. Thank you so much for watching, and I will be seeing you in a bit. But 49. Creating Local Wind Animation for Grass with Vertex Masks: Hello. Welcome back everyone to UnreelEngine, five stylized night environment, VFX sliding foliage and a landscape design. In the last lesson, we left ourselves up with some nice little grass buds coming out of the setup. We still have some work to do, and the main thing for that would be some animation, because right now, even though our trees are swoing in the wind, we haven't got any of the grass system set up. And it's going to be actually a little bit different in comparison to the setup. We're not going to use those global parameters that we had. Instead, we're going to set up its own system because rice being on the bottom and all, it's going to look much nicer if we do. So let's go ahead and do that. We're going to find ourselves back on the baterial tab, like so, and we're going to start off by grabbing ourselves a texture. The texture that we're going to use, if we hold T tap on the texture, we're going to set it up with a water texture. And there is a very nice water texture. Called T water N. Unfortunately, there's two of them. So let me have a look at which one is needed. I believe it's going to be this one. Yep, it is perfect. We're going to be using normals because it has data for well X Y and Z coordinates, and it's going to make it look like a nicely swoing wave, almost like, well, water, like some ocean for the grass. So that's going to be very nice for us. We're going to make sure we make use out of it and make use out of it, we're going to make use out of a node called world aligned world aligned texture. That's the one. So this is the type that we're going to use, and we need to set it up with texture object. However, the texture sample that we have is not a texture object. It is a texture sample. We need to convert this to be a texture object. So if we right click, we can convert it to texture object like so we can now connect it to this value over here. Next up, we need to determine the texture size. So based on the world position, we're going to determine the texture size, so we're going to use vector holding free, we're going to tap on a screen, and we've got X Y and Z coordinates. Each one of them, we're going to set it up to 7,500, like so. It gives us a nice base texture size like this, and we're going to attach it to the texture size, just like Tan. And finally, we have world position. The world position is going to be set with, well, absolute world position. World position, like so. And in this case, we are going to set it up a little bit differently, meaning that this world aligned texture can use, well, vector, vector free. So not only you're going to be getting the top down view, but also you're going to get some offset for for the set value, but we want to make sure that we have some motion in the grass, so we're only moving the top down grass. And for that, we need to, well, separate them, actually. We need to grab a panner. Like, so the panter is going to use X and Y coordinates, just like that. And then for the speed, we can set the values up with one being 25, other being 25, and we can append just like that. This material, we're going to keep it as just a simple master material. We're not going to make a material instance because it's only going to be used once. We don't really need to do it as a material instance. So now we have ourselves to append with setting up with the speed. We got ourselves X and Y codint, but this wall position requires vector free. So we need to append the vector again. So X and Y needs to be appended with Z, so we get X Y and Z back. So that's exactly what we're going to do, just like that. And now we have X Y and Z. Which we can put it onto the world position, just like that. And all of the rest is fine. We can keep it as is. Now we can go ahead and grab the XY coordinates. Honestly, we don't really need the z coordinates. We're going to only make use X and Y coordinates, and then we need to basically reset the Z value, so it would be zero. So that way, it wouldn't create some weird artifacts for the offset. So we're going to well, use append again, append vector. We're going to just grab ourselves a zero value for the X Y and Z for the Z value, and then we're going to multiply this entire value to make a nicer noise by 16. And as a showcase what we have so far, let's go ahead and just put this into our world position offset, just like ten. And once it loads up, we're going to see slight wobble. So how does this wobble look like in the real setting? Let's have a look. There we go. And that's what we're going to have so far. A nice little wobble, go in some swaying a bit left, some swing a bit right, and it's going to look like a nice wave. The only thing though, is that it's swaying from the base up and also we need to offset it so it will be lower down a little bit. We're going to make sure we do that. But as you can see, it swaying at the base is not good. So what can we do about it? Well, we can make use out of the vertex color. Using vertex color will help us to create ourselves a mass. That's the general way of doing it. Although, with this type of texture, honestly, we could have used the same way we did over here where we have a gradient, but it's better to have more control over the setup of the item because some of the buds are smaller, some of them are bigger, and we want to make sure that the general gradient is being kept the same. So yeah, for that, we are going to use something called where is it? Mesh paint. I believe that's the one. Yep, mash paint will have a vertex color. We're going to make use out of it. We're going to turn off the RGB channels like so, which will start previewing the section. Let's make sure we have the selection of a grass. I think we can just do one at a time, like so. And once we have a selection, we can go on to paint, set the paint color to black. And we can do so if we have a look at the setup, the pink color is white. The eraser color is black, but essentially it's just primary and secondary color, which you can switch using a button X. So by clicking X, you're able to just, well, switch between them black and white. And once we have the main color as black, we can use our brackets, make it smaller, larger or using this slide over here. We can do so. And we can just simply tap on the base to kind of get this type of a mask. Now, we're going to make sure that the fall off is set to Max and that way, we're getting a nice little setup. And I'm just going to click X to get a white and maybe lower the upper section. And I think we can make it, we can make it a little bit more extreme. Let's go ahead and do that. I'm going to just quickly tap once or twice to make sure we have some bit of gradient instead of holding it. If we were to hold it, it's going to well, give us no gradient at all. So let's make sure we don't do that. And that's going to be quite right. For this one, we're going to move the another piece. I would say we can also lower the strength a little bit and make sure we just have nice gradient. There we go, something like this, that will be perfect. In case you're not seeing a mask like that, just make sure when you're painting, you have the RGB selected RGB. Honestly, we're only going to be using red, but if was fine, we're going to keep it simple. Let's not overcomplicate it. Essentially, each one of those channels is its own information, and they're just presented as red, green, and blue, as well as Alpha for opacity. But again, they're just separate channels. They're not going to be different or anything of that sort. And we are going to just simply get ourselves a mask for the base of every single piece that we have over here. So we're going to just tap, tap, tap like, so until we get a reasonable mass for the base. And that's yeah, that looks quite right. We're just making sure that every single bud has a little bit of a black mask, like so. So maybe need a little more. But using this method, we can just control exactly where we want the motion to stop, which is very, very nice for us. This one over here, we can also do a little bit of masking like so. That's going to be quite all right. Making sure that every single bud has it, and we can even make this larger, would say. I said to chew. Let's go ahead and do that. There we go. And at the top, I'm just going to tap it out a little bit to get this kind of gradient. There we go. And finally, this part over here, we're going to just, this one is in the ground, actually. So let's go ahead and just quickly grab this upwards a little bit, like, se and use, sorry, not foliage, mesh paint with this selection paint, and we can just make this brush a little bit smaller and just tap it in. Just like that. This section of the grass doesn't want to be affected for some reason. There we go. Now it's affected properly, and we're going to get a nice little grade in as well by just tapping the white on the top. And yeah, that's looking quite right. Let's go ahead and keep it. We're now going to need to make use out of it. So to make use out of it, it's going to be quite simple. Let's go onto the material, like so, and find ourselves the section of world position offset. So this multiply over here, we are going to simply use this as a mask. So let's grab vertex color. So this is information. So RGB, red, green, and blue, we're going to only use red, and we're going to set it up as a mask for arp. So if we put in the original value as this and the value for B zero, and then use the red channel for Alpha, we can essentially say that whenever the verte paint is set to black, we're going to get the zero value, meaning that once we hit the supply, we're going to have ourselves a nice motion only for the top and not opposite. And let's have a look. And we have the opposite of that what we just talked about. So let's go ahead and switch that up a little bit. So the easiest way to switch our around would be by holding control, but you get onto the B, and now by clicking Apply, we are going to get the right result, the A value being set to zero, and there we go. A nice little motion, the base is not moving, and that's exactly what we want. So if we have a look at this grass over here, we have ourselves very nice motion for the grass. I'm just looking at maybe some parts still moving a little bit. All of the grass here is fine, and this one seems to be a little bit off. But we're going to just reapply the grass that we have over here. The motion is there. It's just the offset is not quite there. So we're going to continue on with this in the next lesson and see what is going on with this. Thank you so much for watching and I will be seeing you in a bit. 50. Finalizing Grass Animation and Manual Painting for Realism: All. Welcome back on to On reel Engine five stylized night environment, VFX sliding, foliage, and a landscape design. In the last lesson, we left ourselves off with a nice little grass vertex painting. But we finally went over the entire masking, and there was a slight little issue. And that issue was that, even though we apply the mask, nothing is being placed over here, and we're having everything b. And the reason for that is if I was to bring a brand new mesh and have a look at it in mesh paint or GB channel, we'll see that there is no mask. So what is happening? Well, Uh, there is a tiny little option that I forgot to mention, and that would be if we were to select the grass, go back on the mesh paint. That would be using this little bottom over here called to Mash. Using the bottom to mash allows us to overwrite the vertex painting of not only the individual asset, but of the well, the entire grass itself. So let's go ahead and continue on doing that for every single one of them, just to make sure that we grab a texture for all of them. And right away, once we're finished with it, we can place just to check the grass over here, go into the mesh paint and see that now the grass will have the vertex paint inherited from these grass buds, meaning that this now will move properly, and that is very good for us. So we can now go ahead and delete these parts over here on the grass, these little meshes and start using it onto our foliage. We can also decide the type of density that we want. Think having it set as one will be pretty good. Which might be not even enough, actually. So what we're going to do is we're going to select this entire piece and set it up to 300. Let's have a look at this. And even more, let's say, 800. Let's see. There we go. Nice luster grass, maybe a little bit too much. Then we get away with 600, let's see. We can get away with 600. The first thing that I'd like us to do is there is basically two variations for one longer grass, one smaller grass variation. We can go ahead and disable the longer grass and only have ourselves smaller grass to work with, which should be, I believe these ones over here, or it might be not, actually. Let me have a look. So this one is this smaller grass. Yep. This one is going to be this version, which is larger. This one is going to be larger as well. And finally, this one is going to be like so. So we want basically this variation and this variation. This variations grass 8003, and this one is grass 9003. So these two, the up ones in the middle are going to be disabled, and we are going to Sass select all of them quickly delete already existing ones, like so and just disable it like that again. Now we can just work with well, small grass. The small grass will require us to have even more density actually, like so. There we go. Much nicer. So why we're doing this? Well, we want to make sure we have a general grass everywhere that has grassy setup. But then we want to have some ability to create variation for the grass where we want to be taller, smaller, shorter, and whatnot. So we can just plunk in the grass everywhere on the sill, for example, and it's going to look quite nice. Like so. We can just place it down. We can even make this larger, plunk it down like so, and then we can just work our way around it. So because it's such a small grass, we don't need to worry about it too much. The slope already is nicely set up for us. Just a quick check though. 45 degrees is actually too little. Should be 60. There we go. Now it's going to be much, much better. And we can just plunk in the grass like so. Manually painting it in in all the right spots. Also, let's not forget to make sure that we have the option. Where is it? Option for static meshes tick off. We don't need it. We don't want to have grass or, for example, these trees over here or on our ruins. So that's going to help us with that. And in terms of, well, grass over here, we can make some variations like this, let's have a look. Mm hmm. That looks quite nice. Let's make sure some corners have grass as well. Let's have a look. It's looking nice. I'm going to go on to unlit mode. That way we can see a little bit more when it comes to this grass and put extra care in the primary composition. So this is going to be the tent that we have over here and just tapping it around, getting ourselves nice little setups. We can even put it over in here as well. And afterwards, we can just hold shift, break it up a little bit. When it comes to erasing, we have this option over here called erased density. If we were to change this to one and hold shift, nothing will happen because it means that it's going to keep that same pain density as one. This is going to be set as one, as well. We were to change this to 0.1, it's going to replace basically the paint density from 12.1, meaning that while we're holding shift, some of the grass is going to be still kept. So that's a pretty good option. So maybe 0.3 will do a little bit better, and 0.3 is a little bit not effective. There we go. So now we can just basically create some trimming effect around certain areas. So that's going to be pretty good for us. Like so and yeah, just enjoy painting in the grass. Maybe having a little bit more brightness will work in our favor in this case. We want to make sure we have nice lusciousness in our grass and in areas where it's not going to be the main focus of the camera. We can just simply make the brush quite a bit larger and just go at it just like that. And it's going to be quite right. Yeah. There we go. Now, let's not forget the mountain, as well. We need some little love for the mountain. There we go. And this is going to be nice and luscious, green grass. Like so. Over here as well. This ta valley should be nice and green just like that. And we can make the brush even larger, just to kind of fill in the grass a little bit. Like so. Alright. I think that's enough grass, honestly, what we have over here. We don't need to worry about it too much going outwards. This is going to be quite a reasonable amount. Nice bit of luscious grass. We can even have a look at how this looks like in our game view. So just like that, and so much better. It's looking so much better already. When it comes to this area over here, maybe it's a little bit too flat. We can work with it a little bit, actually. We can even grab a little more pebbles or maybe smaller grass buds, and I think that's exactly what we're going to do. So I'm going to make this grass even smaller actually by going into well, let's go ahead and select both of these grass buds. We're going to go onto the density. So density, we can change this value to be, let's say, 2000, and the scaling can be set to 0.21 0.5, like so, and then we can make the brush just a little bit smaller, and there we go. We're going to get nice little buds of grass in areas where we want. So they started to fill out basically. The raised density is still set to 0.2, so we can just quickly erase some of them a little bit like so. And just playing around with this type of grass is going to give us some nice results. Whether it's taller grass, we're going to make a nice transition with shorter grass. And just like that, we're going to get very nice type of a setup. Yep, that looks pretty good. Alright. Now, when it comes to larger grass, we can go ahead and just work with that as well. We can grab ourselves larger grass and start working on it. So let's see the density, let's go ahead and select both of them so we can affect the density at once, and we can just tap insert areas where we think it would look pretty cool with breaking up the setup. We can just make the density a little bit nicer in these areas like so. And the variation here is pretty nice now, I would say, maybe a little bit over here. There we go. Now we can have some variation even in here as well. Let's go ahead and turn off the game setting so we can actually see and just have some variation in certain areas. For example, by this ruined entrance, maybe some of the parts would be a little bit more overgrown. Helps us break down the shape and talking about breaking down the shape. Here, grass would be pretty good to have here a little bit as well. A little bit over here. Holding shift, we can also trim it. And yeah, I think that looks really good. We can have some patches scattered around in our sections. Just like that. Just a little bit of trimming, all of that good stuff. I think it's going to look quite nice. There we go. Some bit of overgrown grass in this section is going to look quite nice. Maybe some even grass next to the trees, just like so, and maybe a little bit off on a distance. We need to make sure we break down these patterns a little bit, like so. Because it's going to be well picked up in this area, especially. So this is a little bit flat. Maybe we can have some grass over here, maybe some grass over here. Maybe in the corner like this. Let's hold shift with erase it set to zero and just kind of remove it from the areas we don't want. And I think it's already looking quite nice. Can have some grass taller over here as well. Let's not forget that. And there we go. Nice, grassy type of a setup. It's looking pretty good. Alright, so that's going to be it from our lesson. Thank you so much for watching, and I will be seeing you in a bit. 51. Creating Animated Fog with Mesh Planes and Flipbooks: Hello, welcome back everyone to Unreal Engine five stylized night environment, VFX sliding, foliage and landscape design. In last lesson, we left ourselves off with a lot of little grass setups over here, and we're going to continue on adjusting and tweaking the whole setup. This time we're going to add a little bit of fog because in reference, as we can see over here, we have some smoke coming through. There are multiple ways of having more of a foggy volumetric scene with an unreal engine. One way would be using volumetrics, which we're also going to set up. Another way would be using a little bit of poise processing, which we're going to touch up. Some of the settings by the end. And the final thing would be to use some mesh planes. Using mesh planes is a great way of adding some additional VFX onto your scene because you have a lot of control over the way the visuals look like. You can have lots of detail out of a setup. Let me show you what we're going to use. I within a texture step, there is something called smoke Trimset. This option over here has a contact sheet essentially of a smoke. And the way this was set up was basically I grabbed the video. I turned it into a contact sheet with some edges being worn out a little bit. Make sure there's nothing on the side of the edges that would give us some nasty cuts. And then once we had the contact sheet, we're now able to make use out of it as a flipbook. So a flipbook essentially will go through each one of those little parts as individual frames, giving us an animation. We don't need to do I particle setup. We can set it up as a plane. So let's grab ourselves a simple plane onto the scene. Like, so I'm going to go ahead and just take off the lit mode just so we can see what we're doing like so, and I'm going to go ahead and turn on the snapping tool, turn this around 90 degrees. Grab ourselves this little plane and start working with it. Actually, let's go ahead and make it bigger right away, and you know what? Instead of going to it and it mode, what we can do is we can adjust the scalability of the project. And what I mean by that is if we click on this battle over here for performance, we have viewport scalability. If we were to change this to low, by default, it's set to epic, changing it to low will give you more frame rate. It will lower the distance for some of the foliage and whatnot, but all in all, you're going to get somewhat of a similar visual effect, whilst, although it's not fully, but at the same time, the performance will be much better. So that might be a good starting point. Now, next up, let's go ahead and create ourselves yet another material. We're going to call this one a fog mat, like so, and right away, we're going to create ourselves a material instance because if we want to have multiple planes, we might want to have multiple duplications out of the same instances and slightly adjust some of the parameters. Next up, we're going to go onto the material. I did apply the material instance onto this plane, by the way, just letting you know. And next up, we're going to work with this material itself. So, in order for us to make use out of this for a fog, we're going to change the blend mode to additive. It is quite a lightweight because it only adds additional bit of value, meaning that the base color is going to, in a way, behave as an opacity. Any of the darker colors is just going to be not visible, black being completely invisible. So meaning that if we have something like red, for example, and we can see it in the preview, if we have this set to black, it's not going to be seen at all. So that's how the additive works. That. But of course, let's go ahead and set ourselves up with a texture. So let's hold T, click on the screen and grab ourselves the smoke that we had. O we can just type in smoke smoke dream sheet like so, and we are going to set set this up with the base color, just like that to see that we have, if we change this to plain that we have this type of setup. So now we have a lot of little pieces. We can use this as frame. We can right click and search for flipbook like so and use this in our setup. Now, this is going to just be used as UVs data like so, and we're going to get something like this. Now you can see it changed a little bit, but of course, this has not changed fully because we need to determine the rows and the amount. So by default, this was set with eight by eight frame setup. And it's going to give eight rows, eight columns, and we can determine that over here. I'm going to hold one, tap on a screen and just use eight as a value because it's eight by eight, like so. And that's going to give us a single frame just like that. Now, in order to make sure we have control over it, you can see it already being animated, actually, which is pretty nice. In order to have control over it, we're going to set it up with time. So by default, it's going to use time already, but we're going to use a multiplier with a speed control. So holding S, we're going to tap on a screen. We're going to call it speed, like so, and we're going to put this as 0.1, as a default value to multiply it with animation phase. And just like that, we have ourselves a slow little fog coming out, and we can even apply this and see how it looks like in our environment. So let's go ahead and do that. Like so, and right away, this is what we're getting basically. We got to sell a really nice bit of a fog. That's slowly moving. And well, for environment, it's going to look really, really nice. Now, for us to get a little bit more of an extra control, we're going to go ahead and set this up with a multiplier for vector free. So let's hold free, tap on the screen. Use this with a multiplier. Right click, change this to color. So we can change and adjust the color as we see fit and apply this to the base color just like that. Now that's going to be it from the base color itself. And although, well, let's change this default value to white, make sure it doesn't impact anything in terms of the base color. Next step will be the opacity. So as a starting point with opacity, we can do same multiplication actually over here as we had with RGB and color. So it would overlay a little bit when we are darkening up this color, which will be pretty good for us. Next up, we're going to make another multiplier, and this time, we are going to have some, well, additional parameters actually to it. So the parameters that we're going to use is firstly going to be camera adept fade. Let me just find it. There we go. Camera adept fade. This little option is going to be wonderful because it will allow us to have an opacity based on the distance of a camera. Let's go ahead and attach this over here, hold S and create a new parameter. We can call this scam fade, like so, and we're going to just attach this to fade length. Honestly, that's all we need for this. We can change this default value to 200, 200, like so, and attach this to opacity. And we are going to hit Apply then we're going to check how it looks like in our setup, and I am going to open up a material instance so we can play around with the settings a little bit. And just like that, though, we see if we get closer, it starts fading out, and that's exactly what we want. If we want more extreme values, we can totally do so. We can use this camera fade option over here. If we change it to 2000, we'll see that it's invisible, but once we get a little bit further, it gets visible, and that's very, very nice and convenient for us because it doesn't break the immersion. If we don't have this at all, we start going past the fog and it's just going to look very, very weird with, you know, the plane passing through. So this helps us to kind of negate that. It's very nice. The other thing is that the sharp edges when it comes to the terrain. These sharp edges, well, they're going to be contact edges whenever your terrain is touching or your object is touching this plane. We want to make sure we have a little bit more of an ease into that. For us to do that, to fix that, we're going to grab another piece called depth fade. Depth fade will basically mean that the closer it is to the terrain, depth the mask will settle in. So we can make a new multiplier, and I'm just going to attach it over here to multiply or camera depth fade with depth fade node, like, and we can set this up to be depth fade or this distance. Oh, sorry. We're going to just hold S tap on the screen and call this depth. Fade, like so, and we can set this value up to 100, put it into the depth fade, and that's going to help us out. This opacity at the top means the maximum opacity value, but we want to keep to be as one, so we're going to leave it as is. But now we can go ahead and check what the depth fad does. If we have a look at it over here, we can see now that there is, well, some transition from this to this. If we play around with the depth fade parameter that we just graded, we can see that this allows us to basically transition from the depth of terrain. So that's pretty good. And yeah, having it set as just 200 is going to do quite well. The final thing that we need to figure out is, well, the idea for this bug to not look plain when we're going behind it. So for us to do that, there is some options. We're going to go back onto our material. And we're going to set ourselves up with yet another item. So this part will be just grabbing pixel normal world space, so the normal off the face, and we're going to use dot product, so dot product maps node to combine it with camera vector. Camera vector, worldspaceT one over here. We're going to combine them two, and basically allows us to tell the angle at which the camera is looking at this item. Then we're going to make sure that we're using ABS which is going to allow us to, well, make sure we don't go into negative value, and we are going to use power, which is going to allow us to exponentially increase the value. So this can be holding a. We can just name this angle opacity, like so, and attach it to the exponential with a value of one. And finally, just to make sure we clamp the value up, we're going to use saturate. Like so just to make sure it doesn't break anything when we are multiplying this value. And this is going to be attached actually right after these values over here. So we're going to make a number multiply, attach it like so, and into B, just like that. So we got this entire little thing, which will allow us to control when opacity is set up based on an angle. So once we start looking from the side you can see started fading out and we can play around with this parameter, angle opacity if we want to increase the value. So once we start increasing, we can see it fading out. But if we're looking at it from this angle, we are still seeing it. So that's quite nice. And, yeah, it's just make sure that we don't have any fogs that just looks plain, all the angles and setups. You can see example like this. We can have 11 way, another one, another way, and that would help us to get some real nice type of fogs. And yeah, in the next lesson, we're going to start placing them around our scene. So thank you so much for watching, and I'll be seeing you in a bit. 52. Placing Layered Fog Planes for Realistic Depth: Hello. Welcome back around to nReLEngine five stylized night Environment, VFX sliding, foliage, and a landscape design. Now we have ourselves a lovely setup. Let's make sure we click on this button over here to save everything out to make sure we don't crash the system whenever we are populating it with the fog planes because you'll never know Unreal Engine has its quirks, but it's a lovely software. We're going to go ahead and make use out of it to, well, get some nice coloring out of these planes. So having it something like this, more of a bluish tint, I think will work more nicely. So let's go ahead and save it out and start placing them in our scene. So right now, we have, well, this setup over here. If we want to review it back with epic parameters, we can, or we can just simply start placing it with the low scalability. That's also going to work within our scene. And yeah, let's go ahead and start doing some work with it. So first things first, let's turn off the rotation angle, and let's scale it up a little bit with setup. So we could actually see how it looks like. There we go. Now, in terms of the setup itself, the parameters, let's go ahead and have a look at it a little bit. So the angle opacity might be a little bit too much. I think setting it to one will be right. The Cam fade is okay. The fate can be a little bit higher, so setting it up to 250 will be better and speed can be a little bit faster as well to make sure we're getting a better frame rate. And I believe that is it. We just need to make sure we have this quite bright. And I think, that will do quite nicely. I'm just looking at the setup, and I guess we can adjust after the placement opacity a little bit more. If we want to, let's go ahead and go back to the low. And let's see. First things first, let's place some in a bag. So I'm going to go ahead and just take this entire piece, put it in all the way back. Like, so we can rotate it a little bit, make sure we have a nice angle, stretch it out a little bit if needed. And there we go. We got a nice fk plain. Like, so I really want to visualize it a little bit better, so I'm going to go onto lit mode. There we go now, it's a little bit more visual. Now we can have this a little bit more rotated a little bit closer to the edge, and we can have another one in this area. If you don't want this to be duplicated too much, you can just flip this invert it to a negative scale to have a different look in comparison to this fog over here, and that's going to give us a nicer result. Like, so maybe we can just move this a little bit off to the side, the one on the back, and let's have a look. There we go. Something like this. It's going to look quite nice. Let's go ahead and preview it real quick. Yep, the fog is shaping up quite nicely, right. Then we can have a couple of planes on the front of this mountain. So let's go ahead and place some of those fog planes like so in these sections just like that. So we can have one over here and maybe even one over here. A little bit more to the side. We can even squish this one up if we want to just like that. Let's have a look. Let's click one. Go to nlit mode and review this a little bit. So this is sticking out a little bit too much. Going to lower this down, and it's looking quite nice. The instance, I do believe we need to have a better opacity. But lowering the color of the value is not going to help us out. So what I think we're going to do is we're going to grab a multiplier. Yeah, I think that's what we're going to do, actually. We're going to go back on theropk material and set it up with just opacity multiplier at the very end, just to make sure we are able to exaggerate this color. So let's hold S and just make it opacity, multiplier, like, and attaches just in case we need it. And in this case, we'll definitely need it, I believe. Let's go ahead and apply it and see if we're able to just use this opacity or multiplier, set it to two. There we go. Let's see if it looks quite well. And yeah, I think it looks much better. There we go. Simple multiplier, just like that. All right. So next up is going to be, I believe, another fog plane in the front. We can just go ahead and grab this one, put this in the front, we can invert the scale as we did previously, put this little section, put it somewhere in the ground, like so, and we'll have another plane. We can even rotate it a little bit if we want to to make it seem like it's nicely set up for us. Okay. So we have yet another plane. Let's see. O sections, we should definitely have some planes over here. So let's go ahead and make a duplicate out of one of the planes and place it in this area over here. Like, so just like that. That's looking lovely. Let's go ahead and create yet another plane and place it in here and say, well, this way, we're able to get some lovely texture, some lovely depth out of this section over here. Except we want to make sure it goes inside of the what's it called the cave? Not the cave, the cliph like this. And you might want to rotate it a little bit backwards. So slight tweaking and rotation, just to get something a little bit nicer for this section. Let's have a look. That's looking quite nice. This though, I think should need to be going lower a little bit and a little bit more to the back, just like that. Alright. And I would say we can have another plane over in this section over here. Just kind of slightly tilted like this, just to make it look a little nicer. I think I'll just go ahead and just invert the scale for it, so this larger part will be on the upside. And just like that, we're able to get another nice fog plane. This kind of setup, you could make adjustments and placements. All of this is rotated towards the camera, towards the main shot like this. But if you want, you can also change the camera angle like this and then start adding even more planes from this angle. So then you can use the what's it called angle opacity with a higher value and make sure that whenever it's at this angle, these planes will not be as visible. So that is my recommendation, let's go ahead and click one, go to Lit Mode and see how it looks like. Maybe a little bit higher up. There we go. Something like this. And yeah, I'm quite happy with this result. We could have potentially one more plane going behind the setup of the tent. I think we can try that for sure. Let's go ahead and grab the plane, place it, and set it up with just a slight little fog. Maybe even make it smaller to get it. Since it's closer to our camera, get it a little bit higher resolution at the same time. Something like so. And that will work quite well for us. Although it's a little bit too high up, I believe, we can just squish this down actually like so and get this type of a look, maybe even invert the value like this. Yeah, that looks quite nice. I'm quite happy with this result. Let's go ahead and go on to it Mode, see how these fog planes look like, and they are looking quite nice. All right, so that's going to be it for me. Thank you so much for watching and I will be seeing you in a bit. 53. Enhancing Atmosphere with Volumetric Fog and Post Process: Hello and welcome back on to Unreal Engine five stylized night environment, Vx lighting, foliage and landscape design. In the previous lesson, we got ourselves some nice little fog plains, but we're still not quite there yet in regards to the setup. The main thing that's needed, honestly, for just a general vibe of the atmosphere for foggy or atmospheric result is volumetric setup, and we already have at the very start started setting up the general setup for the lighting, let me just go on to the lighting folder. We already have directional lighting and exponential fog within here, as well as the sky atmosphere, the lighting and all of that good stuff for the night sky. The only thing that's missing realistically is going to be just tweaking some values for this exponential fog. If we were to go onto the setup, we can play around with some of the values. The first thing that we're going to do right away is just enable volume metric fog. By just enabling it, you'll realize that, hey, it's actually starting to look like there's more depth out of it. And if we look at the settings from a right angle, we'll see that there is more of how should I put it, light rays coming out. We can play around with scattering distribution for that setting. But honestly, keeping it at its default 0.2 value is going to be quite a thing I would say is that, to make sure that it is part of that colder atmosphere that we're having over here, we should change up the albedo. This albedo should be more of a bluish tint, like so, a little bit more, just like that. That's saturation. Perfect. So this is going to give us a nice transition from what's in a foreground, what's in a background, all of that good stuff. Extension scale is an interesting one because it allows us to well change up the amount that we're having, like so. We can keep this as 0.5 of a value, so it will be somewhat lower. Instead of one, just like that. And let me just check some of the settings. We also have the main options for the fog over here at the top. If we were to change this fog density to something like one, we're going to have a general neutral fog over here. So this part is not the same as the volumetric options we had before, this is just more of an overlay, which is more performance. He Sorry, more performance lighter, but at the same time, if we mix up the volumetric and this option, we're able to get some nice results. So we have fog height fall off. This is going to depend on where the value of this exponential fog is, where the main icon is. If I click F, we can see that it is set over here. Meaning that whenever we are having the fog, with the fall off. Once we start dragging outwards, you can see that it really depends on the setup. So we're going to keep it in a default state and just keep the fall off as 0.15, like so. It's going to give us a nice little gradient throughout the settings, so that's good. Then we have some options for scattering color and atmosphere ambient color. So this will allow us to, well, control some adjustments for the way the setup is for well overall coloring and lighting of this volumetric fog. And if we have a look at it, the main option is basically for us going to be ambient color. This one will mainly allow us to combine what we have in the background with the foreground and we just want a nice bluish shift like this, and that's going to give us in the distance like a nice bluish tint, which again, makes it look a little bit cold towards the setting of the well, the moonlight scene. That's exactly what we're looking for. Next up, we have some options within, well, the if we were to go back on to Oh, let's just wait for it to save. If we were to go back on to our post processing, which was somewhere in this area. There we go. Post processing volume. We're going to make some changes for it a little bit, as well. The reason being is that now that we have the flame on the setting, on the area of the scene, we also have the need to well, do some color grading. At this point, we can start setting up with more parameters. So again, within the post processing volume that we have in the scene, we're going to start adjusting it to make sure it's better fitting for the overall settings. What are the options is going to be the temperature. Temperature is very good at making some of the scenes a little bit more colder. If we were to lower this down, we can see it like super bluish tint. We can also make it warmer if we want to, like, sew. So that's some interesting bluish tint. I think the default was this value, but if we were to make the option just a little bit colder to a value of yep, 6,000, like so. And we can also then apply the tint, so we can either go to negative value or positive. So this will also help us with the setting. And we just need to go on to negative 0.1. So just to kind of give a bit of an extra look. Next up is going to be global parameters over year right underneath the temperature. These are the options that will allow us to do the main control over our well settings. So let's go ahead and use them. The saturation is quite useful one for allowing us to control well the saturation of the setting. If we were to increase it by default, it's going to well saturate overall colors. If we lower it, it's going to make it black and white. And nice about it is that we also have option for controlling how the colors are being affected by the saturation. So if I was to change this to a value of two, like so, and if I was to use this circle, we can see what colors get washed out if we were to use this little circle. So we want more of a keeping it more of a bluish, for example, tint, we can offset that, and it's quite nice, as it will allow us to if we set it more towards the orange value, towards the red value, like so, it will allow us to get more saturation out of our flames. And that's exactly what we want. We want to make sure that wherever there is more flamy result, we're getting a warmer feeling, slightly exaggerated value of that. And let's go ahead and use that. And we are going to set it this saturation value to 1.12. So just a little bit is going to be affected. Like so. Next up, the contrast if we were to click on a contrast value over here, we can set ourselves up to a value of 0.19, like so, and a contrast will basically allow us to, well, set the contrast stop. I just want to make sure we get a little bit more of the detail step there we go. So yeah, the contrast will allow us to sharpen up the image or even soften it up. And what we want over here is just slightly softening it up because, well, the default value of the moon hitting it with the shadows is going to be quite hard shadows. So to offset that, we're going to lower the value. And we're going to increase the contrast a little bit. So this contrast will allow us again to play around with customization. We're going to drag it towards more of a warmer setting, and that's going to leave us with this result. I'm also going to click G, so we're not going to have those values of, well, the icons and whatnot. And yeah, next up is going to be Gamma. Gamma will allow us to if we were to change it, it's going to be kind of like brightness. We can hover over to see that it's basically controlling the luminance, which is pretty good for us. So we're able to just slightly lower this to sharpen up the entire scene, like so. So 0.95. Just like that. And that's pretty much it. The rest, shadows, Mtones highlights, will have the same settings, and we can use that to, well, control a little bit in the darker area. So for example, if I was to enable contrast in shadows, I can increase it and it will darken up the shadows. We want to use that to our advantage, to increase it value to a value of 1.13 to get a bit of a sharper result out of this. So that's looking quite nice. Next up Gamma, again, luminance, but it's only mainly for shadows. We can use it to brighten it up, and just using it to a value of 1.04 will help us to brighten up a little bit those super dark areas. Next up, the mid tones. Let's go on to that. Let's use saturation and increase the mid tone value. It's not the brightest, it's not the darkest value. If we were to increase this saturation is going to be for the middle values themselves. We're going to use this well increase it to a value of 1.2 and set it to more of a bluish tint. So it would lower down the saturation for, well, mainly the background, actually, we're going to lower it to this value over like this, and there we go. I think that's looking pretty good. The contrast, we are going to also use it for the mid tones, and we're going to increase this to a value of 1.1, which we will sharpen up the overall values, we want to be just a little bit towards the bluish, like so. The reason being is that it will sharpen up the mid tones, as it mentions. So that is it. And finally, the highlights, that's well, the highlights of the scene. If we were to use it with the contrast, we're able to well sharpen these areas where it's brighter. So all the lighting where the moon is hitting onto the plants over here, especially, is going to give us sharper outcome. So that's quite nice. We can just increase it just by a little bit, like, so if we were to set it to zero, it's going to not look so good. But by setting it to a value of 1.1, it's going to be quite right. And yeah, I think that's pretty much it when it comes to the setup. Now, looking at this scene, we can finally visualize and preview a little bit more on the aesthetics and whatnot. And looking at this, I believe that the particles are actually a little bit too slow. We can lower them down. So to make sure that it's not too eye catchy with the overall lighting, we can go on to the part will be a x and just kind of slow down the vortex that we have. So the vortex force, we can put it to 1,500, like so, and add velocity, we can lower this down to 21 50, just like that. So it's going to be much, much slower. Like so. That's already looking much better. But I think we can do a little bit even a little better, actually. So let's go ahead and lower this to a maximum of 100. Let's see how this looks like. I'm not quite liking how fast it's turning, to be honest, so I will go ahead and go to the Vortex force and change this Vortex force amount to 50 perhaps. Would that be better? Change the pool origin to 50 as well. Let's see. A little bit too little. Let's put it to 80, and there we go nice, playful particles going in a direction, which from a distance is going to look super, super nice. And I think, just like that, we got ourselves a nice setup. Alright, so that's going to be it from this lesson. Thank you so much for watching, and I will be seeing you in a bit. 54. Lighting and Tree Placement with the Foliage Tool: All right. Welcome back around to Unreal Engine five Stylized night environment, VFX lighting, foliage, and landscape design. In the last lesson, we set ourselves up with some additional customization for well, lighting variation. We made sure we slowed down the portal a little bit. And I'm even considering about slowing down this smoke over here. It might be a good idea. But for now, though, I think it's looking quite nice. The other thing that I'd like you to know about in terms of the overall lighting is that we have a nice little option to increase the ambient occlusion. If let's say there are parts where, well, this part over here, which is completely invisible, if we want to increase the overall lighting, we can go onto our skylight. This skylight essentially grabs the entire well, lighting from the sky, from the source of direction lighting and just puts it as an ambient lighting, and it also helps with the reflections and whatnot. So if we turn this off, it's going to be even darker. But we can make use out of this within the detailed staff for it. There is some options. So we have intensity scale. If we were to set this to something like ten, we'll see that everything gets a nice little bloom effect. This ambient lighting ends up looking well like this. We can make use out of it to a value of four to just make it a little bit brighter in regards to this entire setup. So here is how it was before with the intensity of one, and here is how it looks like with the intensity of four. Just a little bit of variation, and now we can just play around a little bit more with the fog planes over here, I believe. Now that we see them a little more with the lighting, we can invert this probably will be better visually, like so we have another plane, I believe in here. Yeah, we do. We're going to just bring it outwards a little bit, like so, and put it more into the setup. And we can, of course, increase the value for the fog planes even more. So positive multiplier. If we set this to four, it might be a little bit better. I think this is looking quite nice. Let's go ahead and play around with the settings just a little bit. Like, so. And one more thing I'd like to mention is that we don't have the trees required, actually. It's a little bit of a surprise, and we have some trees over in the front. We have some trees over in the back as well. We need to make sure we add them in. So let's go ahead and do that. I'm going to reposition my camera now a little bit even more like this. Like so. It's looking quite nice. Going to make sure we have some additional detail out of this. Yeah, this will work quite well. Just looking at, you know, the main reference that we have over here, checking where the composition is and whatnot, doing some final bit of tweaking. So clicking F 11, making sure that we have a nice little setup, something like this, click Control one, and now we over saved it. I think it's going to look much, much better. And, of course, we need to set ourselves up with some well trees, some extra little trees in the setting, if we look back on this section over here, especially from a distance, we see we have some trees over here, some bits over here. There are some sections here to help us break down the overall landscape, which is fair enough. Let's go ahead and do that. Let's click F 11, go on to the foliage mode, and let's use this single tree. Let's click Control A to select all. Just take one of them. It's going to deselect everything because we only want the tree now. So let's go ahead and make use out of it. So I'm going to click one and just put some tree over here. There we go. A couple of trees. If we want to have more control, we can just click on a single and we can just then select oh, one at a time, just like that. I think at this point, it's a little bit too much for me. So yeah, having two is going to work quite nice. But this section maybe they're a little bit too close to one another. So I'm just going to go ahead and delete one and just place another one using a single factor there we go. Anyways, let's go ahead and just simply play around with some extra trees. So we have some trees down here. Let's go ahead and paint them in a little bit. Like, so Here we go. Next up, we have some trees over here. So I'm just going to place them right behind the fog. Like so. Nice little bit of trees. Looking lovely. Some bit of trees over here, well. Like so. Maybe not this one. Making sure that the main angle is giving us a nice way to break down the forms, and we have a bunch of trees over here just to kind of help us break down this entire setup. I'm going to increase the density to 50 over here. So we should be able to get even more trees in this section, just like that. And just looking at the reference over here, we have, small section over here, small section over here. We're keeping it more in sections, so that's going to be looking quite nice for us. So this area, it is actually quite empty. Let's go ahead and add some of the trees in this part over here, perhaps. Let's have a look. Yeah, that looks quite nice. And then, looking at this setup, we'll notice that, well, we do have some trees over on the corner just to kind of help us break down this form over here, but I don't think we need it to be all the way at the top, like here because it's just going to take off the upper section. So just a little bit lower, I think it's going to be quite alright. Let's go ahead and just add some of them in here. Although I think this is a little bit too much with the density. Let's lower it down back to further like this. Something over here will be quite right. Like so. And let's go onto an angle, actually. There we go with this 70, I think it would be a lot better because we were able to get more interesting results out of this. There we go. And let's have a nice little chunk over here. Actually, there we go, something like so. Let's have a look. It's a little bit too much. So in this case, we're going to go onto the brush density, put it to point free, and whilst holding shift, we're just going to remove some of them to kind of help us break down this entire form. Like so, maybe have some in the back as well. Let's have a look I visible. They are perfect. Very nice. And maybe some in here as well. Just a couple of tabs like this. I think will work quite well. Could have some over here as well, and the rest will be just to kind of make sure it doesn't look too unstable as an environment. If we decide to have some camera angles a little bit that go inwards, they're not going to just have completely empty planes. So we're just making sure that we're also setting them up with some additional trees. Also, even though they're not visible, the shadows do kind of get into the view a little bit, so we need to might perhaps consider that as well. That's why we're setting these up like so. And speaking of shadows, these sections over here will definitely need some trees because, yeah, shadows and all will give us some darker depth, and that will be white, nice, a little bit of an extra tree area, tree line over here, even though we're not seeing it within our viewport, it's going to a little bit darken down in this section, which is going to be great for us. Speaking about darkening it down, let's add some bits in the background. That's well over here. And I'm not sure about this flat surface over here. We can add it a little bit just making sure that nothing goes into the main shot because I don't really want to have them on the right side, like so. So just adding a couple of trees just like that. In the area and we are going to make sure that well, it looks more populated. In regards to this section over here, maybe maybe, maybe maybe a couple of trees. Like, so by the rock, I think it looks quite lovely. And finally, let's have a look back on this setup. If we need I think we definitely need some trees over here on this section, and that's going to look plain otherwise. Yeah, it's just a simple plane. So I'm going to add it over here, some and over here, perhaps. I don't like how high up they are actually. So I will perhaps try to lower some over here like this. Let's have a look. Some are visible. But I'm not quite sure about it. I think in this case, I am going to choose to make some even smaller trees to make sure that we are well filling in this area. I don't want this to be too high up. So yeah, we're going to go ahead and just change up the scale of these trees. Let's not afraid to do Let's not be afraid to do that. We're prepared to change it to a minimum of 0.2 and maximum 0.5, or even actually 0.3 to make sure we have more consistency and just small little trees like. So we can have those small trees in other areas as well, just to make sure we, well, you know, make it more organic, just like we did with the rocks, just like we did with the grass a little bit having some clusters, make it look, so much nicer. So let's go ahead and just add some trees over here. At this point, I'm just going to go on it mode and just kind of help us kind of add some smaller trees. Hopefully, so the trees are a little bit too small. I'll be honest. So I'll go ahead and increase this 5.1 on both ends, and that's hopefully going to help us out kind of break up the formation a little bit, just like that. Let's have a look. Over here, we can also add some. Over here, we can also add some because it's nicely facing in the front, and just a couple of here, a couple of here. We can also add just a couple of tabs in here and maybe in here as well. You might as well add in some as well in here, and that's it. We are going to have a look on how this looks like and go on to it mode. Let's see. In comparison to this type of line, I think it looks much better because this one was just empty gap over here, whereas for this section that we have, I'm going to even zoom in to kind of check how it looks like. We have some nice variation. Yep, that looks very nice. I do think we can add some smaller trees in this section, though. Let me just go ahead and do that. So F 11, act onto the foliage and just kind of small little trees just kind of help us break down this shadow section. Like so. Got to click. One, just kind of see how it looks like. And it's looking quite nice. I'm quite happy with this result. I think it's looking very nice. There is a bit of a issue with the light bleed, I noticed over here with this archway. So as a nice little fix, I believe it is caused by nanite. So let me just go ahead and disallow nanite. This hopefully should fix. No, it does not seem like it fixes it. Let me go into the mesh itself and see if it fixes it. Enable nanite support. We can go ahead and just enable Then we can scroll down, apply changes. And hopefully, if we click one, there we go. So by just using Nate, actually, it kind of helps us out because we're not getting light bleats that we had over here. But that's pretty good. All right. So that's going to be it for me. Thank you so much for watching, and I will be seeing you in a bit. 55. Creating Custom Volumetric Fog Materials in Unreal Engine 5: Alone, welcome back our own to Unreal Engine five stylized night environment, VFX lighting, foliage and landscape design. In the last lesson, we left ourselves off with a nicer lighting and overall gentle setup. We're now going to continue on with the ambience work. And this time, instead of just having, you know, the height fog that we had, instead of just having the planes that we had, we're also going to add individual fog volume. And for us to do that, we're going to create ourselves a new material. So within a content browser. Let's go ahead and create ourselves fog volume, so we can call it volumetric. Fog. So and right away, we can just right click on it and create ourselves material instance. So we'd have some visual feedback. We can go ahead and create ourselves a shape for the volume, which we're going to just use as a cube. Like, so let's go ahead and make this bigger. And that way, we can actually see what we're going to be working with. So we're just going to create this little cube over, like so, and now we're going to apply the volumetric fog instance. And afterwards, let's go ahead and go on to volumetric fog material. And start setting it up with, well, volumetric Bog. For us to do that, we're going to click on the material itself. We're going to go onto the material domain and change it to be a volume. This will remove most of the items and make sure that we have just albedo, emissive extension, and ambit clusion. We're only going to be using the free out of the four and Amit occlusion is not going to be used. We also need to, as the error says, change the material to additive. So let's make sure we change the blending mode from opaque to additive, like so, and now it's usable. And the first thing that we want to do for this fog is going to be hold free, tap on a screen, and set this up with a color. So let's right click, convert the parameter, and we can call it color, like so, and we can attach this to Albedo. And also, we can attach this to emissive as well, actually. Because we just need to use a single color. Let's make sure we change this to default, by the way. And before I'm combining it to the emissive color, we're going to be using the same parameter, but we want to have some extra controls for the glow of the volume. So we're going to hold M, we're going to tap on the screen, and we're going to just set it up with multiplier value like so, and of course, we'll control that with the material instance. So holding S, we're going to tap on the screen. We're going to call this emissive, like so, and we can just attach it onto the setting just like that. Right away, we can go ahead and test how it looks like. We can go ahead and apply this. We can click on the saved item over here on the bottom right hand corner or using Control Shift ins, and we're going to get ourselves this volume thickness. So that's already looking quite interesting, quite nicely. And the first thing we want to do is we want to make sure that there is more of a masking on edges. We don't want this to be too blocky. So what we're going to do is we're going to make sure we change that. To make sure that there is no blockiness like we had over there, we're going to create ourselves a mask. We're going to use object position. I believe it's going to be that one. Object position. World space. Yeah, that's the one. Next up is going to be absolute world position. The world position. There we go. And we are going to combine them to get, well, the mask for our object, we're going to use sphere mask for this. So sphere mask. And if we were to combine them with XYZ, we'll be able to tell where the mask is for the extinction. And if we were to just put this in to see what it looks like, this is what it's going to do. It is now going to turn our cube into a sphere, but we need to have more control over it. So the terms of control is going to be firstly, we need to tell the radius. The radius should be based on object width. So for that, it's going to be object radius over here, we're just going to put it in, and then we're going to change the hardness so we get ourselves fog edge, hardness ability to control. We're going to hold S, we're going to tap on the screen, and we're going to hold this fog edge opacity. Like, so the default value, we can change it to a value 0.2 and put it onto the hardness. Now we're going to get ourselves this type of a look where the edges are bogged up a little bit. So it's not going to give us as hard of a shape. So that's a nice little start. Of course, we need to continue on with this, so let's go ahead and do that. The next up is going to B. We're going to break up this mass to make sure it's not just a solid chunk of a volume. For us to do that, we're going to use T, tap on a screen, and we are changing this to a volume noise. And there is 32, 64, one, 28. Each one will be higher resolution. 64 will work quite well for us. We don't need to go onto the higher version because it's a little more performance heavy. And we're going to start setting this up with, well, some parameters. We're going to set this up with a world position. Like, so we need to have some controls for the world position. So we're going to wrap X Y Z because it's a volume and we're going to subtract from it a value for time. And we're going to make sure, well, we have control for the time. We're going to hold S, we're going to call this speed and set it up with multiplier. That way we have some control over the speed of this. We can set this to 100 and Yeah, that's going to give us some motion with or volume. But of course, we need to make sure, well, we multiply the values with X Y and Z. So for this, we could use potentially vector f, and we could turn this into parameter, but to make it easier for me to make control nicer, I prefer to just have three different parameters like this and just combine them. So this one is going to be if we click F two, we can rename it. We can have it as X value. We can have this as Y value and this as Z value. And we should be able to use append many or yeah, that's the one where we can just set this up with vector free, like so and use RGB to multiply, and now it's going to be X y z value. RGB basically turns into XY z because it's just free vectors, and we can use it to subtract the value from here. So for value, let's change it to one so that we make sure it always goes upwards, and that way, we essentially create ourselves a little panner for a volumetric setup, and now we can go ahead and set it up with some scale parameter. So we're going to go ahead and do that. We're going to use multiply. But before using the multiply as is, we're going to go ahead and divide this value for B because the absolute world position value default is well quite high. So it's better to go ahead and divide it. So if we were to divide this by 1,000, it's going to allow us to have a much more reasonable a control for the scale. And now for this, we can actually just use S and create noise scale, like so and attach it to A, just like that. And outcome is going to give us a nice panning. If we were to test it over here, we can see what we've done. Which is not going to work just yet because, well, we need to add some additional parameters, actually. Let's go ahead and continue on with this. So firstly, the volume, the value that we have over here is a little too low. We need to use cheap contrast. That will help us to break this up a little bit, like so. And the value for this can be a parameter, noise contrast. We can set this to a value of two. So we're able to control the sharpness of our fog. And next up, we have a noise multiplier. So let's go ahead and set up a noise multiplier value. To determine how strong of a value this can be. This can be set as 0.5 because default value is a little bit too high up. And then we are going to, well, clamp this actually. The reason we need to clamp it is we need to make sure that it doesn't go over the limit of extinction because otherwise it will give us some interesting artifacts for the glow of the volume. So we can have this and we can actually make use out of these values to have min and maximum, like so. Because it will allow us to well control the opacity a little bit in terms of clamping it down. We can check how it looks like now with the volume control, and there we go. That's what we're getting. So we are not getting anything at all, because if we were to go onto the material instance fog, we have all of these options and we want to use X Y Z noise multiplier, if we were to increase this, we should get ourselves the noise Oh, I forgot to make sure we save this. Like so. And now that it's saved. Ah. Okay, so noise scale. By default, I kept it as zero. It should be set to one or 1.3, actually, little bit of better value. Let's see now. Oh, right. The clamp value, let's make sure it's also set to one. There we go. That was the issue. The clamp value at the end needed to be set to one, and we got ourselves this fog bag. Now that we have the fog bag, we can play around with the noise a little bit and see that we're getting some nice little noise in this fog. And we have speed controls, we have XY z controls, we have noise contrast, which is going to allow us to, well, play around with the overall noise. And we can just basically combine this up. I'm not seeing the noise itself. So we're going to go ahead and continue on with the setup. Let's go ahead and combine this with what we had previously for this mask. We're going to set it up with the subtract. So we're going to subtract the value from the sphere mass that we already created. Like so. And finally, I'd like to have one final multiplier for the last extinction. So final multiplier, like so. We can set this value to one just to make sure that we have the final controls of all the little items at the very end, and that is it. Let's go ahead and apply it, save everything out. And in terms of the settings that we have, we can go ahead and enable everything and start playing with the values. First things first, in terms of edge opacity, we can go ahead and lower this down to well, get the fog to have no edges. We can set this to a value of -3.5 and it's going to give us a good base result. In terms of minimum and maximum, we can keep it as is or actually yeah, for now, let's go ahead and keep it as it is. The noise contrast, if we were to turn into a negative one, it's going to give us an inverted contrast. So that's going to be quite right for us. Then we have noise multiplier, which we can set up to a value of five or 4.9 actually, like so, and then we have a noise scale. The noise scale is by default, a little bit too high up. Let's go ahead and lower this down to value of 0.25. Then we have XYZ. So for some reason, this is not working within this version of one wL engine. I'll go ahead and try to change this to just multiple appends. So it's a little bit of a workaround. And we're going to append yet another one. So basically we're having X Y and Z like this, and we're going to have the values nicely set up for us. Now let's go ahead and save it out and see if it works. And Oh, right. The cheap contrast only allows for a single parameter. So this needs to be instead of RGB, it needs to be just red like so. And now, it should work for us. Let's have a look. And I just realized my mistake. So, it turns out I was not using the right volumetric fog. It was a fog material instance, one for the planes. We need to make sure we use volumetric fog, so a mistake on my end. And right, it's working now. So just a quick recap, I went over the setup and the top section for the color albedo and admissive color was the same. The item for sphere max was the same, and this section, I just ended up splitting this off onto separate append options, as well as fixing up the usability over here for the texture noise, volume noise 64. Then I went on to just setting it up like so, and using a clamp, taking it from a multiplier. And the main issue that was the case was just that noise contrast needed to be within a certain range. Otherwise, if you go past it, if you go under it, it's not going to affect it as much. But if we set it to a value of one point minus one, value close to that, you're going to get yourself the result you're looking for. Also, I went on to change up the clamp. So from one, that would give us the setting for, well, nice little breakup. I changed this to a value of 0.1, like so. That helps us to make sure there's no too many gaps in this fog, and that's pretty much it. We can go ahead and also now change, for example, the Xpeed if we want to be going in one direction, we can. Let's say for X, we can just put it to 0.1, y, I believe, if we put this to just to check. Yeah, Y is going to be -0.1. So it's going to go out to the moon, just like we had with the smoke and everything. We're making sure we are having consistent type of a look. And as for the fog itself for the color, we can go ahead and just simply click one and see how it looks like within the setup. So we're just going to match up the rest of the coloring of the fog of the flock planes. So let's go ahead and do that. So we're seeing this fog over here, and we're just going to make it a little bit more bluish and here we go. Perfect color. Just like that. Alright, so that's going to be it for me. Thank you so much for watching, and I will be seeing you in a bid. 56. Enhancing Stylized Environments with Fog Placement & Lighting: Hello, welcome back everyone to UnreelEngine five stylized night environment, VFX, sliding, foliage, and landscape design. In the last lesson, we set ourselves up with this lovely fog plane, which we can now make use out of it. So let's go ahead and do that. The main key factor is that the larger you make this volume, the more of a fog you're going to get. We can also put this a little bit more into the ground, and that way, we can essentially get a fog to go within areas where there's only sections of going it inwards. And I think that looks, it looks quite alright. Let's go ahead and make yet another duplicate to go in the back as well. So in this section, I'd like another bit of fog. There we go. That's going to look quite nice. We can even tilt it as well. It's going to be affecting the setup. So if we were to rotate it a little bit more with elevation, we're going to get a nice, nice result, like so. Alright. So we got this setup as well. We can also add a fog onto this little section over here, kind of help us break down the entire form. Let's go ahead and do that. And I just realized I removed the fog from here. So let me go ahead and just make a duplicate out of it and reset the rotation. There we go. That way, it would be nice and straight, and we can put it into the ground just like that. A little bit of fog in this section. It's going to look very nice. I think so, yeah. It's looking pretty good. Next up, we got ourselves while holding alt, let's go ahead and just move it. And there we go. We made a duplicate. Let's go ahead and put it onto this cliff over here as well. We're going to rotate it towards the elevation of the cliff and place it in the area. Just like that. Lower it down a little bit, rotate it a little bit as well, and we are going to have some very, very nice type of result, as it will help us to kind of distinguish, get some nicer variation and softer look out of this entire design, although it can be a little bit more to the right, maybe like this. Let's have a look. Yeah, I think it looks quite alright. In this section, we can even make it a little bit, well, larger. Like so. And that's going to look quite right, I reckon. Yeah, it's looking lovely. All right. And next up is going to be, well, some additional fog maybe over here in this corner because otherwise, I think it's just going to look a little bit too flat. For the section, we can make it larger. And when creating fog chunks like that, I personally, again, prefer to just like we did with the rocks, the tray, the trees, and everything, I prefer to have them as separate chunks instead of just one massive large chunk because it helps us to break down some of those forms, some of those shapes into a nicer variations. And just like that, it's going to look quite nice for us. So next up, we got ourselves an area by the little tent. We can go ahead and even add in the fog over here. Just like that. Like so. In this case, because it is, well, an area that's way closer to our camera, we can go ahead and just make a duplicate out of this volumetric fog. Let's go ahead and make a duplicate, like so. And we're going to use this separate instance. For the setup. I'm using Instance one now to duplicate. We can now go into it and play a little bit with the settings. So if I were to click one, the first thing that we should do probably is going to use fog edge opacity just to make sure that we're getting closer to the parts inside, like so, we can make this a little bit smaller now to better fit this entire setup, like so. Next step is going to be if we click one, we can change up let's have a look. I don't like how this corner is for this particular angle, so I'm going to go ahead and just rotate it a little bit, like so to get a bit of a nicer look and at opacity even more. Like, so now if we play with the contrast a little bit and the noise scale, if we were to increase the value a little bit, we're going to have some very, very nice results. Like so. And because it's so close up to the camera, we can actually just lower down the brightness a little bit, quite a little bit, actually. Like so just to get nice variation, just to make sure it doesn't overlap too much with the other parts of the scene, maybe I would even make this smaller as well. Just to make sure again, we don't overwhelm the seem too much with the setup, and in terms of color, we can lower this down to halfway amount. There we go. Contrast, we can play around with that a little bit. Like so and noise multiplier. A little bit like that. And I think this will do quite well. Let's put the maximum value to 0.5. Just having a little bit of that fog in this area will do quite well. We can even lower down the saturation a little bit because it was getting too bluish next to the fireplace. I think that's going to be much, much better. And when it comes to the fire itself, we have this light over here, which because we're using volume metrics, there's going to be a nice little option. Let's go ahead and grab this light. I'm just going to go ahead and just search for light. And within the light, there is going to be an option for indirect lighting intensity and volume metric scattering intensity, I believe, we need to use just this one. Let's go ahead and just put this to extreme value. Let's see how it works. That's actually not the value we're looking for. There we go. That's the value we're looking for. So this is going to enhance the light bounces coming off the volume metrics. If we by default, had it as one, it has a bit of a nicer glow. But if we set it to two, it's going to give us even nicer type of glow. With that in mind, I think it's going to look much nicer overall. And yeah, I would also say that we can lower down the speed the way it's traveling upwards for this section, set it to a value of 0.5, like so, and the noise scale, I would honestly double it. I would double it, I think. It's going to look much better. Nice little soft touch. There we go. And let's not forget this area over here. Let's go ahead and grab one of our volumes from this section and place it in the edge of this cliff. Just like that. Right away, you can see the effect it's making. And I think it is exactly what we want. Alright. Although this part can now be lower down. And tweaks like that are always important to do. You can just play around with the settings, tweak it up a little bit. See what works, what doesn't. And yeah, we can now go even further, take it a step further and grab a screenshot and analyze this a little bit. So we're going to continue on with this in the next lesson. Thank you so much for watching, and I will be seeing you in a bit. 57. Lush Grass and Night Sky Atmosphere with Volumetrics: Hello and welcome back around to Unreal engine five stylized night environment, VFX, lighting, foliage, and landscape design. In the last lesson, we left ourselves off with a lovely type of scenery. We're going to make use out of it, and I took a screenshot for it to analyze it with the original scene. So first things first, what you might notice is that the light in this area is a lot brighter. So we can go ahead and increase it a little bit. And also, I noticed that this section over here is a lot more fuzzy, is a lot more nicer in comparison to this, which I think can certainly take away from the overall visuals as this harsher type of well, shapes are just simply too much for us. Let's go ahead and make sure we fix those up. So going back to this little scene over here, we already played around with the lighting and the way it's being affected with the volume metrics, but we can do so even more if we were to find lighting in our outliner. So this little light over here, we can low down the source radius. I think that would be a better choice, and we can increase the brightness just by a little bit. So from 6,000 to let's say 7,000, like so, and that brings us the brightness onto this section over here. Next step is well fixing grass. Let's go ahead and do that. In foliage option. What we have is an option. Actually, we need to change up the items that are growing out because these large grass buds might not be in the right way. So we're going to go onto the paint option with the raised density of zero, which is going to completely remove this section like so and just kind of rework this part a little bit. That's super close to our camera. So this grass buds I quite like, but everything else that's super close to this section, I did not like. And I think the tallest grass is the ones are in the middle. Let's go ahead and just untick them and only keep the first and the last one. And let's go ahead and have a quick look. Yeah, that's the ones we're looking for, we're going to make use out of this. Next up, scale. Let's go ahead and change it to 0.1 0.1. Let's see how this works. It's looking quite nice. So with this setting and maximum set 0.2, have a little bit of a variation. We can go ahead and play around with it a little bit. So if we were to change this to lock X and Y, we have the ability now to sorry, if we were to change this to f, we have the ability now to change the X, Y, and Z scales independently. I'm just going to go ahead and put these up as default values or 0.1, 0.1 0.2 0.2, so they would give us the same type of result that we have over here, uniform. But now, let's say we want them to be well smaller we make them, the less of a space they're going to take up, and that's not really what we're looking for. We want to make sure that they're a little bit wider at this point to make it a little bit more fuzzy. So what can we do? Well, we can change this value to point f, point free, and this value to point free, and now it's going to be a little wider, which is going to be much better. Let's go ahead and just double that, actually. There we go. And that's going to look quite a lot nicer. The only thing is that we can't do it too much because you can see that there's going to start being some artifacts from this kind of scaling. So if we change it to a value of 0.5 instead, like so, and let's have a look. They go much better. So now we're going to go ahead and change the density to a value of 8,000, I think. Let's go ahead and just try that out. And it's looking nicer. There we go. We can even change it to 80,000 actually, even. Kind of just really fill in the space, make sure that the fuzziness of the grass is going to look very nice in our area. And I think it's looking quite nice but not quite there. I'm going to go ahead and increase density even more. There we go. Something like that. We'll do the trick. I will increase the scale a little bit actually to a value 0.2 and 0.3. Let's see now. Yeah, that is what we're looking for. That's exactly what we're looking for. All right, we're going to go ahead and just fill in the space a little bit, a little more this section over here. And we can also play with the z value a little bit, as well. If we were to change it to 0.1, we're going to get more squished up off a grass 0.01, even. Like so. Let's have a look. That grass might be quite right. I just realize I'm only changing one grass, but we need to make sure we change all of them at once. So let's put it to 80,000 for the value, and there we go. There we go. That's what we're looking for. Nice, luscious grass. So that was a little bit of a mistake. And we can just grab this luscious grass in an area where the cameras going to be and just populate it with this a little bit. There we go. Nice little grass. Like so. We can even go around the rocks a little bit. As well, I don't think anyone is going to complain about that. I think it's going to look quite nice, like so. Let's have a look. So in comparison to the previous setup, we have over here and here, and now we got this. Now we can add in the previous grass a little bit. So I could say that let's go ahead and enable this whilst we're adding in the grass and it's a little bit too big. Let's go ahead and just grab these and change the scale to a value of 0.5 0.5. 0.55, like so, and we are going to have some bit of variation in grass, just a tiny bit closer to rocks maybe as well, and just some bit that gets a little bit larger once it gets to the section with more pieces and maybe over here as well. And just like that, we got ourselves a very nice type of setup. Now we just need to make sure, well, we play around with deleting it actually, because we need to select it. We need to go on to where is it? A raise density. If we were to have it as zero, it's going to delete it. Having it as 0.1, I believe it's going to be enough. Let's hold shift and just see. Is it deleting? It is leading, but not enough. So a value of 0.05, let's Okay, if I use a zero, that is going to delete it. We need to use 0.001, perhaps. Let's see. What we're looking for is we want to make sure we leave some of the value. So 0.01, let's see. There we go. That's what we're looking for. We're making sure now that the grass doesn't just end up being in this weird shape. We are trimming it up a little bit to make sure that whenever it reaches the dirt section over here, it's going to look a lot thinner. And I think that's looking quite nice. Now we can also play also a little bit with the darkness in terms of how bright the grass is if I was to go back onto the grass that we had. So let's see onto the grass material can slightly increase the color for the multiplier to a value of 0.2, let's see. So control shiftiness. Just a little brighter. So we're changing up the subsurface. Let's try, actually, the value of one. I'd like to see what the maximum value looks like. There we go, that is a little too much. So value 0.3, I think we do the trick. Let's go ahead and apply, and we are going to have ourselves a nice little bit of glow out of this. Next up is going to be the sky. So the glow over here is a little bit different. There is a very nice option in the height fog that we already worked on. Let's have a look. So sky atmosphere ambient. If we were to just add in more of this we can change up to color, basically. So if we were to add in saturation even more, brighten this up, and we can even change the value over here to a value of two, it's going to give us nicer result. So maybe that's something worth to consider to get a nicer brighter result. Lower saturation, the values kept as 1.5. And I think that's, that's quite nice, actually. We got ourselves to height fall off, which you can use well to grab that nice atmosphere if you want the starry night sky, a little bit more back, you can lower or increase this to get it back. But if we have it as a little bit of a transition, we can have something like this, and I think that looks very, very nice. Maybe a little more like so, right. So that's going to be it for me. Thank you so much for sticking with me all the way to the end. In this class, we went through the entire night scene setup, building up ruins and landscape, shaping the mood and lighting, and dialing in the atmosphere with volume metrics. You now have a complete workflow. You can repeat and adapt onto your own personal projects. If you found this helpful, it would be great if you could leave us a feedback or a review. It helps a lot and guides what we improve on next. Thank you again for your time and focus until next time. Happy modeling, everyone.