# Any Unreal Engine Experts Here?



## Huntn

I've always been interested in computer graphics, played with it early in my life, and then let it slide.Recently, I kind of got a wild hair. Any experts here? My intent is to create a limited environment with a theme, like a secluded grotto, pond, waterfall, balcony overlooking with secret hideaway in side of a cliff, that you can walk through.

Can you do all of the things, terrain, plants, and architecture within the Unreal Engine or do you need 3rd party stuff? I was shocked to find that all the stuff for it seems to be free as far as learning.
Thanks in advance! 









						Learn How to Use Unreal Engine - A Powerful Real-Time 3D Creation Platform
					

Unreal Engine offers well over 100 hours of free video tutorials so you can learn the skills to succeed in game development, architecture, film, automotive, and other exciting industries.




					www.unrealengine.com


----------



## thekev

Does it actually have 3D modeling tools? You need some way to deal with textures/texture painting. You need shader creation, compliant with whatever renderer it's using. You need some skinning and rigging tools if you plan to animate anything. A game engine isn't really where I think most people would build assets. Check integration with something like Blender.


----------



## Renzatic

I’ve dabbled with Unreal, and I know a bit about Blender. If you want to know anything specific, feel free to ask.

The first thing you should do is check out the Megascan assets, which come free with Unreal.









						Quixel Megascans - The world's largest scanned 3D asset library
					

Megascans is the world's largest 3D asset scans library full of high-resolution, PBR-calibrated surfaces, vegetation and modular scanned assets.




					quixel.com


----------



## DT

I'd suggest starting with Unity vs. Unreal, it's also free, there are 1000s of resources from tutorials, model/texture/etc. assets and outstanding community support.  It's got a little friendlier interface, not as overwhelming as Unreal, especially for someone who's just getting into 3D software, some of the organization/abstractions in the Unity UI make more sense from a sort of "cinematic metaphor" (if that makes sense).

While you probably wouldn't wade into the code up front, Unity is going to have less ramp up time, and I think you'd be able to understanding some of the code basics without being a developer, for example, something like controller implementation - FWIW, Unreal uses C++ and Unity uses C#.

I spent a few years in Unity, we built several apps, just small stuff, published through Oculus/Steam - developed a couple of prototypes we shopped around the West Coast - and my extended SV gig was working on the SDK for the AR firm we had a consulting contract with, all built around Unity.

To clarify, I did mostly backend, so I didn't get engaged with much in the way of design, that's where @Renzatic has much better expertise, especially around asset creation outside of Unity/Unreal.


----------



## Huntn

thekev said:


> Does it actually have 3D modeling tools? You need some way to deal with textures/texture painting. You need shader creation, compliant with whatever renderer it's using. You need some skinning and rigging tools if you plan to animate anything. A game engine isn't really where I think most people would build assets. Check integration with something like Blender.






Renzatic said:


> I’ve dabbled with Unreal, and I know a bit about Blender. If you want to know anything specific, feel free to ask.
> 
> The first thing you should do is check out the Megascan assets, which come free with Unreal.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Quixel Megascans - The world's largest scanned 3D asset library
> 
> 
> Megascans is the world's largest 3D asset scans library full of high-resolution, PBR-calibrated surfaces, vegetation and modular scanned assets.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> quixel.com



I’m curious it is self contained being able to do terrain, vegetation, and 3D architectural modeling, or does it require 3rd party programs/assets to accomplish this?


----------



## Huntn

DT said:


> I'd suggest starting with Unity vs. Unreal, it's also free, there are 1000s of resources from tutorials, model/texture/etc. assets and outstanding community support.  It's got a little friendlier interface, not as overwhelming as Unreal, especially for someone who's just getting into 3D software, some of the organization/abstractions in the Unity UI make more sense from a sort of "cinematic metaphor" (if that makes sense).
> 
> While you probably wouldn't wade into the code up front, Unity is going to have less ramp up time, and I think you'd be able to understanding some of the code basics without being a developer, for example, something like controller implementation - FWIW, Unreal uses C++ and Unity uses C#.
> 
> I spent a few years in Unity, we built several apps, just small stuff, published through Oculus/Steam - developed a couple of prototypes we shopped around the West Coast - and my extended SV gig was working on the SDK for the AR firm we had a consulting contract with, all built around Unity.
> 
> To clarify, I did mostly backend, so I didn't get engaged with much in the way of design, that's where @Renzatic has much better expertise, especially around asset creation outside of Unity/Unreal.



Thanks, I’ll look at Unity. I downloaded UE and looked at some of the tutorial titles. For the Unreal Engine, they certainly give the impression it can do everything and I’d like to get that straightened out In my head. I know zero code….


----------



## Renzatic

Huntn said:


> I’m curious it is self contained being able to do terrain, vegetation, and 3D architectural modeling, or does it require 3rd party programs/assets to accomplish this?




You can do some basics in Unreal, but it's primarily meant to accept models created in another program.

For example, you can create a basic bumpy terrain generated from a flat plane in Unreal, and paint it with textures. But when you want to start adding extra details, like rocks, ferns, grass, trees, and whatnot, you're going to need to buy an asset pack (or use some of the Megascans listed above), or make them in an application built for creating 3D models, like Blender, Maya, or Cinema4D.

Unreal can do some basic geometry, but it's all primitive based. Planes, cubes, cylinders, and so on. With a bit of creativity, you can make some interesting shapes, but it's always gonna be pretty simple and flatish looking.

If I were to recommend you do anything, it'd be to start out on the simpler end of 3D, and work your way up. I would look into low poly work, since you don't have to worry about complex shaders, or UV maps, surface normals, or subdivision surfaces, or anything like that. It's all flat shaded shapes, and it helps you build a nice foundation that you can work from when you start wanting to get more photorealistic. Plus, you're producing a bunch of neat looking little scenes in the meanwhile, making you feel like you're actually accomplishing something.

For example, this is one of the first real scenes I built. Except for the fog, and rain, this is all stuff you could learn within the first couple of days of using one of the aforementioned DCCs.


----------



## Renzatic

Polygon Runway's a good site to hit up for low poly tutorials in Blender.


----------



## Renzatic

Though starting out, you'll probably want something that takes you through the bare basics step by step. For that, I recommend the now legendary Blender Donut Tutorial!

The bare bare basics





Part 1 - Beginning The Donut


----------



## MEJHarrison

DT said:


> I'd suggest starting with Unity vs. Unreal, it's also free, there are 1000s of resources from tutorials, model/texture/etc. assets and outstanding community support.  It's got a little friendlier interface, not as overwhelming as Unreal, especially for someone who's just getting into 3D software, some of the organization/abstractions in the Unity UI make more sense from a sort of "cinematic metaphor" (if that makes sense).
> 
> While you probably wouldn't wade into the code up front, Unity is going to have less ramp up time, and I think you'd be able to understanding some of the code basics without being a developer, for example, something like controller implementation - FWIW, Unreal uses C++ and Unity uses C#.
> 
> I spent a few years in Unity, we built several apps, just small stuff, published through Oculus/Steam - developed a couple of prototypes we shopped around the West Coast - and my extended SV gig was working on the SDK for the AR firm we had a consulting contract with, all built around Unity.
> 
> To clarify, I did mostly backend, so I didn't get engaged with much in the way of design, that's where @Renzatic has much better expertise, especially around asset creation outside of Unity/Unreal.




I've only looked at some Unreal stuff, but I've spent the past year playing around with Unity quite a bit.  So I can't compare the two, but I can say I've found working with Unity to be a fun time.  Especially after I picked up a mouse with a scroll wheel to use on my Mac.  Unity + track pad =   To be fair, I think it would be an issue for any Windows software ported to the Mac that relies heavily on the scroll wheel.

I'm a web developer, so I've just been playing with it experimenting with some VR stuff.  It's tons of fun to step into a world you've made.  I just wish I had the artistic skills to compliment my developer skills.  Earlier this year there was a 2-3 month stretch where I was probably spending 50-60 hours a week playing with Unity.  And that's after my day job.  I've not played much with it lately.  Kinda burned myself out.  But I might jump back in again real soon (at a slower pace).  I had started something I'd like to get back to.


----------



## Renzatic

Comeon, @Huntn, you can't tease us with hopes of nerdy hobby discussions to come, then bail on us!


----------



## Huntn

Renzatic said:


> Comeon, @Huntn, you can't tease us with hopes of nerdy hobby discussions to come, then bail on us!



Dude, this stuff takes time. 
I’m still interested, but since I posted this I have yet to start an Unreal Engine tutorial, but it’s still in the plan. And when I’m not working out at the gym/pool, playing computer games (currently No Man’s Sky), I’m still sorting out password manager stuff, have to check out DataVault, and figuring out how to send our 20 year old grandson back to Minnesota, busy busy. Three days a week I work out and on those days not much else gets done, same for the weekend chores outside which does not leave tons of spare time.    Still have to decide on Unreal vs Unity, but naturally lean towards UE. I predict more nerdy hobby discussions are forthcoming be patient.


----------



## Huntn

MEJHarrison said:


> I've only looked at some Unreal stuff, but I've spent the past year playing around with Unity quite a bit.  So I can't compare the two, but I can say I've found working with Unity to be a fun time.  Especially after I picked up a mouse with a scroll wheel to use on my Mac.  Unity + track pad =   To be fair, I think it would be an issue for any Windows software ported to the Mac that relies heavily on the scroll wheel.
> 
> I'm a web developer, so I've just been playing with it experimenting with some VR stuff.  It's tons of fun to step into a world you've made.  I just wish I had the artistic skills to compliment my developer skills.  Earlier this year there was a 2-3 month stretch where I was probably spending 50-60 hours a week playing with Unity.  And that's after my day job.  I've not played much with it lately.  Kinda burned myself out.  But I might jump back in again real soon (at a slower pace).  I had started something I'd like to get back to.



I still have to decide between UE and Unity. I’ve got  a couple of ancient USB powered graphic tablets and wonder if I pull one out and it still works, if that would be an asset for this purpose?


----------



## Huntn

Regarding Unity vs Unreal Engine, is there any significant difference between their capabilities? And based on recommendations that Unity is easier to use? 



Renzatic said:


> Though starting out, you'll probably want something that takes you through the bare basics step by step. For that, I recommend the now legendary Blender Donut Tutorial!
> 
> The bare bare basics
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Part 1 - Beginning The Donut



What software is that? Heading to the gym, be back soon.


----------



## Renzatic

Huntn said:


> What software is that?




That's Blender, which you'll probably be using if you want to tailor or create objects specific to your scene.

The good news is that Unity can read .blend files natively, and Epic made a nice importer addon that makes moving objects between the two programs as quick as hitting a button.


----------



## Huntn

After the gym today, I actually sat down and worked my way through the first tutorial at Unrealengine.com/learning/*Your first Hour in Unreal Engine 4* tutorial. It's free. My first hour, half the course was like 3 hours (with some interruptions added. Still have the other half to do.) Yes I'm taking notes, and finished the first quiz which is presented half way through. All of the time is navigating the interface, with a tutorial project, and covers items like how to edit actors, add actors, import from other projects and other programs, just getting familiar with how to navigate around. There's even a free starter game project (game assets and a basic setup), you download as part of the tutorial, under their Marketplace/free/Epic games. 

So far I see nothing that is scary. The unreal engine program, and the assets provided seem very polished. Nothing too mysterious so far (knock on wood).


----------



## MEJHarrison

Huntn said:


> After the gym today, I actually sat down and worked my way through the first tutorial at Unrealengine.com/learning/*Your first Hour in Unreal Engine 4* tutorial. It's free. My first hour, half the course was like 3 hours (with some interruptions added. Still have the other half to do.) Yes I'm taking notes, and finished the first quiz which is presented half way through. All of the time is navigating the interface, with a tutorial project, and covers items like how to edit actors, add actors, import from other projects and other programs, just getting familiar with how to navigate around. There's even a free starter game project (game assets and a basic setup), you download as part of the tutorial, under their Marketplace/free/Epic games.
> 
> So far I see nothing that is scary. The unreal engine program, and the assets provided seem very polished. Nothing too mysterious so far (knock on wood).




That's interesting.  I found a similar experience with Unity.  I thought their online tutorials were mostly well done.  I grew out of them very quickly, but I've been a developer for a long time.  I just needed to understand the basics.

Nice to know Unreal has some quality stuff as well.


----------



## Renzatic

MEJHarrison said:


> That's interesting.  I found a similar experience with Unity.  I thought their online tutorials were mostly well done.  I grew out of them very quickly, but I've been a developer for a long time.  I just needed to understand the basics.
> 
> Nice to know Unreal has some quality stuff as well.




The one big advantage Unreal has for non-coders (like me) is the Blueprint visual scripting setup. Rather than dealing with the seemingly arcane syntax and structuring of C++, you just have to wrap your head around a bunch of premade logic blocks strung together in a nodal system. 

For what Huntn's planning, which is a single environment with some interactive bits and bobs strewn about, it won't take him long to come to terms with things.


----------



## Huntn

Renzatic said:


> The one big advantage Unreal has for non-coders (like me) is the Blueprint visual scripting setup. Rather than dealing with the seemingly arcane syntax and structuring of C++, you just have to wrap your head around a bunch of premade logic blocks strung together in a nodal system.
> 
> For what Huntn's planning, which is a single environment with some interactive bits and bobs strewn about, it won't take him long to come to terms with things.



Yes, my goal is to create an immersive, interactive  scene, that I can walk through, kind of like a fantasy location I’d like to get away to. Flowing water would be a very nice touch. 

i still have active although somewhat neglected Minecraft projects, one is a Jungle House that is partially escavated into the side of hill/mountain, in the jungle surrounded by lush foliage and huge trees, overlooking a wetland of lakes and islands. There is a railed balcony, and steps and down to lake, which has nice clean, clear water, not yucky pond scum (like many lakes especially hot climate lakes are). 

The other is a giant tree in a mountain terrain. large enough to support individual dwellings built among it’s branches, with both internal carved into the tree and external steps, with a huge hall in the base of the tree.

Now Minecraft is simple and crude, and well, blocky. But even there, intense building can wear on you, block by little block, lol. But I own a Nordic Content Pack which includes a world that might just blow your mind.  There is also at least one stunning Minecraft Rivendell build out there.  This is when the creation can overcome the blocky-ness of Minecraft. 

For this Unreal Engine collaboration, I’m going to start basic and see how far it can take me.


----------



## MEJHarrison

Renzatic said:


> The one big advantage Unreal has for non-coders (like me) is the Blueprint visual scripting setup. Rather than dealing with the seemingly arcane syntax and structuring of C++, you just have to wrap your head around a bunch of premade logic blocks strung together in a nodal system.
> 
> For what Huntn's planning, which is a single environment with some interactive bits and bobs strewn about, it won't take him long to come to terms with things.




If I'm not mistaken, Unity has similar tools available.  Seems like there's several as I recall.  I can't name them off the top of my head as I wasn't interested, but I do recall coming across a series of videos where a school teacher tried several different tools with his class.

Honestly, I think he'd be find either way.  Coming from someone who been a developer for a long time, I don't think it matters.  It's not the tool being used that matters here, but the person wielding it.  I very much doubt he's going to be pushing the limits of either tool, so I think "pick the one you like" is a perfectly valid answer to the question.  It's not like one tool will lead to success and one will lead to failure.


----------



## Renzatic

MEJHarrison said:


> If I'm not mistaken, Unity has similar tools available.  Seems like there's several as I recall.  I can't name them off the top of my head as I wasn't interested, but I do recall coming across a series of videos where a school teacher tried several different tools with his class.




I was gonna say "I think there's an addon for something similar," but then I realized that I have the internet, so I should just look it up.

I'll be back in a second.


----------



## Renzatic

Yup. It does indeed. It's a fairly recent addition.









						Unity visual scripting
					

Add interactivity without writing code. Unity Visual Scripting allows rapid prototyping and testing enabling game developers to save hours of their time.




					unity.com


----------



## DT

MEJHarrison said:


> I've only looked at some Unreal stuff, but I've spent the past year playing around with Unity quite a bit.  So I can't compare the two, but I can say I've found working with Unity to be a fun time.  Especially after I picked up a mouse with a scroll wheel to use on my Mac.  Unity + track pad =   To be fair, I think it would be an issue for any Windows software ported to the Mac that relies heavily on the scroll wheel.
> 
> I'm a web developer, so I've just been playing with it experimenting with some VR stuff.  It's tons of fun to step into a world you've made.  I just wish I had the artistic skills to compliment my developer skills.  Earlier this year there was a 2-3 month stretch where I was probably spending 50-60 hours a week playing with Unity.  And that's after my day job.  I've not played much with it lately.  Kinda burned myself out.  But I might jump back in again real soon (at a slower pace).  I had started something I'd like to get back to.




Sounds like you've put in some decent time, you should share some of your work.   I hear you about the design side, while I have very good design sensibilities,  my skills [in that capacity] aren't up to par with my coding ability.



Renzatic said:


> Yup. It does indeed. It's a fairly recent addition.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Unity visual scripting
> 
> 
> Add interactivity without writing code. Unity Visual Scripting allows rapid prototyping and testing enabling game developers to save hours of their time.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> unity.com




Oh, that's very cool, even if it's just for getting a sense of model movements, doing some basic collision detection, controllers, etc., that's great.


----------



## Renzatic

DT said:


> Sounds like you've put in some decent time, you should share some of your work.   I hear you about the design side, while I have very good design sensibilities,  my skills aren't up to par with my coding ability.




If it weren't Blender, I would've spent my entire life never once using what I learned in trigonometry.


----------



## DT

Yeah, my former partner in the AR/VR company (a former colleague and sometimes friend, in two previous startups and my partner at the company I sold in 2000), is a killer designer, I mean really world class, 2D/Print, 3D, UI, custom artwork - too bad he used his powers for evil instead of good ...


----------



## Renzatic

DT said:


> too bad he used his powers for evil instead of good




Did he...did he join a marketing agency?


----------



## DT

I guess I should say he's also reasonably technical, this is the guy who's son started GaTech when he was 16, smart folks.

But to answer your question, I can't really answer your question, the level of insanity has to be shared "live".


----------



## MEJHarrison

Renzatic said:


> Yup. It does indeed. It's a fairly recent addition.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Unity visual scripting
> 
> 
> Add interactivity without writing code. Unity Visual Scripting allows rapid prototyping and testing enabling game developers to save hours of their time.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> unity.com




Yeah, that's one of the two I came across.  Some high school teacher was using that with his students.  He had a big series of videos on using that and Blender.

Since I already know the coding part, those tools didn't really grab my attention.  So I have no clue how useful they may or may not be, but the stuff I saw looked good.

When I checked out his blender videos, it took about 3 minutes to come to the conclusion that I'd be better off looking for assets online rather than trying to create my own.  I'd have more luck writing a tool like Blender than being able to put it to good use.  I just don't have those skills.


----------



## Huntn

What I’m doing right now is mechanical, interface familiarization. I need to get farther down the rabbit hole.


----------



## MEJHarrison

DT said:


> Sounds like you've put in some decent time, you should share some of your work.




It's 100% VR stuff.  And it's mostly been working through different YouTube tutorials.  How to grab things.  How to move around.  I think the most impressive thing I did was expand a little on a demo I worked through on making a gun shoot.  I have nothing of substance at this point.  I just lack a good project to sink my teeth into.  And a Windows machine.  I've not missed Windows until I got into VR.


----------



## Renzatic

MEJHarrison said:


> Since I already know the coding part, those tools didn't really grab my attention. So I have no clue how useful they may or may not be, but the stuff I saw looked good.




If you know coding, you can do things with more finesse with pure text than you can with nodes. The nodes are good for people who don't know how to structure things in a raw programming language, like how Function A connects to Function B, combining to produce Output C, by giving them a easy to follow flowchart and blocks that have singular use.

A good example would be this video below. What he's doing in this video is, for all intents and purposes, programming, but with a layer of abstraction applied.


----------



## Huntn

Renzatic said:


> Though starting out, you'll probably want something that takes you through the bare basics step by step. For that, I recommend the now legendary Blender Donut Tutorial!
> 
> The bare bare basics
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Part 1 - Beginning The Donut






Renzatic said:


> That's Blender, which you'll probably be using if you want to tailor or create objects specific to your scene.
> 
> The good news is that Unity can read .blend files natively, and Epic made a nice importer addon that makes moving objects between the two programs as quick as hitting a button.




Thanks for the links. I see that Blender is open source, so this is something I'd want to check out. Is it respected in the 3D Modeling community? 

Today in the First Hour in Unreal Engine 4 Tutorial, I spent 3 hours in one section, creating a new level. In terms of creating a game, this is incredibly easy and I was wowed by the power of the sky lighting. Incredible. I've finally figured out that yes, a 3D modeling is required  to import architectural elements into the program other than simple floors and walls. I maybe wrong, but my impression is that Unreal Engine can do terrain modeling, although for my purposes, I don't need a lot of terrain, but I will need some. And I have no real idea how well the unreal engine does water, as in standing, vs running, vs waterfalls...


----------



## Huntn

MEJHarrison said:


> I've only looked at some Unreal stuff, but I've spent the past year playing around with Unity quite a bit.  So I can't compare the two, but I can say I've found working with Unity to be a fun time.  Especially after I picked up a mouse with a scroll wheel to use on my Mac.  Unity + track pad =   To be fair, I think it would be an issue for any Windows software ported to the Mac that relies heavily on the scroll wheel.
> 
> I'm a web developer, so I've just been playing with it experimenting with some VR stuff.  It's tons of fun to step into a world you've made.  I just wish I had the artistic skills to compliment my developer skills.  Earlier this year there was a 2-3 month stretch where I was probably spending 50-60 hours a week playing with Unity.  And that's after my day job.  I've not played much with it lately.  Kinda burned myself out.  But I might jump back in again real soon (at a slower pace).  I had started something I'd like to get back to.



For myself, VR is for later, maybe much later. However is developing for VR, that much different than developing for non-VR?  I'm playing a game called No Man's Sky which can be played either way. Honestly VR has wowed the heck out of me in a couple of games, but mostly I would not choose it for games that are input heavy. An RPG  I play called Greedfall, has 20 programmed buttons I need to use spells, and potions. This would just not work well in a VR environment based on the OR controllers I have.


----------



## Renzatic

Huntn said:


> Is it respected in the 3D Modeling community?




As of the 2.8 release is it. That’s when it went from being a bit player, to this huge deal everyone is using. It’s since been adopted by a few big studios, and just about every other 3D based program out there has support for it.


----------



## MEJHarrison

Huntn said:


> For myself, VR is for later, maybe much later. However is developing for VR, that much different than developing for non-VR?




I only did a handful of tutorials that were non-VR games just to get a sense of how they constructed.  For me the hard part wasn't the pieces but putting it all together.  And I'd say that was about the same both ways.

The example I used to use was: I know how to get a chainsaw and put it in my scene.  I know how to make the user grab the chainsaw.  I know how to put a tree in the scene.  But how do you "cut down" the tree when the user puts it against the tree?  The pretty much the same problem in VR or not.

I was eventually able to answer that question.  The other hard part was trying to work on a Mac.  You can't just hit Run and slip on the headset like you can on a Windows machine.  That was a disappointment.  I had to actually build and deploy each time to test it.  So that slows things down.  But it works.  I do plan at some point to dive back into Windows. That would not only make development easier if I got back into it.  It would also open me open to a ton of new games.


----------



## Huntn

Renzatic said:


> As of the 2.8 release is it. That’s when it went from being a bit player, to this huge deal everyone is using. It’s since been adopted by a few big studios, and just about every other 3D based program out there has support for it.



It's now on my todo list.  So would this be used for plant modeling? It's very possible in the EpicGame Marketplace there are inexpensive products. BTW take a look at this:

*Make a forest in an hour using Unreal Engine and Megascans:*





Holy Crap​
 I'm now in my 6th hour of the _Your First Hour using Unreal Engine,_ lol.  I watch, I take notes, because there is so much stuff thrown at you, I'd forget a lot of it without some reference, and I follow along, mimicking  what I'm shown, and  then I type it up on my computer so that is taking twice as long, but it gives me time to digest what I just watched before moving onto the next topic.


----------



## Renzatic

Huntn said:


> It's now on my todo list.  So would this be used for plant modeling? It's very possible in the EpicGame Marketplace there are inexpensive products. BTW take a look at this:




Yup. I've seen that. It's cool stuff.

The only thing I don't like about the Megascans is that they don't provide you any trees. They provide you the textures for the bark and leaves, and occasionally they'll throw a trunk your way, but mostly they expect you to use Speedtree to make your own.


----------



## Renzatic

If you're going to want to get into modeling, you're going to need to get into texturing too, which means that you're gonna have to consider buying Substance Painter, which is the de facto standard for texturing, but costs $200/$20 a month subscription, Quixel Mixer, which is free, but lacks a few features...

...or this, Fluent Materializer, which came out recently, and I only just now discovered.

I already have Substance Painter, but this has interested me, because it works right inside of Blender, meaning I don't have to take all those extra steps having to export and import my models. Plus, it's just $35.

Annoying accent aside, this videos shows off how versatile it is.


----------



## Huntn

Renzatic said:


> Yup. I've seen that. It's cool stuff.
> 
> The only thing I don't like about the Megascans is that they don't provide you any trees. They provide you the textures for the bark and leaves, and occasionally they'll throw a trunk your way, but mostly they expect you to use Speedtree to make your own.



I’ve looked at the Epic Games Marketplace and see there are packages available, I assume there and elsewhere and for the sake of saving time, I’d consider something like a $40 tree and bush package, but that is for saving time.   Megascans appears free if you sign in with  your Epic/UE account.

Having not done it, I could see myself spending a lot of time building generic trees and bushes, but then you either need a program that automates this for you, or become educated about tree growth patterns and manually put them together. The key would be to end up,with so,ethi g that looks natural.

Referencing the video, the author says he made this scene in Unreal Engine, but in the comments section someone commented that he made the initial terrain mesh with Maya.



Renzatic said:


> If you're going to want to get into modeling, you're going to need to get into texturing too, which means that you're gonna have to consider buying Substance Painter, which is the de facto standard for texturing, but costs $200/$20 a month subscription, Quixel Mixer, which is free, but lacks a few features...
> 
> ...or this, Fluent Materializer, which came out recently, and I only just now discovered.
> 
> I already have Substance Painter, but this has interested me, because it works right inside of Blender, meaning I don't have to take all those extra steps having to export and import my models. Plus, it's just $35.
> 
> Annoying accent aside, this videos shows off how versatile it is.



This bullshit with software developers expecting everyone to rent their product strikes me as heinous. Currently grappling with that as you know with picking a new password manager. If t does the job, $35 is more than reasonable. 

Regarding Unreal Engine, starting to get a lot on my to do list. But that’s ok, keep talking and suggesting.


----------



## Renzatic

Huntn said:


> This bullshit with software developers expecting everyone to rent their product strikes me as heinous. Currently grappling with that as you know with picking a new password manager. If t does the job, $35 is more than reasonable.




Yeah, I know. I hate having to rent software. I wouldn't mind it so much if they also provided the option to buy a license, but no. They're all about the temporary leases these days.

The Substance suite used to have this buy it outright, or rent to own setup that was really nice. Then they got bought out by Adobe a couple years back, and they've been slowly pushing towards a subscription only setup every since. Right now, you can still buy Substance Painter and Designer on Steam, but the rumors are that they're going to nix that, or refuse to update it by the end of this year.


----------



## Renzatic

This is neat as hell. I should use this more often.


----------



## MEJHarrison

Renzatic said:


> Yeah, I know. I hate having to rent software. I wouldn't mind it so much if they also provided the option to buy a license, but no. They're all about the temporary leases these days.




I watched a science video recently and he was showing how you could use an app (ScandyPro) to make a 3D scan of your face (on a FaceID phone of course).  And if you have the LiDAR Scanner, it can use that to scan rooms.

It's tons of fun.  I then go to save my scan and I need a subscription.  They actually do have an option to buy it outright, but they want $120.  They also offer weekly, monthly and yearly subscriptions.  So I deleted my scan.  It's not like I had anything fun planned with it.

My subscriptions currently consist of: Apple TV+.  It was going to get canceled, but my year was up just as Ted Lasso was beginning, so I've kept it.  That's it.  1 subscription.  I'm a software developer, so I don't begrudge them trying to make money.  I just choose not to be part of that equation.


----------



## Renzatic

MEJHarrison said:


> I'm a software developer, so I don't begrudge them trying to make money. I just choose not to be part of that equation.




To me, renting software is like renting tools. Yeah, I could probably save a bit of money in the long run renting them, but I'd rather just spend the money, and always have them on-hand for everything from big projects, to little incidental tweaks.

Take Photoshop for example. An old license for it used to cost, what, $400 or so? Paying $20 a month is easier to stomach in the short term, but what if all I want to do is open up and convert old .psd file? I'd have to pay $20 for a month just to do that.

My use case with Photoshop was that I'd use it heavily for awhile, then not need it that much for awhile after, just for the occasional thing. Having to sign up and cancel, sign up and cancel, sign up and cancel for those moments when I do have a need for it is just kind of a pain in the ass. Spending $400 up front, then always having it around thereafter is far preferable.


----------



## Huntn

3 Days and 10+ hours I finished my* first hour in Unreal Engine * course.  The two things that opened my eyes the most was although complex, is how assessable it is as a polished graphics engine. It controls light and atmosphere and character movement. You may have to design a a character, but the engine has programmed into it most the character's interactions with the environment. The other amazing thing are the logic widgets circuts that control character movement based on mouse input and how relatively simple they are as compared to what I imagine working with lines of code is like.  No real coding at all, at least not at the basic level. I imagine in some advanced stages the engine with licensing from Epic, being altered to suit a particular game.


----------



## Huntn

Now I'm doing the "*Intro to Unreal Engine*". It's kind of dry, but it's filling me in on features I missed during the first tutorial. This software still impresses me with what it can do.


----------



## Renzatic

Huntn said:


> Now I'm doing the "*Intro to Unreal Engine*". It's kind of dry, but it's filling me in on features I missed during the first tutorial. This software still impresses me with what it can do.




Have you built anything with it thus far? That's the best way to come to terms with one of these engines. 

Epic themselves provide tons of free assets and materials to play around with, alongside a number of freebies on the Epic Marketplace.


----------



## Huntn

Renzatic said:


> Have you built anything with it thus far? That's the best way to come to terms with one of these engines.
> 
> Epic themselves provide tons of free assets and materials to play around with, alongside a number of freebies on the Epic Marketplace.



I've only built what they have told me to build. During the first tutorial they had me download a free project titled: *Unreal Learning Kit: Games* (project) which has a bunch of stuff in it, characters, basic building, and they walked me though some of the lighting settings which was very interesting.

The Unreal Engine has basic geometric shapes, so I'd like to find a tutorial that walks you though some architecural possibilities that are possible within the Engine. The learning game kit had some walls, a doorway and windows, a good display of how shadows work, but nothing, architecturally that made me say, wow, I want to build that. And  talking to you and others, it's seems like a 3rd party program like maybe Blender is required to get serious about architecture or modeling plants, not that I am planning anything to start off with that is big and crazy. 

My interest in not in a general gaming environment, and introducing actors onto a grid. My interest is crafting a natural setting, terrain, plants, and incorporating architecture elements. What I desire are examples of building project tutorials of such things, where I am inspired, more importantly within my grasp, and of course, they walk me through it.  

If I lay it out step by step it would be create the natural setting including maybe a pond or flowing water, then incorporate some architectural elements, a create a relaxing environment one might want to hang out in and meditate or something, lol. The day could cycle, maybe learn how to introduce weather. Have a pitcher of margaritas I could pick up and sip while sitting in a lounger or a hammock.


----------



## Renzatic

Huntn said:


> I've only built what they have told me to build. During the first tutorial they had me download a free project titled: *Unreal Learning Kit: Games* (project) which has a bunch of stuff in it, characters, basic building, and they walked me though some of the lighting settings which was very interesting.
> 
> The Unreal Engine has basic geometric shapes, so I'd like to find a tutorial that walks you though some architecural possibilities that are possible within the Engine. The learning game kit had some walls, a doorway and windows, a good display of how shadows work, but nothing, architecturally that made me say, wow, I want to build that. And  talking to you and others, it's seems like a 3rd party program like maybe Blender is required to get serious about architecture or modeling plants, not that I am planning anything to start off with that is big and crazy.
> 
> My interest in not in a general gaming environment, and introducing actors onto a grid. My interest is crafting a natural setting, terrain, plants, and incorporating architecture elements. What I desire are examples of building project tutorials of such things, where I am inspired, more importantly within my grasp, and of course, they walk me through it.
> 
> If I lay it out step by step it would be create the natural setting including maybe a pond or flowing water, then incorporate some architectural elements, a create a relaxing environment one might want to hang out in and meditate or something, lol. The day could cycle, maybe learn how to introduce weather. Have a pitcher of margaritas I could pick up and sip while sitting in a lounger or a hammock.




I wasn't talking about games specifically, rather pretty environments in general. Over my few years of learning 3D, I've found that the best way to learn is to goof around. You don't always have to set out to accomplish anything, but the experience you gain from futzing around with various shapes, shaders, and whatnot without anything really guiding you is worth its weight in gold.

...though admittedly, you do have to do a bit of learning before you reach the point where you can freely experiment.


----------



## Huntn

Renzatic said:


> I wasn't talking about games specifically, rather pretty environments in general. Over my few years of learning 3D, I've found that the best way to learn is to goof around. You don't always have to set out to accomplish anything, but the experience you gain from futzing around with various shapes, shaders, and whatnot without anything really guiding you is worth its weight in gold.
> 
> ...though admittedly, you do have to do a bit of learning before you reach the point where you can freely experiment.



I did the *your first hour in UE tutorial* and thought oh, I got this, but now doing the *Intro to UE* my pen is flying taking notes, each section of the editor, tons of features and ways to skin a cat. This is totally focused on the mechanics of editing, manipulating, and the organization of a project. I’ve got about 4 more sections of that, and btw at unrealengine.com once you register, they keep track of your progress and give you quizzes, although the quizzes are short and no penalty if you get an answer wrong. You just keep trying until you get 100%


----------



## Renzatic

Huntn said:


> You just keep trying until you get 100%




Oh, just wait until you get into shaders and particle effects.


----------



## Renzatic

Here’s a nice video for you, from one of my favorite Youtube channels.



			https://m.youtube.com/channel/UC7cmH--tFhYduIshTKzQUJQ


----------



## Huntn

Renzatic said:


> Here’s a nice video for you, from one of my favorite Youtube channels.
> 
> 
> 
> https://m.youtube.com/channel/UC7cmH--tFhYduIshTKzQUJQ



Wow very cool! But it looks so cartoony!!   I have subscribed.  He talked about buying his 13 hour couse for $49, but it kind of looks like the episodes are available on YouTube. The fortunate thing is that what I picture as a first project has no vistas, a rather small tight scene to get started, like a hidden grotto. As I imagine it, not too much in way of terrain but enough and creating plants atmosphere, and depth.

Now that _Make a scene in an hour_ video link I posted, knocked my socks off, but obviously that is a tremendous display, a demo of what is possible, without much teaching value. In the remarks section, someone  commented where is the tutorial for  the tutorial?


----------



## Renzatic

Huntn said:


> Wow very cool! But it looks so cartoony!!   I have subscribed.  He talked about buying his 13 hour couse for $49, but it kind of looks like the episodes are available on YouTube. The fortunate thing is that what I picture as a first project has no vistas, a rather small tight scene to get started, like a hidden grotto. As I imagine it, not too much in way of terrain but enough and creating plants atmosphere, and depth.
> 
> Now that _Make a scene in an hour_ video link I posted, knocked my socks off, but obviously that is a tremendous display, a demo of what is possible, without much teaching value. In the remarks section, someone  commented where is the tutorial for  the tutorial?




What I meant to link to was this, but that's apparently nearly impossible to do when you're browsing on your phone.


----------



## Huntn

Renzatic said:


> What I meant to link to was this, but that's apparently nearly impossible to do when you're browsing on your phone.



This must be a series on YouTube because with about 17 hours studying it, I don’t see learning it in a 9 minute video, but I will check it out.


----------



## Renzatic

Huntn said:


> This must be a series on YouTube because with about 17 hours studying it, I don’t see learning it in a 9 minute video, but I will check it out.




Well, it's more like a guide on where you should focus your interests, though I do think a lot of these do assume you have some prior knowledge of the 3D scene.


----------



## Renzatic

Huntn said:


> This must be a series on YouTube because with about 17 hours studying it, I don’t see learning it in a 9 minute video, but I will check it out.




This, by the way, is probably the most important video you'll ever watch. You will learn SO MUCH!


----------



## Huntn

Renzatic said:


> This, by the way, is probably the most important video you'll ever watch. You will learn SO MUCH!



Ya never know…


----------



## Huntn

While I‘m continuing slogging though the UE Intro tutorial, what would you say is the best way to model trees and other plants? I need to do something besides this Intro to EU. I’ve been reading and some say do tree trunks in Blender, import, and then add leaves in UE. There is the Quixel Megascan video I linked to and @Renzatic’s  Stylilized Station- Make beautiful environments video. This is besides buying a pre-made plant packs in the UE Marketplace, and there is Speed Tree, but not sure about costs there.

I’m sure that modeling trees would be an educational endeavor, but I’m also thinking of convienence.


----------



## Renzatic

There's always Speedtree, the de facto standard for all things realtime foliage.  It's $20 a month, and might have a free trial for you to learn on. You also get to keep the trees you make or buy once your sub ends, though you obviously won't be able to edit them any further.

If you want to go the free route, there's always Modular Tree for Blender, which is what I use. The downside to it is that it's not really built to create game ready trees, so you have to do some work to make them efficient. Plus, you need the latest version to use with the most up to date version of Blender, which is currently a work in progress.


----------



## Huntn

Renzatic said:


> There's always Speedtree, the de facto standard for all things realtime foliage.  It's $20 a month, and might have a free trial for you to learn on. You also get to keep the trees you make or buy once your sub ends, though you obviously won't be able to edit them any further.
> 
> If you want to go the free route, there's always Modular Tree for Blender, which is what I use. The downside to it is that it's not really built to create game ready trees, so you have to do some work to make them efficient. Plus, you need the latest version to use with the most up to date version of Blender, which is currently a work in progress.




Thanks I will be watching this! 






This make a forest scene in 1 hour video, it's impressive, but I'm only about 15 minutes into it. It's way, I mean WAY above my level, but it is valuable to me because it shows how a scene like this is constructed. The author creates a large flat mesh in Maya*, imports it to UE, and then applies a blended texture to it which lost me as how as those diagrams with logic paths work when it comes to creating textures, but no matter. He  tiles the ground to expand the ground area, and adds the actors/meshes of rock formations and tree stumps is very enlightening to newb such as myself.  It looks like he's introducing items from megascans.

* I looked at Maya pricing, LOL, so Blender has to be it. 

Here is  a question about the floor of this project. In the beginning the author creates what I call a flat mesh and raises a bit of it, and sinks other parts of it, applies a texture to it, and then he tiles it to expand the floor area.

In the First Hour in UE Tutorial,  there are square flat tile pieces of textured floor, they have been using to define the floor of a space. These meshes have thickness, but would be something you might use as the floor in a building, that serves as both floor and ceiling.  In the video referenced above, the  plain which the author above constructs, is a flat plain. without any perceivable depth to it. I'll assume this is something that can be made in Blender. Is it any different than one of the floor pieces with depth, or is it just, I'll assume a flat 2D mesh. Would that be defined differently than a 3D mesh?


----------



## Renzatic

Huntn said:


> In the First Hour in UE Tutorial,  there are square flat tile pieces of textured floor, they have been using to define the floor of a space. These meshes have thickness, but would be something you might use as the floor in a building, that serves as both floor and ceiling.  In the video referenced above, the  plain which the author above constructs, is a flat plain. without any perceivable depth to it. I'll assume this is something that can be made in Blender. Is it any different than one of the floor pieces with depth, or is it just, I'll assume a flat 2D mesh. Would that be defined differently than a 3D mesh?




Are you asking why it is that it looks like the flat plane has a front and back in Maya, but only the top side in Unreal? That's because Maya, Blender, etc. always display their meshes as being doublesided by default, while game engines like UE usually only show faces as single sided unless told to do otherwise. It's all about surface normals, or which side a polygon's face is pointing.

And the reason why it looks flat, without depth, is because, well, it is. That doesn't make it 2D, rather no one has added any depth to it yet.

See, modelers like Maya, Max, and Blender work with something called manifold geometry. It's like you're working on a shell that's empty inside. A sphere in one of these programs doesn't have any thickness or volume to it. Rather, it's a contiguous manifold.

And yes, Blender can do what you see in the video above. Here's a quick example I did for you. It's all loop cuts, edge bevels, a couple of scales, and moving some faces/vertices (or transforming them, per the parlance).


----------



## Huntn

Renzatic said:


> Are you asking why it is that it looks like the flat plane has a front and back in Maya, but only the top side in Unreal? That's because Maya, Blender, etc. always display their meshes as being doublesided by default, while game engines like UE usually only show faces as single sided unless told to do otherwise. It's all about surface normals, or which side a polygon's face is pointing.
> 
> And the reason why it looks flat, without depth, is because, well, it is. That doesn't make it 2D, rather no one has added any depth to it yet.
> 
> See, modelers like Maya, Max, and Blender work with something called manifold geometry. It's like you're working on a shell that's empty inside. A sphere in one of these programs doesn't have any thickness or volume to it. Rather, it's a contiguous manifold.
> 
> And yes, Blender can do what you see in the video above. Here's a quick example I did for you. It's all loop cuts, edge bevels, a couple of scales, and moving some faces/vertices (or transforming them, per the parlance).
> 
> View attachment 9097



The author says he could have done this in UE, but that this method gives him for freedom. I sat. down tonight and watched that entire video and while a lot was over my head it's main value is to see how a scene like this is constructed with not that much difficulty. Although as I took notes, I had lots of questions. Here is the general sequence, but a lot of my screenshots are left out.

Questiona about Baking/Building. When you build a scene does this protect stuff already added to the scene or can it (the baked stuff) sill be edited?  After a baked scene, he added some leaves, did not like them, then it looked like he used an eraser paint brush to remove them without effecting the stuff below them.

First is the starting mesh as illustrated above, the author made it with 3 pieces, center, right side, left side, exports into UE.


Adds master texture, author speaks of vertex paint, blending, and noise mask.


*The road: *Paints in green channel for grass along the road, and red for the dirt.​
*Right Side (the lip and above)- *Looking at the screen he texurized the right side (above the ledge)  and then duplicated that, roasted it 180° and used it for the left side of the road.​
*Tiles-* Then he tiles this 3 piece mesh and extends the road with 6 new sections.​
*Adds rocks piles, and tree stumps* along the road, meshes brought in from Megascans. The rock pile is ingenious because he would place 3 rocks piles, the same rock pile, but rotate it with each placement.  Then duplicate those 3 rock piles, rotate them 180° and move to the opposite side of the road where they would look different. Used a single rock pile up and down the road.​
*Adds grass, small sticks, and leaves * to road area with what sounded like a "scatter" application, just run the curser around the screen and paint objects. He did mention something about offset, I assume so if you are painting trees, they all plop down oriented differently.​



UE Landscape is added (the green mesh)​
Adds the UE Landscape and adjusts it down so this mesh imported to UE is sitting on the new Landscape/Terrain.​

Paints Hills​
Around the scene he paints significant terrain  (hills) with a brush, then smoothes it out and lowers it so you can see the blue of the horizon.​

Applies same green texture to the UE terrain.


Adds trees, shrubs junipers, bigger grass.​
Note, he did not mention where he got the trees from, Megascans or somewhere else, but at some point he said everything came from Megascans.​
*Question: *I noticed when the grass was placed it was waving in a breeze. Very cool, but I have no idea what the mechanism is, if it's an UE setting or a setting associated with the vegetation,  the grass actors/items  brought into the scene.​



with some tweaks to lighting and post processing
Final Product​
So with the final product, I'm thinking in UE, you can just hit play and could walk about in this environment. Just don't walk off the edge. 


​


----------



## Renzatic

Huntn said:


> Questiona about Baking/Building. When you build a scene does this protect stuff already added to the scene or can it (the baked stuff) sill be edited? After a baked scene, he added some leaves, did not like them, then it looked like he used an eraser paint brush to remove them without effecting the stuff below them.




Yeah, you can still edit it, since all he's doing is baking the lighting to account for any new instances or geometry added to the scene. If you remove something after baking, you'll see it's shadow still floating about in the scene, but that can be fixed with another quick bake.



> *Question: *I noticed when the grass was placed it was waving in a breeze. Very cool, but I have no idea what the mechanism is, if it's an UE setting or a setting associated with the vegetation, the grass actors/items brought into the scene.




It depends on the size and complexity of your objects. The trunks and branches on your trees trees will need a rig to tell the engine what parts of the geometry can be pushed by a wind effect, but grass and leaves, being alpha masked textures applied to flat planes, can be swayed about using simple vertex shaders.



> So with the final product, I'm thinking in UE, you can just hit play and could walk about in this environment. Just don't walk off the edge.




Sure can. All you need to do is set up your scene with a basic first person shooter template, and place a starting point, and you can walk around in your scene without any problems whatsoever.

Though the one thing you need to keep in mind is that the way this guy is designing his scene makes for great screenshots or still scenes where the camera doesn't move around a lot, but will look weird as hell as an actual environment.

Obviously, interactive environments will need to be designed as they would exist in real life.


----------



## Huntn

Renzatic said:


> Are you asking why it is that it looks like the flat plane has a front and back in Maya, but only the top side in Unreal? That's because Maya, Blender, etc. always display their meshes as being doublesided by default, while game engines like UE usually only show faces as single sided unless told to do otherwise. It's all about surface normals, or which side a polygon's face is pointing.
> 
> And the reason why it looks flat, without depth, is because, well, it is. That doesn't make it 2D, rather no one has added any depth to it yet.
> 
> See, modelers like Maya, Max, and Blender work with something called manifold geometry. It's like you're working on a shell that's empty inside. A sphere in one of these programs doesn't have any thickness or volume to it. Rather, it's a contiguous manifold.
> 
> And yes, Blender can do what you see in the video above. Here's a quick example I did for you. It's all loop cuts, edge bevels, a couple of scales, and moving some faces/vertices (or transforming them, per the parlance).
> 
> View attachment 9097



Second time I answered this post. I need to install Blender. First time I answered, I was wrapped up in that video.  With Unreal Engine (I’ll refer to as UE) I have limited exposure to it. Based on my impression of what comes with UE there is a landscape/ terrain tool which can paint/create hills and mountains. Until I get into the landscape part of a tutorial, based on the Forest in 1 Hr video,  when creating Landscape terrain, it creates a large flat mesh upon which terrain, hills and mountains can be painted/built.

Just a quick observation, it seems like it will be interesting to learn how in a game with a  typical large, sprawling outdoor environment how these spaces can be created, and connected to each other, where you can run to the horizon and not see a screen load. I’ll set this aside as it is not my interest at this point. 

The author of the Forest in 1Hr  video starts in a modeling program (Maya) and creates a flat mesh and then manipulates  it, the same as you illustrated in Blender.  He says his project can be done in UE, but he chose Maya because it offered him some freedom.

Based on what I observed, it seems that the convienence was the ability to compose a scene on a smaller scale on a relatively flat mesh, instead of trying to work with UE terrain for this composition. I don’t know if UE  has the ability to create this kind of a mesh, but I see the advantage.

So far in my limited exposer to UE, I only see a list of basic geometric shapes, including floors, that can be added to a scene. And I do knot know if the UE landscape/terrain mesh can be manipulated the same way the mesh used in the video was manipulated in Maya/Blender.

The mesh defines a primary space and focal point where design can take place, kind of like creating a building. It’s not completely unlike the UE tutorials I am looking at where the first part of creating a game project is to take floor pieces that have thickness, and lay them out to make a space that defines the space and where a character can walk. Without a space to walk on, the character falls to infinity. I don’t know if the author of the project was making a scene that he intended for a character to walk through or that it is just a technical capability demo, but it is impressive regardless.

This is part of the reason why a game engine attracted me. It is used not to create a static scene like a painting, but a living interactive scene. It includes support for the visitor and for creating a dynamic environment, where a visitor can stroll around, experience, and interact with it.This is my attraction to a game engine, a lot of the environmental work has already been programmed  for you.

As my impression you are not an expert in UE, I’ll still ask, I wonder if the kind of a manipulated flat mesh can be created in UE or if this is something better suited to Blender? I won’t be surprised if Blender is the answer for this purpose.


----------



## Huntn

Renzatic said:


> Yeah, you can still edit it, since all he's doing is baking the lighting to account for any new instances or geometry added to the scene. If you remove something after baking, you'll see it's shadow still floating about in the scene, but that can be fixed with another quick bake.
> 
> 
> 
> It depends on the size and complexity of your objects. The trunks and branches on your trees trees will need a rig to tell the engine what parts of the geometry can be pushed by a wind effect, but grass and leaves, being alpha masked textures applied to flat planes, can be swayed about using simple vertex shaders.



It was the grass I noticed blowing. One thing that opened my eyes were these logic gates that control something like character, how far it can jump, or if it can fly. 
 I’m assuming at this point that something like this is used to allow grasses to sway.


----------



## Renzatic

Huntn said:


> So far in my limited exposer to UE, I only see a list of basic geometric shapes, including floors, that can be added to a scene. And I do knot know if the UE landscape/terrain mesh can be manipulated the same way the mesh used in the video was manipulated in Maya/Blender.




UE is good for making basic geometry, and can whip up some simple shapes like walls, doorways, and whatnot fairly quickly. Landscapes, for example, are flat subdivided planes that can be pushed or pulled on the Z axis. That's great for making rolling hills, but if you want anything that overlaps, like cliff walls, ditches, and so on, you'll need something that can manipulate geometry at a finer scale. This is where programs like Blender and Maya come in.

Being able to mix and match these types of geometry is how you can do things quickly. You don't have to design cliff walls by hand every time you design a scene. You can take a flat plane, stretch it out, then add a few premade rocks to the flat section on the plane to give it more character.



> It was the grass I noticed blowing. One thing that opened my eyes were these logic gates that control something like character, how far it can jump, or if it can fly.
> I’m assuming at this point that something like this is used to allow grasses to sway.




Somewhat. Game logic is what you use to define how your character moves, what can be interacted with, and how. They're more global settings. Vertex shaders are applied at the material level on an object, telling the vertices how to move on a simple object.

I'll make a quick, sloppy video right fast illustrating what they do. Gimme a second.


----------



## Renzatic

Okay, this is really quick and sloppy, but it illustrates the point fairly well, I guess.

I found a quick grass texture on the internet, and applied it to a flat quad. This is BASICALLY how grass is made in 3D engines, since it looks grassy, but doesn't take a lot of polygons to produce. The two points I select are the vertices. A vertex shader would tell the object to move those vertices I selected in a similar way to how I transform them in the video.

So here.


----------



## Renzatic

Hey, I figured that if you want to check out a scene to see how it's done, I can upload two of my outdoor examples. My stuff is a little more stylized, but it'd give you something to pick apart, and I could easily explain the process, since it's all done by hand.

This is what they look like. If you're interested, I'll upload them. Just keep in mind that they're big ass files.

General Store





Railroad Shack


----------



## Renzatic

Here's a nice video for you, showing how it easy it is to make leafy plants.


----------



## Huntn

Renzatic said:


> Hey, I figured that if you want to check out a scene to see how it's done, I can upload two of my outdoor examples. My stuff is a little more stylized, but it'd give you something to pick apart, and I could easily explain the process, since it's all done by hand.
> 
> This is what they look like. If you're interested, I'll upload them. Just keep in mind that they're big ass files.
> 
> General Store
> 
> View attachment 9129
> 
> Railroad Shack
> 
> View attachment 9134



Wow, looks great! Is everything in here an actor or for  backgrounds are images ever used as wallpaper?

Is this Blender? The reason I ask is that what really appeals to me is the ability of walking though, interacting with such a scene. This is why UE is so appealing, because by default, it provides the infrastructure  for interaction.

I’ll assume Blender does light and atmosphere similiar to the Unreal Engine? I’m interest to see how similar Blender is to UE.

But even if this is Blender, it‘s a related ball game, I anticipate I’ll be relying on Blender,  so I’m interested in it.  Yes I would be interested in both of them, but I’ll need to get up to speed with a couple of Blender tutorials before I’ll  be able to do much with it, but if you want to make these projects available, I will download them. And if you want to include a simple description of how you put these together, I’d appreciate it.  Thanks! 

Regarding Intro to UE tutorial, I‘ve got about 6 more sections to complete. Most likely since I am enamored with the Forest scene I will dip my toes in that project and see just how hard it is to duplicate, and what  I would first need to do is duplicate the starting mesh in Blender, like you illustrated. I know I need to do Blender tutorials, but can how to create that mesh, be easily described? It seems basic and does not strike me as something that is hard to accomplish.

BTW, on occasion I’ve had trouble connecting with this forum. Are you still active on MRs or did you totally abandon that? The reason I ask, is that I started a UE thread in the Graphic Design forum, but have gotten minimal response, including a comment that The Unreal Engine is not Graphic design, lol. Anyway, if I have trouble reaching this forum, and need your advice, I would PM you via MRs.  When the time comes, I’ll look for or start a Blender thread there too and see if that gets more participation.


----------



## Renzatic

Blender is, by itself, a building tool, more for still images, animations, movies, and whatnot. It's primary concern is to put out a nice image. In contrast, Unreal is designed primarily to produce realtime interactive environments. There is a lot of overlap between the two, but in your case, you'll use blender to construct your assets, then pop them into Unreal to lay out in a scene.

I could go into the nitty gritty details, like how Unreal renders a scene compared to Blender, or what the differences are between Eevee and Cycles, and how those differences relate to UE, but that's a ton of info to absorb all at once. So while you can use Blender to create lighting and atmosphere in a similar fashion to Unreal, your best bet for that is to stick to Unreal exclusively for the time being so as not to overwhelm yourself.

And yeah, I can fairly easily describe the basics on how to build a mesh. I could even throw out a quick video or two for you if it'll help (wish I had a mic, though). In the end, it's not the voodoo magic a lot of people assume it is when they're first starting out, especially these days when you have all these cool tools at your disposal to make things that much easier, but there is a ton of technique and best practice stuff to come to terms with that can take awhile to get through.

As for MR, I've been banned from there for 5-6 years now. I've tried sneaking in a few times afterwards, but they always catch me. 

If you can't get ahold of me here, I do post a lot on https://blenderartists.org/, which would be a good place for you to visit if you want to ask questions in general.


----------



## Renzatic

Also, this is more cool for me, but I'm gonna show it off here cuz it's so cool.


----------



## MEJHarrison

Huntn said:


> Is this Blender? The reason I ask is that what really appeals to me is the ability of walking though, interacting with such a scene. This is why UE is so appealing, because by default, it provides the infrastructure  for interaction.




Sounds like you need a VR headset!  Then you can _*really*_ walk through the scenes.  

Honestly, that's what got me into Unity.  The ability to make something and actually get to walk around in it.  It all started when I found Doom in VR, then found the Doom level I'd built years ago, then got to play MY level in VR.  It's a magical experience.

If only I could build landscapes that were more than a simple black plane with colored blocks scattered about!  At least I can make the colored blocks do interesting things.  They just don't look pretty.


----------



## Huntn

Renzatic said:


> Blender is, by itself, a building tool, more for still images, animations, movies, and whatnot. It's primary concern is to put out a nice image. In contrast, Unreal is designed primarily to produce realtime interactive environments. There is a lot of overlap between the two, but in your case, you'll use blender to construct your assets, then pop them into Unreal to lay out in a scene.
> 
> I could go into the nitty gritty details, like how Unreal renders a scene compared to Blender, or what the differences are between Eevee and Cycles, and how those differences relate to UE, but that's a ton of info to absorb all at once. So while you can use Blender to create lighting and atmosphere in a similar fashion to Unreal, your best bet for that is to stick to Unreal exclusively for the time being so as not to overwhelm yourself.
> 
> And yeah, I can fairly easily describe the basics on how to build a mesh. I could even throw out a quick video or two for you if it'll help (wish I had a mic, though). In the end, it's not the voodoo magic a lot of people assume it is when they're first starting out, especially these days when you have all these cool tools at your disposal to make things that much easier, but there is a ton of technique and best practice stuff to come to terms with that can take awhile to get through.
> 
> As for MR, I've been banned from there for 5-6 years now. I've tried sneaking in a few times afterwards, but they always catch me.
> 
> If you can't get ahold of me here, I do post a lot on https://blenderartists.org/, which would be a good place for you to visit if you want to ask questions in general.



Sorry to hear that about MR. I’m still there but my heart is not in it like it used to be. At blenderartists.org are you Renzatic?

I do want to do couple of complete Blender tutorials, but for the purposes of this UE Forest project, right now I just want to make that mesh, which might be as easy as pick it out, plop it down, and start pulling it into the shape I want.  I don’t want to put you out with a video unless you really want to make one, if it’s not a lot of effort or maybe I can find a video tutorial online, regarding that mesh.


----------



## Huntn

MEJHarrison said:


> Sounds like you need a VR headset!  Then you can _*really*_ walk through the scenes.
> 
> Honestly, that's what got me into Unity.  The ability to make something and actually get to walk around in it.  It all started when I found Doom in VR, then found the Doom level I'd built years ago, then got to play MY level in VR.  It's a magical experience.
> 
> If only I could build landscapes that were more than a simple black plane with colored blocks scattered about!  At least I can make the colored blocks do interesting things.  They just don't look pretty.



Actually VR is part of the long range plan and I have an Occulus Rift I’ve not used in a year.


----------



## MEJHarrison

MEJHarrison said:


> If only I could build landscapes that were more than a simple black plane with colored blocks scattered about!  At least I can make the colored blocks do interesting things.  They just don't look pretty.




I finally got around to uploading a video of some of my very early experiments.

This was one of the first things I did when I was learning Unity.  One of the tutorial guys I was watching kept starting tons of videos with a black plane for a floor, a white cube as a "table" and a smaller cube sitting on it and colored.

So I built that.  Then made the "table" bigger and added a couple more blocks.  Then I copied the table and added colored spheres.  Then I found a free car model, so I made a table for them.  Then I found some other random assets to play with.

At some point I went through a hand animation tutorial, so I added those to this project.  That was one of the most frustrating things I've done to date.   Now that I have a real mouse, I think it would be a lot easier.  I was on my MacBook with the trackpad and that wasn't fun at all.  It's hard to "scroll the mouse wheel" on a trackpad for example.  For the curious, the frustration thing is the tutorial I went though started you with a basic hand.  And you had to animate the rest.  So when the trigger is pulled, you needed to move the index finger to the final position.  When meant bending each joint until things looked right.  Then repeat that with the grip button, but that one controls the other three fingers and I had to do each joint on each finger.

Later I came across a "how to make a gun shoot" video, and since I already had the guns, I added that in there.  Then I made a few changes like a running score and bullseye-in-a-row.  It's a silly gun, but that's what the tutorial had me build.   

I eventually stopped adding to this project and went on to work through lots of others.  Teleporting.  Building doors that can be opened.  Buttons that can be pushed.  Guns that shoot bullets instead of squirt guns.  

One thing I had started on before getting distracted by other things is the idea of a photo gallery.  Upload a ton of photos to the headset, then have some space auto-generated displaying the photos as pictures on the wall.  Then you could click on the photo to see it full sized.  I think it would be cool to have a museum.  One room could be photos / videos of one child.  I could have another room for the other child.  Another room for whatever.  Just stick them in their own subfolder.  I think that could be super nifty.  I just need to get back to that.  As I recall, I was reading the photos from the folder and displaying them pretty well.  Next up I need to figure out how many photos are in the folder, and construct a room of the appropriate size and stick them on the walls.  I'll get back to it eventually. Nothing worth showing at this point.  Just a bunch of pictures hovering a few feet off the floor.


----------



## Renzatic

Huntn said:


> Sorry to hear that about MR. I’m still there but my heart is not in it like it used to be. At blenderartists.org are you Renzatic?




Dude, you're killing me! We used to have conversations! We used to be _FRIENDS!_

But anyway, HORRIBLE SLIGHT aside, if you want to hit the ground running as soon as possible, I'd watch this quick 7 minute video showing off the tools you'll be most using while modelling. I'd replace Grid Fill with the Inset tool, but, eh, it's still pretty good.






But if you want to get a little more indepth with the basics, Grant Abbitt's series is solid for that.






Okay, I just realized I misread your quote.

Yes, I'm Renzatic over at Blenderartists too.


----------



## Renzatic

So Apple joined the Blender Development Fund, and is donating money and engineers to the project. A Metal backend has been in the works for awhile now, and it seems that it gives the program a MASSIVE boost to performance on those machines.

So this means that my next computer is going to be a Mac. 100%.









						Apple joins Blender Development Fund — blender.org
					

Apple has joined the Blender Development Fund as a Patron Member to support continued core development for Blender.




					www.blender.org


----------



## Huntn

MEJHarrison said:


> Sounds like you need a VR headset!  Then you can _*really*_ walk through the scenes.
> 
> Honestly, that's what got me into Unity.  The ability to make something and actually get to walk around in it.  It all started when I found Doom in VR, then found the Doom level I'd built years ago, then got to play MY level in VR.  It's a magical experience.
> 
> *If only I could build landscapes that were more than a simple black plane with colored blocks scattered about!  At least I can make the colored blocks do interesting things.  They just don't look pretty.*



Look at the *Make A Forest in the Unreal Engine* video link posted in this thread if you have not.  I find this extremely impressive, however it is in UE vs Blender which  you may not want to tackle. Even though most of this video is above my level, I can see how it is structured, how easy it is to place elements, and realize how important textures and lighting is to the finished process. There are things called “texture or material instances” sometimes called Master Material (or was it texture?) where variations in texture can be created. It look easy and complicated at the same time.  This is one of the things I’ll be learning Soon.


----------



## Renzatic

Huntn said:


> It look easy and complicated at the same time.  This is one of the things I’ll be learning Soon.




Materials are where the real fun begins. You can do SO MUCH with them.


----------



## Huntn

Renzatic said:


> Dude, you're killing me! We used to have conversations! We used to be _FRIENDS!_
> 
> But anyway, HORRIBLE SLIGHT aside, if you want to hit the ground running as soon as possible, I'd watch this quick 7 minute video showing off the tools you'll be most using while modelling. I'd replace Grid Fill with the Inset tool, but, eh, it's still pretty good.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> But if you want to get a little more indepth with the basics, Grant Abbitt's series is solid for that.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Okay, I just realized I misread your quote.
> 
> Yes, I'm Renzatic over at Blenderartists too.



Yes, Friend remain calm.  I know you were at MRs, you came here from MRs, we were friends there, had many conversations, and that you were banned, but what I did not know or forgot is that you were basically permanently banned there. That is what the sorry was about. I groveled to what’s his face and he reinstated me. 

Thanks for the links! 

Now regarding Blender, I got it downloaded and created a flat grid with it, but I want to duplicate that grid in the Forrest Video Tutorial. If there is a short list of steps to duplicate it, I’d appreciate it, things like snap to grid, or no snap which made most of  the little points dissapear on me. I think I can pick multiple points and use the to pull up a section. But really the answer is for me to get into one of the Blender tutorials.

In the UE tutorial last night I was studying the pipeline and textures. Getting ready to jump into UE static mesh tips and functionality.

*Note*: My ability to connect with TalledAbout has been intermittent for over a week. Hence my replies here  maybe delayed.  I have visited blenderartists.org and will establish an account there. Are you Renzatic there?


----------



## Renzatic

Yup. I'm Renzatic EVERYWHERE.

Okay, let's start with the bare basics here. There are three tools you're going to be using most to create that road. First and foremost...

Loop Cuts - Ctrl+R (or whatever the Mac equivalent is. I think it's the cloverleaf). This will cut an edge into your vertices, sourced from the edge you hover the mouse cursor over. You can scroll the mousewheel up and down to increase or decrease the amount of cuts being made.

Grab/Translate tool - G. This will move your selected vertices, edges, or faces about. You can constrain movement to a specific axis by hitting X, Y, or Z.

Scale tool - S. Scales your selected vertices away from each other.

Vertex, edge, and face selection mode - 1, 2, & 3 respectively. If you want to grab the dots, hit 1. Want to grab a long edge? Hit 2. A whole polygon face? Hit 3.

Edge bevels - Ctrl + B. This will take one edge, and split into two or more. Increase or decrease the number of cuts on the bevel by scrolling your mousewheel up or down.

When you get right down to it, these are all you need to make your road. When you get right down to it, modelling is a lot like sculpting, only you're constrained to a wire case, and you're moving your elements around to around to define a shape. If you need more detail, you add more geometry, usually via loop cuts or bevels.

The best thing to do starting out isn't to try and make something, but to use your tools randomly to see how they behave. Once you have a good understanding of that, you'll be able to make that road easily enough. Just look at my picture above for reference, and see if you can figure out what I did.

If you need any help, don't hesitate to ask me.

Also, don't worry about snapping to the grid. You can activate it by hitting the little magnet icon at the top of the screen, but it's not really a concern for what you're doing.


----------



## Huntn

Renzatic said:


> Yup. I'm Renzatic EVERYWHERE.
> 
> Okay, let's start with the bare basics here. There are three tools you're going to be using most to create that road. First and foremost...
> 
> Loop Cuts - Ctrl+R (or whatever the Mac equivalent is. I think it's the cloverleaf). This will cut an edge into your vertices, sourced from the edge you hover the mouse cursor over. You can scroll the mousewheel up and down to increase or decrease the amount of cuts being made.
> 
> Grab/Translate tool - G. This will move your selected vertices, edges, or faces about. You can constrain movement to a specific axis by hitting X, Y, or Z.
> 
> Scale tool - S. Scales your selected vertices away from each other.
> 
> Vertex, edge, and face selection mode - 1, 2, & 3 respectively. If you want to grab the dots, hit 1. Want to grab a long edge? Hit 2. A whole polygon face? Hit 3.
> 
> Edge bevels - Ctrl + B. This will take one edge, and split into two or more. Increase or decrease the number of cuts on the bevel by scrolling your mousewheel up or down.
> 
> When you get right down to it, these are all you need to make your road. When you get right down to it, modelling is a lot like sculpting, only you're constrained to a wire case, and you're moving your elements around to around to define a shape. If you need more detail, you add more geometry, usually via loop cuts or bevels.
> 
> The best thing to do starting out isn't to try and make something, but to use your tools randomly to see how they behave. Once you have a good understanding of that, you'll be able to make that road easily enough. Just look at my picture above for reference, and see if you can figure out what I did.
> 
> If you need any help, don't hesitate to ask me.
> 
> Also, don't worry about snapping to the grid. You can activate it by hitting the little magnet icon at the top of the screen, but it's not really a concern for what you're doing.



I want to lay it out with the many points, called vertices? Grab  the points for a center section and elevate them, drag them up. I just need to play with this or… read a tutorial lol.

In the UR Forest tutorial, the author took the center flat, but manipulated grid and butted a cube to it on one side, then removed the bottom and back side of the cube so there were only 2 sides of the cube remaining which connected to the center part and  served to create the lip and horizontal section on the sides. The author just slam bams his way though it and continues on. While I will be stumbling my way through it.


----------



## Renzatic

Huntn said:


> While I will be stumbling my way through it.




Well yeah, that's because you're a totes noober, brah! 

Okay, I watched the video, and the first couple of things he does is pops in a plane primative, scales it up, then runs some loop cuts through it along the Y axis (the green line in Blender). You can do the same by hitting Ctrl + R, and scrolling up a bit until you have 6 or 8 edges in there.

One thing he does do that I failed to mention above is that he uses proportional editing to get some smooth bumps in there. You can do the same thing in Blender by hitting the O key, then rolling your mouse up and down to change the area of influence.

He does the rest by adding a cube in, deleting all but two faces, then shaped the rest.

It's the shaping you'll want to spend the most attention on. Try to get some grooves and bumps on your flat road space, then move on once you feel like you're getting the basics of it.

Like I said, the best thing to do is just do it. See how everything acts and comes together. Do something random with the above if you so feel like it. It won't take you long to get a feel for it.

Oh yeah, one other thing I forgot. When you first lay down your plane in Blender, you're gonna be in Object Mode. It's more or less how Unreal acts, and where you'll position all your models and whatnot when you're laying out a scene. If you want to get to your vertices and all that good stuff, hit the Tab key to hop into Edit Mode.


----------



## MEJHarrison

Huntn said:


> Look at the *Make A Forest in the Unreal Engine* video link posted in this thread if you have not. I find this extremely impressive, however it is in UE vs Blender which you may not want to tackle. Even though most of this video is above my level, I can see how it is structured, how easy it is to place elements, and realize how important textures and lighting is to the finished process. There are things called “texture or material instances” sometimes called Master Material (or was it texture?) where variations in texture can be created. It look easy and complicated at the same time.  This is one of the things I’ll be learning Soon.




I did watch that video.  The whole thing.  It was cool.  I think I did a similar one once on Unity.  And it came out looking cool I think.  Not as cool as the tutorial, but it was an interesting exercise.  Nothing I think I could or would tackle on my own.  It just doesn't interest me.  If I was doing something that needed that level of graphics, I'd be looking for someone with those skills.

I've also watched enough Blender videos to know it's not for me.  It's not the tool.  I could learn to use the tool no problem.  It's just that once I'm proficient with the tool, I don't have the art skills to do anything with the tool.

I'm not an artistic person.  Never have been.  I like fooling around in ProCreate, but the best I'll ever do is copy someone else's work.  I accept that about myself.  I'm creative at times, just not artistic.  

It's the same at work.  I can't design the website.  But I can take a design and get it on the page and make it do all the interesting things.


----------



## DT

This was a super early experiment, I only have some static shots, I'll have to dig those up - it's Unity and I wrote an interface for the Facebook API that queried your photos and built a wall you could fly through.  The concept was to build all these 3D constructs, like a "City of Content" from your various social media sources, maybe use meta-data/tags for some kind of geographical-like organization.


----------



## Renzatic

MEJHarrison said:


> I'm not an artistic person. Never have been. I like fooling around in ProCreate, but the best I'll ever do is copy someone else's work.




The problem isn't that you're not artistic, it's that you haven't spent enough time goofing around, and cribbing from other people's work to say that you are.

Everyone starts out aping someone else. You find things you like, you copy it, you tweak it, and sooner or later, you'll eventually start developing your own style. The most important thing is that you stick with it.

Like with web design, I can guarantee you that the people who's work your copying themselves got their start copying bits and pieces from other people's templates, learning from the best. After awhile, they started getting a feel for what works and what doesn't, what they personally like, and what they don't, and now it seems like they're able to semi-magically create these awesome looking webpage layouts with no effort at all.

It's not raw, ingrained talent that's important. It's whether you like doing it, and have the drive to stick with it until you're good at it.


----------



## Huntn

Renzatic said:


> Well yeah, that's because you're a totes noober, brah!
> 
> Okay, I watched the video, and the first couple of things he does is pops in a plane primative, scales it up, then runs some loop cuts through it along the Y axis (the green line in Blender). You can do the same by hitting Ctrl + R, and scrolling up a bit until you have 6 or 8 edges in there.
> 
> One thing he does do that I failed to mention above is that he uses proportional editing to get some smooth bumps in there. You can do the same thing in Blender by hitting the O key, then rolling your mouse up and down to change the area of influence.
> 
> He does the rest by adding a cube in, deleting all but two faces, then shaped the rest.
> 
> It's the shaping you'll want to spend the most attention on. Try to get some grooves and bumps on your flat road space, then move on once you feel like you're getting the basics of it.
> 
> Like I said, the best thing to do is just do it. See how everything acts and comes together. Do something random with the above if you so feel like it. It won't take you long to get a feel for it.
> 
> Oh yeah, one other thing I forgot. When you first lay down your plane in Blender, you're gonna be in Object Mode. It's more or less how Unreal acts, and where you'll position all your models and whatnot when you're laying out a scene. If you want to get to your vertices and all that good stuff, hit the Tab key to hop into Edit Mode.



Thanks, I will play with Blender and report back!
Note I am not sitting at my computer all day long studying this stuff, but  hitting it on more of a casual basis, some nights 2-4 hours. It is voluntarily eating into my game  playing time Which is actually a good thing because it indicates a level of interest.

On the *Intro into the UE Tutorial*, I finally ran into some stuff that they hit on as if you are familiar with it.


Lightmaps- stuffing different graphical info in different channels (R,G,B) of a texture, definitely requires more study.  I’m thinking this is along the lines of ”Master Materials”.
LightmapUVs- huh?
Material Types in Actors- multiple material types means an object must be rendered for each material type, so this should be minimized.
Overdraw- when a texture map excessively exceeds the size and shape object that you are applying the texture to, causes lots of extra work by the engine to render it,
DCC- that had me stumped for a while They just mentioned DCC then talked about 3D Studio Max so I searched and the acronym did not easily reveal itself. Digital Content Creation program.
Collision Meshes- what irked me was that the teacher, spent most of his time in 3D Studio Max (which I don’t have) showing you how ito make a Collision Mesh in it, then says oh UE will makes these for you automatically and sends a fraction of the time there. It was not hard to understand, but needs more study. So the object moving around in a scene needs a collision mess and all of the things in the scene it could bump into require Collusion meshes.
LOD- Level of detail models this was very cool but I’ll have to study it a bit more. I’ve noticed this in games and it’s cool. The farther you get away from an object the less details it shows, but not only because it is farther away, but  because you should not make the engine display details that you can’t see, thst is not efficient and you want to reduce overhead. So the engine automatically loads, less resolution duplicate models with less polys to reduce the rendering work load. 
When building an actor/object, being aware of the number of polys you are creating.
More to come!


----------



## Huntn

MEJHarrison said:


> I did watch that video.  The whole thing.  It was cool.  I think I did a similar one once on Unity.  And it came out looking cool I think.  Not as cool as the tutorial, but it was an interesting exercise.  Nothing I think I could or would tackle on my own.  It just doesn't interest me.  If I was doing something that needed that level of graphics, I'd be looking for someone with those skills.
> 
> I've also watched enough Blender videos to know it's not for me.  It's not the tool.  I could learn to use the tool no problem.  It's just that once I'm proficient with the tool, I don't have the art skills to do anything with the tool.
> 
> I'm not an artistic person.  Never have been.  I like fooling around in ProCreate, but the best I'll ever do is copy someone else's work.  I accept that about myself.  I'm creative at times, just not artistic.
> 
> It's the same at work.  I can't design the website.  But I can take a design and get it on the page and make it do all the interesting things.



Actually, I don’t feel that I am that artistic either despite having  a BFA in Commercial Art and never working in the field.  I‘m not that creative, tending to want to emulate things I have seen, but despite this there are some things, I can imagine, immersive scenes that I would like to create. So do what interests you whatever that is. (I’m sure you have already decided this.) I basically walked away from a career in commercial art 40 years ago, partially because I knew this about myself, but also wanted to be a pilot, and still like to dabble, hence my recent discovered interest in UE. And I’ve  been exposed to a Grandson who wants to be a game designer. 

What  struck me about the Design the Forest Tutorial was that even though many aspects of it were above my level, placing  objects was rather simple. Bring them in and plop them down with an eye to distribution and emulating nature to some degree. The atmosphere the engine creates based on where you place some lighting seems to do the majority of work, as compared to hand painting a scene, yet one must understand what the capabilities and limits of the engine are which… I don’t really, not at this point.


----------



## Renzatic

I'm familiar with some of the terms above. A lot of them sound specific to UE, things I haven't had to deal with before, or go by a different name from what I'm used to (which happens quite a bit, actually). Here's the way I understand them...



Huntn said:


> Lightmaps- stuffing different graphical info in different channels (R,G,B) of a texture, definitely requires more study. I’m thinking this is along the lines of ”Master Materials”.




Lightmaps are simply the baked shadow and lighting information from your scene, usually performed on a per-object basis. Usually, this is handled by the engine itself, separate from your material stacks. Using RGB channels for a lightmap sounds like something you'd do if you're going for stylized lighting, not for a photorealistic scene.

What you're describing sounds more like channel packing to me, which is when you combine a number of images that make up a PBR material (normal, roughness, metallic, ambient occlusion, and height) into a single efficient image.

...I should watch the Intro to UE video myself to get a better idea of what you're talking about. 



> LightmapUVs- huh?




When you bake your lightmaps, the engine needs to know where to bake the light to on your object. That's where your Lightmap UV comes in, which is a 2nd UV channel on your model meant specifically to host lighting information.

Think of it kinda like layers in Photoshop, with UV 0 being your base color of your object, and UV 1, your lightmap, or the light colors, shadows, and whatnot painted on top of your base color.

And if you don't know what UVs are, well, that's a conversation in and of itself.



> Material Types in Actors- multiple material types means an object must be rendered for each material type, so this should be minimized.




What they probably mean here is that you need to have one material per object for maximum efficiency. Like, for example, if you have some object that's a mix of wood and metal, like a pistol, you'd be tempted to assign a metal material to the metal bits of your pistol, and a wood material to the grip. That would work, but it'd be inefficient, especially when you start stacking tons of objects in your scenes. It's better to have both the metal and the wood in the same material.



> Overdraw- when a texture map excessively exceeds the size and shape object that you are applying the texture to, causes lots of extra work by the engine to render it,




I think of overdraw as applying more to densely packed alpha mapped objects, like grass, tree leaves, particle effects, and whatnot. The engine has to calculate the alphas on each of these textures, what's in front of what, what's behind what, what can be seen through, what can't, and when they're all bunched together in a far more dense than it needs to be pile, the engine has to spend that much more time on it, hurting performance.



> DCC- that had me stumped for a while They just mentioned DCC then talked about 3D Studio Max so I searched and the acronym did not easily reveal itself. Digital Content Creation program.




I could've told you that. 

By the way, anything that can be done in Max, can also be done in Maya, or Blender, or Cinema4D, or what have you. They're all just polygon editors, doing basically the same things.



> Collision Meshes- what irked me was that the teacher, spent most of his time in 3D Studio Max (which I don’t have) showing you how ito make a Collision Mesh in it, then says oh UE will makes these for you automatically and sends a fraction of the time there. It was not hard to understand, but needs more study. So the object moving around in a scene needs a collision mess and all of the things in the scene it could bump into require Collusion meshes.




Yeah, more often than not, you can let UE just make a collision mesh for you. Though if you want to maximize efficiency, you can make your own collision meshes in your favorite DCC.

Think of something like, say, a gas pump. If UE generates the collision mesh, it'll be based off the original mesh, meaning that all the nooks and crannies in your object are gonna be considered when it's calculation collisions, which is great for something like a shooter, where you'll have lots of bulletholes peppering your objects, but if you just want to make a scene that people walk around in, a simple cube will suffice.



> LOD- Level of detail models this was very cool but I’ll have to study it a bit more. I’ve noticed this in games and it’s cool. The farther you get away from an object the less details it shows, but not only because it is farther away, but  because you should not make the engine display details that you can’t see, thst is not efficient and you want to reduce overhead. So the engine automatically loads, less resolution duplicate models with less polys to reduce the rendering work load.




Yup. LODs are great for expansive environments. The usual standard is to have 4 different models for your LOD levels. Your full on high poly object for level 1, levels 2 and 3 being reduced accordingly, and the 4th being a billboard, or a simple plane with a picture of your tree on it.



> When building an actor/object, being aware of the number of polys you are creating.




Yup. For game engines, you want to go as low as possible while still maintaining your looks and style. That in and of itself is something of an art.

Also, I'm not 100% sure what a master material is. That sounds like something UE specific.


----------



## MEJHarrison

Huntn said:


> Actually, I don’t feel that I am that artistic either despite having  a BFA in Commercial Art and never working in the field.





Renzatic said:


> The problem isn't that you're not artistic, it's that you haven't spent enough time goofing around, and cribbing from other people's work to say that you are.




The problem is interest.  It's not that I can't create something in Blender.  It's that I'm not interested.  Or not strongly interested is perhaps a better way of putting it.

My interest in that stuff is as a developer.  I have no desire to build models that look like chainsaws or trees or lumber.  But if you hand me those assets, I can make your character cut down the tree.  Those are the problems I enjoy solving.  I have no desire to build a 3D model of a barrel, but if your inventory items keep ending up attached to the barrel instead of the player, I'm your guy.

That said, I did walk through one of those "build a pretty world" tutorials.  Not because I have a strong desire to do more of that.  But just because I was curious about how it was done.  It was interesting, but not something I would normally enjoy doing with my spare time.


----------



## Huntn

MEJHarrison said:


> The problem is interest.  It's not that I can't create something in Blender.  It's that I'm not interested.  Or not strongly interested is perhaps a better way of putting it.
> 
> My interest in that stuff is as a developer.  I have no desire to build models that look like chainsaws or trees or lumber.  But if you hand me those assets, I can make your character cut down the tree.  Those are the problems I enjoy solving.  I have no desire to build a 3D model of a barrel, but if your inventory items keep ending up attached to the barrel instead of the player, I'm your guy.
> 
> That said, I did walk through one of those "build a pretty world" tutorials.  Not because I have a strong desire to do more of that.  But just because I was curious about how it was done.  It was interesting, but not something I would normally enjoy doing with my spare time.



Eventually my goal is to make a VR hidden grotto with a waterfall. Or a fancy tree house overlooking some fantastic scene.


----------



## Huntn

DT said:


> This was a super early experiment, I only have some static shots, I'll have to dig those up - it's Unity and I wrote an interface for the Facebook API that queried your photos and built a wall you could fly through.  The concept was to build all these 3D constructs, like a "City of Content" from your various social media sources, maybe use meta-data/tags for some kind of geographical-like organization.



Was there supposed to be visible images attached to this post? I can’t see them If so.


----------



## Huntn

Renzatic said:


> I'm familiar with some of the terms above. A lot of them sound specific to UE, things I haven't had to deal with before, or go by a different name from what I'm used to (which happens quite a bit, actually). Here's the way I understand them...
> 
> 
> 
> Lightmaps are simply the baked shadow and lighting information from your scene, usually performed on a per-object basis. Usually, this is handled by the engine itself, separate from your material stacks. Using RGB channels for a lightmap sounds like something you'd do if you're going for stylized lighting, not for a photorealistic scene.
> 
> What you're describing sounds more like channel packing to me, which is when you combine a number of images that make up a PBR material (normal, roughness, metallic, ambient occlusion, and height) into a single efficient image.
> 
> ...I should watch the Intro to UE video myself to get a better idea of what you're talking about.
> 
> 
> 
> When you bake your lightmaps, the engine needs to know where to bake the light to on your object. That's where your Lightmap UV comes in, which is a 2nd UV channel on your model meant specifically to host lighting information.
> 
> Think of it kinda like layers in Photoshop, with UV 0 being your base color of your object, and UV 1, your lightmap, or the light colors, shadows, and whatnot painted on top of your base color.
> 
> And if you don't know what UVs are, well, that's a conversation in and of itself.
> 
> 
> 
> What they probably mean here is that you need to have one material per object for maximum efficiency. Like, for example, if you have some object that's a mix of wood and metal, like a pistol, you'd be tempted to assign a metal material to the metal bits of your pistol, and a wood material to the grip. That would work, but it'd be inefficient, especially when you start stacking tons of objects in your scenes. It's better to have both the metal and the wood in the same material.
> 
> 
> 
> I think of overdraw as applying more to densely packed alpha mapped objects, like grass, tree leaves, particle effects, and whatnot. The engine has to calculate the alphas on each of these textures, what's in front of what, what's behind what, what can be seen through, what can't, and when they're all bunched together in a far more dense than it needs to be pile, the engine has to spend that much more time on it, hurting performance.
> 
> 
> 
> I could've told you that.
> 
> By the way, anything that can be done in Max, can also be done in Maya, or Blender, or Cinema4D, or what have you. They're all just polygon editors, doing basically the same things.
> 
> 
> 
> Yeah, more often than not, you can let UE just make a collision mesh for you. Though if you want to maximize efficiency, you can make your own collision meshes in your favorite DCC.
> 
> Think of something like, say, a gas pump. If UE generates the collision mesh, it'll be based off the original mesh, meaning that all the nooks and crannies in your object are gonna be considered when it's calculation collisions, which is great for something like a shooter, where you'll have lots of bulletholes peppering your objects, but if you just want to make a scene that people walk around in, a simple cube will suffice.
> 
> 
> 
> Yup. LODs are great for expansive environments. The usual standard is to have 4 different models for your LOD levels. Your full on high poly object for level 1, levels 2 and 3 being reduced accordingly, and the 4th being a billboard, or a simple plane with a picture of your tree on it.
> 
> 
> 
> Yup. For game engines, you want to go as low as possible while still maintaining your looks and style. That in and of itself is something of an art.
> 
> Also, I'm not 100% sure what a master material is. That sounds like something UE specific.



Master material from what I could tell has different textures in each channel like leaves in one channel, twigs in another channel, some color which was used to make the forest floor and I think its qualities can be altered, which may also be a “material instance”. I maybe confused some of this with the channels, as a light map or a master texture. The Forest tutorial  guy addresses it briefly when he is talking about the Forest floor texture. 

When you open one of these things (materials, material instances?)  in the editor you get something thst looks like this, a series of logic gates:


----------



## Renzatic

Huntn said:


> When you open one of these things (materials, material instances?) in the editor you get something thst looks like this, a series of logic gates:




The way I understand instances is that they're clones of a parent object, and the advantage of them is that they take up no more memory beyond what the initial object uses. You can scale, rotate, and translate them independently of the parent object, but you can't edit them directly. You can only edit the parent object, and when you do, whatever changes you've made are instantly updated on all the instances in your scene.

Like, say you're making a forest, and you have this one tree you want to use again, and again, and again. You make mutliple instances of this one tree, scatter them about, rotate them, scale them up and down for variety, and you'll have a nice, memory efficient forest. But if you suddenly decide that you don't like the way one branch is hanging off your trees, you can go back to the parent object, remove that branch, and suddenly none of the trees in your forest have that branch.

That's kind of the way he's describing these master textures and texture instances, but there must be something different about them, because all materials are instanced by default. If you have two or more objects sharing the same material, any change you make to one will be reflected in the other, unless you make them individual.

I'm missing something here, so I guess I'll watch the next part to see what more he says.

Also, that node tree you linked to above is a glass shader. It's using a fresnel effect, which is how the reflectivity of an object changes depending on the angle you're viewing it at. Like you see a puddle of water in the road. From a distance, it looks like it's reflecting the sky, but as you walk closer to it, it gets more and more transparent. When you're standing over it, there's almost no reflection.

Lerping is when you have parts of a material transitioning from one attribute to another based upon a set of variable, which in this case would be whether the camera is viewing the texture from the front, or from the side. In short, it's lerping back and forth between two reflectivity, opacity, and refractivity parameters depending upon your position relative to the glass material.


----------



## Renzatic

Okay, I think I got it.

In Unreal, you can have a master material, which would be something basic, like grey metal. You can make an instance of that grey metal, change some parameters to make it rougher or smoother, blue or green, or any other type of things you defined as a perimeter in the master material. In other words, you're making variations upon the same base.

I think it does this without using more memory than the source master texture resides in, hence calling them instances. That's pretty neat.


----------



## Huntn

Renzatic said:


> Okay, I think I got it.
> 
> In Unreal, you can have a master material, which would be something basic, like grey metal. You can make an instance of that grey metal, change some parameters to make it rougher or smoother, blue or green, or any other type of things you defined as a perimeter in the master material. In other words, you're making variations upon the same base.
> 
> I think it does this without using more memory than the source master texture resides in, hence calling them instances. That's pretty neat.



I find it neat because this appears to a a bit of programming a mini-program imbedded into UE that does something for the user with zero programming skills like… the entire engine.  But you can do things in C++, but that is way beyond me for now.

I started to do the Blender Complete Beginner’s Tutorial you linked and something inside me rebelled. i saw the little scene the guy was going to have me make and I was like, NO, don’t need this right now, got enough on my plate.  Not that it’s a bad tutorial, so I  started looking for  Blender,  working with grid videos and found a couple although I don’t know how in depth they are and I’ll start looking at your 2 recent posts that discuss Blender tools/commands for this grid I want to make and that Blender Top 5 Tool video. Hopefully this will be enough to get me through that grid part of the Forest scene before importing to UE.

Then since the guy talks about his UE Master Material, I’ll be looking at some tutorials on those too.

Step one is to get the grid done. Btw I asked a question about the grid over at forums unreal engine.com and someone there said there was a plug-in for UE that lets you make grids. Since I watched it done in Maya though, I’ll try to be a copy cat in Blender, and learn more about that later for UE.


----------



## Renzatic

Huntn said:


> Since I watched it done in Maya though, I’ll try to be a copy cat in Blender, and learn more about that later for UE.




I'll make you a video tomorrow. Because I don't have a mic, I'll have go through all the steps fairly slowly so you can follow along.

And no, it's not a problem. It shouldn't take me more than 5-10 minutes.


----------



## Huntn

Renzatic said:


> Dude, you're killing me! We used to have conversations! We used to be _FRIENDS!_
> 
> But anyway, HORRIBLE SLIGHT aside, if you want to hit the ground running as soon as possible, I'd watch this quick 7 minute video showing off the tools you'll be most using while modelling. I'd replace Grid Fill with the Inset tool, but, eh, it's still pretty good.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> But if you want to get a little more indepth with the basics, Grant Abbitt's series is solid for that.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Okay, I just realized I misread your quote.
> 
> Yes, I'm Renzatic over at Blenderartists too.



I watched part of the 5 Tools video and that was good, will finish it up tomorrow. The only thing is and I've seen this before, these guys don't tell you all of their settings, so I freeze the video, then look at their interface to make sure I'm matching them.  

Now this other video I watched had no talking just labels thrown up on the screen and the person made a sphere. I learned how to rotate it holding the MMB and using the keypad numbers, that's good, but then he oriented it at the top facing you with the NP7 key, then selected the vertex in the center of the sphere (top) and from this orientation the concentric circles with vertices,  I would call them latitudes, after selecting the top single vertex he flashed on the screen a way to select the top 3 latitudes with these key commands which don't make any sense to me: *Ctrl+ NP+x3 *as in Ctrl Key + Number Pad (number pad what?) and x3 (what ever that means unless you meant hold Ctrl +NP3, which did not work, that just rotated the sphere as I recall. He also said by " " that Ctrl+ NP + x5 would select the top 5 vertices, and then delta would erase them and the top of the sphere. Any ideas what keys this person was talking about? Note, if I manually selected the 5 top latititudes of the sphere, I could indeed erase them with Delete.
Thanks!


----------



## Renzatic

Huntn said:


> Now this other video I watched had no talking just labels thrown up on the screen and the person made a sphere. I learned how to rotate it holding the MMB and using the keypad numbers, that's good, but then he oriented it at the top facing you with the NP7 key, then selected the vertex in the center of the sphere (top) and from this orientation the concentric circles with vertices, I would call them latitudes, after selecting the top single vertex he flashed on the screen a way to select the top 3 latitudes with these key commands which don't make any sense to me: *Ctrl+ NP+x3 *as in Ctrl Key + Number Pad (number pad what?) and x3 (what ever that means unless you meant hold Ctrl +NP3, which did not work, that just rotated the sphere as I recall. He also said by " " that Ctrl+ NP + x5 would select the top 5 vertices, and then delta would erase them and the top of the sphere. Any ideas what keys this person was talking about? Note, if I manually selected the 5 top latititudes of the sphere, I could indeed erase them with Delete.
> Thanks!




If he's using the keypad numbers, then he's not rotating the sphere, he's orienting the view to the top of the sphere. If you don't want to use the numpad to rotate your view, you also hit the Tilde key to bring up a pie menu showing your orientation selections (which is what I do).

And he's hitting Ctrl+ Numpad Plus key, 3 times. That grows the selection out from your initially selected element. You can shrink it with Ctrl + Numpad Minus.


----------



## Huntn

Renzatic said:


> If he's using the keypad numbers, then he's not rotating the sphere, he's orienting the view to the top of the sphere. If you don't want to use the numpad to rotate your view, you also hit the Tilde key to bring up a pie menu showing your orientation selections (which is what I do).
> 
> And he's hitting Ctrl+ Numpad Plus key, 3 times. That grows the selection out from your initially selected element. You can shrink it with Ctrl + Numpad Minus.



That’s it! Thanks! When I started with the first Blender tutorial, I went though the Interface and typed up a hierarchal list of most of the settings and tools. This helpes me greatly, with familiarization, then as I learn about different controls and tools, I insert outline notes for the appropriate tool/control/setting. Otherwise I feel lost in a sea of settings.

Not to be argumentative but with the NP numbers, you can look at top, left, right, with the sphere makes it rotate around which is would properly called orientation, but for 3 of those keys something called relative perspective view pops up and if you hit any one of those specific keys multiple times repeatedly, it appears to make the sphere rotate in a direction a small number of degrees, either left or right or top to bottom. but maybe those are considered orientations too.


----------



## Renzatic

I rarely ever use the numpad for viewport switching. Though from what I remember...

1 - Front orthographic
2 - Rotates downwards
3 - Right orthographic
4 - Rotates left
5 - Switches between orthographic and perspective projections.
6 - Rotates Right
7 - Top orthographic
8 - Rotates upwards
9 - Rotates the view 180 degrees from your current position (you'll never use this).
0 - Switches between last view, and the camera.
.  - Focuses view on selected model/element.

If you're wondering what orthographic means, it's simply a way to view your your model without any depth projection, like an isometric drawing. Some people prefer to model using orthographic exclusively, but I prefer them just for the cardinal angles: left, right, top, bottom, front, and back. When I'm free rotating, I prefer the more natural looking perspective.


----------



## Renzatic

Okay, here's the video. I set the hotkey display to the center of the screen, and tried to go slow enough to be easy to follow along with. If you've got any questions, you know the drill.


----------



## Huntn

Renzatic said:


> Okay, here's the video. I set the hotkey display to the center of the screen, and tried to go slow enough to be easy to follow along with. If you've got any questions, you know the drill.



I‘ll check this out soon and  report back. Thanks so much!


----------



## Renzatic

Huntn said:


> I‘ll check this out soon and  report back. Thanks so much!




The one cardinal rule to all things 3D is to first make a lumpy representation of what you want, then add geometry to smoothen it up and add details.

I guess it's like any art in a way. No one just draws a full on face starting out. They always begin with putting down an oval, and blocking out the basic shapes before going all in on the fine details.


----------



## Huntn

Renzatic said:


> The one cardinal rule to all things 3D is to first make a lumpy representation of what you want, then add geometry to smoothen it up and add details.
> 
> I guess it's like any art in a way. No one just draws a full on face starting out. They always begin with putting down an oval, and blocking out the basic shapes before going all in on the fine details.



Based on traditional art that depends a little but I see what you are saying and agree. Painting landscapes frequently start as a outlines and shapes, then filling in details, building up textures.

What caught my attention in the Forest tutorial is that the author says it’s mostly about presentation. And when you look at the elements, while their placement requires some general rules as in what you might spect to see in nature, including some perspective decisions, such as he chose to place the largest trees far away, it appears simple to place them. And finally I had no clue just how non-complex the basic terrain shape grid was. However the master texture will require some study.

I remember first looking at this scene, regarding how complex it looked, and I would have never guessed that the terrain involve was so simple. Of course this does not mean I’ll be able to duplicate it, but that is what this is, duplicating to learn. Because natural settings is a significant area of which I am interested in creating. Hope I’m not too disappointed. 

One very cool aspect of digital art is lighting that can be controlled by a few settings changes where in a painting the entire painted surface, the artist must micromanage lighting, considering how light and atmospheric conditions effects the appearance  of every object in the scene. Yes there are lighting settings that regarding digital art may seem complex to master, but the work load is handled mostly by the engine, and the artist is just faced with knowing which settings to change and how.


----------



## Huntn

@Renzatic,
I've created my account at BlenderArtisits.org you can find me here (PhantomFlyer):








						Blender Newb Inquisition
					

Hi guys. I am new to Blender, learning it in conjunction with Unreal Engine, a newb there too. Anyway I am studying blender documentation, and have taken one of those quick version tutorials, and  have been researching, but some things are very easy to ask. 😄 So if you are interested in helping...




					blenderartists.org
				




I saw no way to PM you there, but maybe that is because I'm new there for security reasons....
I could not connect to TA forums this morning for over an hour....


----------



## Renzatic

Huntn said:


> @Renzatic,
> I've created my account at BlenderArtisits.org you can find me here (PhantomFlyer):
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Blender Newb Inquisition
> 
> 
> Hi guys. I am new to Blender, learning it in conjunction with Unreal Engine, a newb there too. Anyway I am studying blender documentation, and have taken one of those quick version tutorials, and  have been researching, but some things are very easy to ask. 😄 So if you are interested in helping...
> 
> 
> 
> 
> blenderartists.org
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> I saw no way to PM you there, but maybe that is because I'm new there for security reasons....
> I could not connect to TA forums this morning for over an hour....




I just saw that, and was coming over here to ask if that were you.


----------



## Huntn

Renzatic said:


> I just saw that, and was coming over here to ask if that were you.



I’m back for a while until my next episode of not being able to connect To TA. 

Thanks for putting up with me at blenderartists. At first it was like a crawl and not knowing which tool the author of the Forest video was using, and then suddenly it was coming together, but then I was getting funky distortion results because I had multiple meshes superimposed on one another, which you figured out, thanks!  and that shadow shading tool was the  on the project.

Most/all of the distortion of the mesh  was a combination of grabbing faces, edge, vertex, combinations, and pulling them one way or another.

Suddenly the project went from flailing to finished so I can get back to Unreal Engine, and I’m still working on the last 5 sections of the Unreal tutorial,  but I will do the Blender tutorial because I can see that in my future for these type projects. I hesitated  at the time on that suggestion because I did not want to get overloaded learning two systems at once. And once I got used to just a couple of Blender, tools, loop, move, scale, and duplicate it was easy to reproduce (several times) the basic mesh shape I needed to import into UE.

On Thursday I have a colonoscopy (fun) with   propofol, the drug that makes being knocked out tolerable, almost fun.  Then Friday, we hit the road from Houston to Minneapolis to deposit our Grandson who has been living with us for the last year, back to his home town. He’s a good kid, but it will be a burden lifted.


----------



## Renzatic

Huntn said:


> Thanks for putting up with me at blenderartists. At first it was like a crawl and not knowing which tool the author of the Forest video was using, and then suddenly it was coming together, but then I was getting funky distortion results because I had multiple meshes superimposed on one another, which you figured out, thanks!  and that shadow shading tool was the  on the project.




Don't worry, I wasn't getting frustrated with you over there. I was pressed for time, and it was difficult figuring out what your problem was by description alone. Once you posted that screenshot, I knew what you meant by "double lines", and was able to drill down on helping you fix it.

And by the way, you don't have to use your iPhone to take pictures of your screen. Just hit Win+printscreen, and it'll pop a shot into your pictures folder. That'll probably save you some time,


----------



## Huntn

Renzatic said:


> Don't worry, I wasn't getting frustrated with you over there. I was pressed for time, and it was difficult figuring out what your problem was by description alone. Once you posted that screenshot, I knew what you meant by "double lines", and was able to drill down on helping you fix it.
> 
> And by the way, you don't have to use your iPhone to take pictures of your screen. Just hit Win+printscreen, and it'll pop a shot into your pictures folder. That'll probably save you some time,



I’m not that used to Windows, I tried to use the Blender SS function, but that did not work. Before this it was only for gaming, and it bothers me a bit that I’m not doing this stuff on my Mac, but the Windows machine as configured  is clearly the more powerful machine. Although for this trip to the Twin Cities I have loaded both UE and Blender on my 2016 MBP and will continue with my tutorials. 

As far as the Forest Project, next I have to learn about materials/master materials in UE.

Of interest, as far as saving time, since all of my comms are via Mac/iOS, a pic on my phone is actually the fastest method of transfer from Windows.


----------



## Renzatic

Huntn said:


> As far as the Forest Project, I have to learn about materials/master materials in UE.




The nice thing is that materials are a lot easier to figure out that raw geometry manipulation. Once you learn what your various textures do, it's all just a matter of stringing them all together.


----------



## Huntn

Renzatic said:


> The nice thing is that materials are a lot easier to figure out that raw geometry manipulation. Once you learn what your various textures do, it's all just a matter of stringing them all together.



3 sections on materials including instances, and master materials, did the first section, 2 more to go, I’ll post my notes for the scoop,


----------



## Renzatic

Huntn said:


> 3 sections on materials including instances, and master materials, did the first section, 2 more to go, I’ll post my notes for the scoop,




Hey, figured this would probably interest you. It isn't too expensive, either.


----------



## Huntn

Renzatic said:


> Hey, figured this would probably interest you. It isn't too expensive, either.



Thanks! 
I maybe just a little pissed, although not a huge trajedy , I bought an inexpensive starter plant pack, in the Epic Market Place for $5, but it might not be compatible with UE 4.7 (4.6 and earlier), I need to check it again. There were a bunch of free things I added to my library and after the fact, discovered they were not 4.7 compatible. 

In my ignorance I would think that a mesh created by UE 4.6 would be able to be exported to a newer version of the engine, cause it’s just a mesh which is fundamentally the same, but maybe not… the newer engine might not be compatible, maybe you‘d need a conversion program.


----------



## Renzatic

Huntn said:


> In my ignorance I would think that a mesh created by UE 4.6 would be able to be exported to a newer version of the engine, cause it’s just a mesh which is fundamentally the same, but maybe not… the newer engine might not be compatible, maybe you‘d need a conversion program.




That might be due to some random difference in versions that effects animations, shaders, or what have you. If you can export the raw mesh and textures out, you might be able to fix it in Blender, then bring it back in.


----------



## Renzatic

Hey, Huntn! You might want to look at this. Epic is having a big giveaway for education week. Gotta grab it by Nov. 1st though.









						Join us for Education Week 2021!
					

See the full schedule for Education Week 2021. Career and portfolio tips, project breakdowns, special livestreams, educator interviews, and more.




					www.unrealengine.com


----------



## Huntn

Renzatic said:


> Hey, Huntn! You might want to look at this. Epic is having a big giveaway for education week. Gotta grab it by Nov. 1st though.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Join us for Education Week 2021!
> 
> 
> See the full schedule for Education Week 2021. Career and portfolio tips, project breakdowns, special livestreams, educator interviews, and more.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> www.unrealengine.com



I’m learning about master materials…still. Only studied one evening on this trip so far. It’s funny how travel and visiting friends can screw up your habit patterns. 

Most of the free stuff seems to be educator materials, but I will take a closer look at them before the first. Thanks for the heads up.


----------



## Renzatic

I watched this, and thought you might be interested in this too. It's exclusively Blender, but as you should be learning by now, anything you learn in one is more or less directly transferable to the other.


----------



## Huntn

Renzatic said:


> I watched this, and thought you might be interested in this too. It's exclusively Blender, but as you should be learning by now, anything you learn in one is more or less directly transferable to the other.



My studies have been radically reduced with this week away from home. I have learned how to make a master material, notes forthcoming for your curiosity. We should be home on Sunday evening.  Yes Blender will be part of this future.

I had a bazaar dream last night, I was taking notes and I was looking at a form that took up my entire field of  view (in the dream) and when I would make a note, it was acting like a program that would add comments, references and cross references. And in this dream, I was puzzled, as to how this program was working trying to figure it out. I’m confident this is a direct result of my graphic studies, but it won’t stop me. 

As long as I worked in aviation as a pilot and got into intense study regimes I would end up dreaming about procedures and what would drive me crazy is that the procedures I dreamed were always wrong so it was really not reinforcing what I was really studying.

I also hated manuals which were typically verbose. I always created my own outline format manual with just the facts I needed to review,  which is especially important when watching a video that has no written reference.


----------



## Renzatic

Huntn said:


> I had a bazaar dream last night, I was taking notes and I was looking at a form that took up my entire field of view (in the dream) and when I would make a note, it was acting like a program that would add comments, references and cross references. And in this dream, I was puzzled, as to how this program was working trying to figure it out. I’m confident this is a direct result of my graphic studies, but it won’t stop me.




I have dreams somewhat like that too when I'm trying to figure something out. I'll tediously pick at some random thing, never quite getting it, and eventually bore myself awake. 

Though those dreams must be good for something, because I usually have my moments of inspiration when I first wake up in the morning.


----------



## Huntn

From the UE Tutorial making a Master Environmental Material:

*Master Material Concepts*

*•    Material Functions:*
•    Allow you to share and re-use parts of your Material Graph.
•    Allow you to share material code to lessen the burden of maintenance, in case. wide global changes are required.
•    UE4 has a lot of material functions built in, determine where object is  in world or where screen coordinates for your mouse are located.
•    Many material functions you may already be using and not realize it.
•    *Pertinent-* If making or recreating a certain piece of code like tiling the texture in both the X and Y axis, it is advantageous to take that code and put it into a material function and share that through your material library, so if ever need to make adjusting to that specific tiling, would only have to adjust the material function, instead of opening every material you have to make tiling adjustment there.

*Create a Master Material* by creating a new material and into this:

•    Add a Color.
•    Add a Texture.
•    Add a Metal Component.
•    Add a roughness component by using the same texture.
•    Add Normal Map (texture).
•    Apply and Save

​


Spoiler: Master Material Verbose



*Create Master Environment Material (Material Instance?) for Environment Objects*

•    In UE, author creates a new Level, and in Master Material Folder, RC to create New Material, labels Mat_Env_Master and DCs to open it.
•    *Step 2: Add Color, create Vector Parameter (Yellow box)  Node.*
•    RC in Material Editor and choose or type in “Vec”, choose vector parameter and name it *Base_Color* and adds it to group BaseColor.
•    Connect Node to Master Material List box to right.
•    *Set Color values* as R= .5, G=.5, B=.5, A= .0 to put some white in there.

•    *Add Texture from the Content browser*- and place it inside the Material with the T key, make it a texture object.
•    *Place Texture in Material Editor- Select texture-* T_Brick_Clay_ New, *hold T,* then click in Material Editor to place it as a texture sample. If at this point, you connect it to “Base Color” on the material menu, but can’t be used as a material instance, because the texture sample can’t be adjusted.  It must be turned into a parameter first. (This step is undone.)
•    *Turn texture into a parameter (Blue Box)- *RC on Texture, and from the menu select *Convert to Parameter*.
•    *Under Details*, you’ll now see both a Parameter Name (name Base_Color_Texture)  and Group: BaseColor.


•    *Create Static Switch (Green box) -*to get the ability to change back and forth between a basic color or a texture inside the material instance.
•    Disconnect the connection between the texture and the material menu panel.
•    RC in the Material editor and in the search field type “switch” and pick *StaticSwitchParameter*.
•    At this point all 3 boxes should be disconnected from each other.

•    *Under Details: *
*•    Material Expression Static Bool Expression- * Default Box checked.
•    General: Parameter Name: bUseBaseColorTex- This name is to decipher what you are doing, enabling the texture that you previously labeled base color texture.
•    General: Group: BaseColor.
•    So with Default checked, the base color will be used, and if unchecked (false value), the base texture will be used.

•    *Adds Metal Component- *Set Up Master Material for Metal
*•    *Based on last example, going to add a metallic component by adding a constant, converting it into a parameter, and set it up to be a Metallic input.
•    Hold 1 in Material Editor and LC to create Constant?
•    RC and convert into parameter.
•    *Details Note:* Metallic by default has a value of 0 or 1, either on or off.
*•    Details:* Parameter: Metallic, Group: Metallic.
•    *Details: *Material Expression Scalar Parameter: Default 0.0, Min Slider 0.0, Max Slider 1.0.
•    Author makes a comment that the max value of 1.0 is set so the artist does not accidentally push the metallic value above 1, but says nothing is going to happen if he does? 






*•    Add Roughness Component- Creating a Master Material: Set Up Roughness*
*•    *Add Roughness to Master Material and set up so that roughness is controlled by turning the values of roughness up or down using a *Lerp Parameter* (?), described as a poor man’s levels.
*•    Create Texture Sample in Material Editor- *Drag material into Material Editor- In UE grab texture T_Brick_Clay_ New, and pulls it into the Material Editor, where it appears as a box with a “texture sample” label. 
*•    Set up Roughness Mask-*that is packed into the R, G, or B channels of the material.
*•    Details: *Material Expression Texture Base: Sampler Type:  Masks.
*•    Create a Mask Parameter: *On the Texture Sample (previously created) not sure if author clicked on UV label to create a white line connector or RC on the triangle (pull down menu) of the Label to create a Mask Parameter which will allow us to select the R, G, or B channels of Texture Sample.
*•    Detail: *Parameter Name: RoughnessMasks; Group: Roughness.

*•    Change Texture Sample to a parameter: *RC on it and select “Convert to Parameter”.
*•    Details:General:* Parameter Name: RoughnessTexure; Group: Roughness.
*•    Create Lerp Parameter:*Hold “L” and click in Material Editor to create Lerp parameter.
*•    *Take the output of Mask Parameter and drag it to the Lerp Alpha Channel.


*•    Create 2 Scalar Parameters:*Hold 1 and click in Material Editor to create 2 Scalar Nodes.
*•    *Select both RC on them and Convert to Parameters.
*•    First (Top) Scalar Parameter*
*•    Details:General:* Parameter Name: Roughness_Low; Group: Roughness.
*•    Details: *Material Expression Scalar Parameter: Default 0.0, Min Slider 0.0001, Max Slider 1.0. *Note* author states Default value of 1 but leaves it at 0, so not sure which is the correct value.

*•    Second (Bottom) Scalar Parameter*
*•    Details:General:* Parameter Name: Roughness_High; Group: Roughness.
*•    Details: *Material Expression Scalar Parameter: Default 0.5, Min Slider 0.0001, Max Slider 1.0.
*•    *Connect to Lerp B Value.

*•    Connect Scalars to Lerp and Lerp to Roughness on Material Menu*
*•    *Connect Roughness_Low Scalar Parameter to Lerp value A.
*•    *Connect Roughness_High Scalar Parameter to Lerp value B.
*•    *Connect Lerp Parameter to Material Menu: Roughnesss.



*•    Add Normal Map (texture)*
*•    Note:* This is a different texture than used before.
•    *Place Texture in Material Editor- Select texture-* T_Brick_Clay_ Norm, *hold T,* then click in Material Editor to place it as a texture sample.
•    *Details: *Material Expression Texture Base: Sampler Type:  Normal.
•    RC and Convert to Parameter.
•    *Details:General:* Parameter Name: Normal_Map; Group: Normal.

•    *Apply and Save-* At the top of the Material Editor select “Apply” and then “Save” now it can be used. This is ready to be used in a *Material Instance*.


----------



## Renzatic

Personal opinion? If you really want to grasp materials easily, it might be best to start out with the barest basics of the PBR texture stack before delving in to the deep end of the shader pool.

Diffuse/Albedo - The colors of your surface, devoid of any shadow or highlight information

Metallic - What surfaces on your texture are metal, and what aren't. For photorealistic results, this should be treated as a binary value: if it's metal, it's white, if it's not a metal, it's black. You can play around with shades of grey for some extra style and taste though.

Roughness - In simplest terms, it's what's shiny on your texture, and what isn't. Think of a Pool ball fresh out of the box with nary a scratch or a fingerprint on it. It's very shiny, right? In PBR texturing terms, it's smooth. A full black roughness map. Now, say you take an X-acto knife to this Pool ball, and start scratching away at this shiny surface. It starts becoming less and less shiny the more you scratch it. You're adding roughness to the surface of this pool ball, which would be translated into little cuts of lighter grey on your roughness map. The more towards white it is, the rougher it becomes.

Normal - So what's a normal in 3D terms? Okay, think of a quad, a square with 4 vertex points at each corner, all connected by edges that, when enclosed, make up a face. Now which direction is this face pointing? That's your normal.

Since a picture is worth a thousand words, here's a shot of a quad, with the little light blue line representing the surface normal.





So what's a normal map good for? Well, say your texture has a bunch of little pebbles on it. They're bumpy, so they should be picked up by the lights, and cast shadows and highlights, right? Thing is, there's no information on your texture for the light rays to bounce off of. As far as they're concerned, your texture is perfectly flat.

You could add in some polygon rocks in there to break up the light, and make things look more realistic. But these are tiny details. There's no reason to waste millions of polygons on something that small. So what do you do? You can take the normal information from a surface, and bake it to a texture, giving your renderer something to work with.

And since pictures will be worth a million words in this situation, here's a shot of a basic cylinder with a normal map baked from a high poly source. There's no extra geometry added to the cylinder, but it's catching the light much like the high poly rope does.





This is what your normal maps are for.

Height - Somewhat similar to a normal map, but instead of baking curvature and angle, it's baking height. You won't be using these often starting out, but they're great for displacements, or adding actual 3D depth to an otherwise flat object through shader trickery, like parallax occlusion maps.

Ambient Occlusion - A map of the shadows in your crevices, places where light usually doesn't quite reach, leaving it in slight shadows. In the shot above, you can see the AO in the places where the braids of the ropes meet on both the real geometry, and normalmapped cylinder. You'll usually be combining these with your diffuse, strengthening or weakening their effect based upon your personal tastes. They can also be used to create masks for adding things like rust, dirt, or dust into the cracks and crevices on your objects when making smart materials.

Emission - This one's easy. You have a texture with a glowy bit on it? Make them actually glow with emission maps! When baking light information, they'll make your texture act as their own light source based upon the emission.

Now these are the basic parts of a material. Once you know how all of these play together, you can start building more complex shaders more easily.


----------



## thekev

Renzatic said:


> To me, renting software is like renting tools. Yeah, I could probably save a bit of money in the long run renting them, but I'd rather just spend the money, and always have them on-hand for everything from big projects, to little incidental tweaks.
> 
> Take Photoshop for example. An old license for it used to cost, what, $400 or so? Paying $20 a month is easier to stomach in the short term, but what if all I want to do is open up and convert old .psd file? I'd have to pay $20 for a month just to do that.
> 
> My use case with Photoshop was that I'd use it heavily for awhile, then not need it that much for awhile after, just for the occasional thing. Having to sign up and cancel, sign up and cancel, sign up and cancel for those moments when I do have a need for it is just kind of a pain in the ass. Spending $400 up front, then always having it around thereafter is far preferable.




Photoshop was more expensive for a full license, more like $700. Upgrades were only around $200 for 2 - 3 versions back (think they changed from 3 to 2 back at some point). Some third party retailers would sell upgrades for about 10% less than Adobe charged directly. Basically if you had an initial license, it was cheaper to maintain than the current model without adjusting for inflation.


----------



## Huntn

Renzatic said:


> Personal opinion? If you really want to grasp materials easily, it might be best to start out with the barest basics of the PBR texture stack before delving in to the deep end of the shader pool.
> 
> Diffuse/Albedo - The colors of your surface, devoid of any shadow or highlight information
> 
> Metallic - What surfaces on your texture are metal, and what aren't. For photorealistic results, this should be treated as a binary value: if it's metal, it's white, if it's not a metal, it's black. You can play around with shades of grey for some extra style and taste though.
> 
> Roughness - In simplest terms, it's what's shiny on your texture, and what isn't. Think of a Pool ball fresh out of the box with nary a scratch or a fingerprint on it. It's very shiny, right? In PBR texturing terms, it's smooth. A full black roughness map. Now, say you take an X-acto knife to this Pool ball, and start scratching away at this shiny surface. It starts becoming less and less shiny the more you scratch it. You're adding roughness to the surface of this pool ball, which would be translated into little cuts of lighter grey on your roughness map. The more towards white it is, the rougher it becomes.
> 
> Normal - So what's a normal in 3D terms? Okay, think of a quad, a square with 4 vertex points at each corner, all connected by edges that, when enclosed, make up a face. Now which direction is this face pointing? That's your normal.
> 
> Since a picture is worth a thousand words, here's a shot of a quad, with the little light blue line representing the surface normal.
> 
> View attachment 9483
> 
> So what's a normal map good for? Well, say your texture has a bunch of little pebbles on it. They're bumpy, so they should be picked up by the lights, and cast shadows and highlights, right? Thing is, there's no information on your texture for the light rays to bounce off of. As far as they're concerned, your texture is perfectly flat.
> 
> You could add in some polygon rocks in there to break up the light, and make things look more realistic. But these are tiny details. There's no reason to waste millions of polygons on something that small. So what do you do? You can take the normal information from a surface, and bake it to a texture, giving your renderer something to work with.
> 
> And since pictures will be worth a million words in this situation, here's a shot of a basic cylinder with a normal map baked from a high poly source. There's no extra geometry added to the cylinder, but it's catching the light much like the high poly rope does.
> 
> View attachment 9484
> 
> This is what your normal maps are for.
> 
> Height - Somewhat similar to a normal map, but instead of baking curvature and angle, it's baking height. You won't be using these often starting out, but they're great for displacements, or adding actual 3D depth to an otherwise flat object through shader trickery, like parallax occlusion maps.
> 
> Ambient Occlusion - A map of the shadows in your crevices, places where light usually doesn't quite reach, leaving it in slight shadows. In the shot above, you can see the AO in the places where the braids of the ropes meet on both the real geometry, and normalmapped cylinder. You'll usually be combining these with your diffuse, strengthening or weakening their effect based upon your personal tastes. They can also be used to create masks for adding things like rust, dirt, or dust into the cracks and crevices on your objects when making smart materials.
> 
> Emission - This one's easy. You have a texture with a glowy bit on it? Make them actually glow with emission maps! When baking light information, they'll make your texture act as their own light source based upon the emission.
> 
> Now these are the basic parts of a material. Once you know how all of these play together, you can start building more complex shaders more easily.



Thanks for your perspective on these definitions! I’m mostly focused on understanding just what I need to know for my first project, duplicating the Forest road. That’s not a hint and I appreciate your perspective. 

What is kind of funny is that the author of the Forest scene tutorial, throws up this insanely complicated master material and describes it as _routine stuff,_ minus a complete explanation because it’s s so basic how could a novice not understand it? 



So I am evaluating what I need to know to create some minimally passible master material to duplicate the Forest floor, which also includes vector painting.

The main problem with the UE Intro tutorial, is that while they show you step by step  how to set up a master material, it’s completely divorced from showing you how this relates to a project And shows how it works. Now maybe, I’m just not to the point where the author says _now that we built this master material, now here is how to use it in a  project. _

Today,  I have been studying an excellent tutorial on vector painting in what looks like to me to be a master material, but maybe it’s not.  What you said at the beginning of you post coincided with some of the info provided in the following link, where roughness is described, along with diffused and normal maps, where the diffused equates to a basic color and normal equates to details.







 Next I’m looking for info on Height Lerps. This if I understand it, where texture is applied to another based on the height of the bumps in the texture Where it is being applied.


PS, probably not going to get home till Monday.


----------



## Renzatic

Huntn said:


> ...minus a complete explanation because it’s s so basic how could a novice not understand it?




Well, yeah! I mean, comeon! It's _right there!_

From what it looks like from far away, he's creating a master material for all the bits and pieces he'll need for a forest floor. The dirt, leaves, and grass, all blended together using Red, Green, and Blue vertex colors, alongside some transitional effects at the edges for extra blending beyond what you'd get from the vertex paint.

I can't tell you EXACTLY what's he doing, because Blender and Unreal are similar enough that you can get the jist of what's going on by looking at it, different enough that you have to learn different nodes to perform the same actions. The beat's the same, but the melody's a little different.

Now, lerps seem sorta complicated at first, but they're actually the easiest things in the world. Lerp is short for Linear Interpolation. It's a straightforward gradient from 0 (black) to 1 (white), and all the numbers between that 0 and 1, such as 0.357 or 0.81, are the shades of the grey between the black and white. Lerps are put in place to take you from an arbitrarily defined 0, to another defined 1 based upon some set parimeters. In short, it creates a transition.

As far as height maps go, you could use lerps for a number of things, most of which blend two textures together. Like say you want to fill the cracks of a brick texture with sand, with the bricks being various different heights. You have two materials, your bricks on top, and your sand on the bottom. You combine them together on a lerp node, then apply a parameter to control the contrast, mixing them together.

If your lerp contrast is a perfect grey between black and white, or 0.5 in computer terms, then all the parts of the brick texture's heightmap that are below 0.5 will be filled with the sand material, leaving the bricks that are above 0.5 exposed and unsanded.

...I feel like I've forgotten to address something, so if you've got more questions, feel free to ask.


----------



## Huntn

Renzatic said:


> Well, yeah! I mean, comeon! It's _right there!_
> 
> From what it looks like from far away, he's creating a master material for all the bits and pieces he'll need for a forest floor. The dirt, leaves, and grass, all blended together using Red, Green, and Blue vertex colors, alongside some transitional effects at the edges for extra blending beyond what you'd get from the vertex paint.
> 
> I can't tell you EXACTLY what's he doing, because Blender and Unreal are similar enough that you can get the jist of what's going on by looking at it, different enough that you have to learn different nodes to perform the same actions. The beat's the same, but the melody's a little different.
> 
> Now, lerps seem sorta complicated at first, but they're actually the easiest things in the world. Lerp is short for Linear Interpolation. It's a straightforward gradient from 0 (black) to 1 (white), and all the numbers between that 0 and 1, such as 0.357 or 0.81, are the shades of the grey between the black and white. Lerps are put in place to take you from an arbitrarily defined 0, to another defined 1 based upon some set parimeters. In short, it creates a transition.
> 
> As far as height maps go, you could use lerps for a number of things, most of which blend two textures together. Like say you want to fill the cracks of a brick texture with sand, with the bricks being various different heights. You have two materials, your bricks on top, and your sand on the bottom. You combine them together on a lerp node, then apply a parameter to control the contrast, mixing them together.
> 
> If your lerp contrast is a perfect grey between black and white, or 0.5 in computer terms, then all the parts of the brick texture's heightmap that are below 0.5 will be filled with the sand material, leaving the bricks that are above 0.5 exposed and unsanded.
> 
> ...I feel like I've forgotten to address something, so if you've got more questions, feel free to ask.



You are always helpful! 

Because I’ve chosen what I would describe as an advanced project to become enamored with, I am being exposed to many advanced concepts. Which is not necessarily bad, I’m not feeling overwhelmed, and when I look at an unpacked material there is a lot of nodes all connected, but it does not seem overly complicated. Mostly it’s just being familiar with what a node does (easy), and how it functionally works (just a matter of looking at examples, tutorials).

I linked to a vertex painting tutorial which is easy to digest.
I’m looking at channel packing because UE limits you to 16 texture maps but you might feel squeezed. I obviously need some XP before I can judge this.

The bad thing about the UE tutorial is they spend a lot of time setting things up, but very little showing how something like a master material is used, after it is set up.













						Guide: Texture Optimisation - Channel Packing
					

Basic info: Why?   As You might know regular color image is in fact made of 3 separate grayscale images that correspond to one of three colors Red, Green, Blue. That are displayed on top of each other to give human eye illusion of color. Each grayscale image is called channel.     Additional...




					blenderartists.org
				






			https://help.poliigon.com/en/articles/1712652-what-are-the-different-texture-maps-for
		


What I’m not clear on about height/displacement maps when it comes to blending because I think the Forest Scene Tutorial man may have used a texture height map, and what I’m not sure about is if the average person has the ability to create a displacement map, or if you just search around online for a material that includes a displacement map?

We are getting ready to drive from Broken Arrow, Ok back to Houston, and this week, I anticipate, I will start messing with the Forest floor textures and vertex painting to see if a displacement map is really needed to get a nice effect for the floor. There are places online, including UE Marketplace that has free textures, so I need to open them up and see what is there, such as a displacement map and then figure out if it was used in the Forest scene (rewatch the video) and what is actually required to make a nice floor texture For my purposes.

Be back soon!


----------



## Renzatic

Huntn said:


> Because I’ve chosen what I would describe as an advanced project to become enamored with, I am being exposed to many advanced concepts. Which is not necessarily bad, I’m not feeling overwhelmed, and when I look at an unpacked material there is a lot of nodes all connected, but it does not seem overly complicated. Mostly it’s just being familiar with what a node does (easy), and how it functionally works (just a matter of looking at examples, tutorials).




Nodes really aren't that complicated, though they can be busy. You look at some of these node trees, see all those crisscrossing noodles, and think it's doing some weird, arcane thing, but really, it's all just simple actions performed step by step by step.



Huntn said:


> I linked to a vertex painting tutorial which is easy to digest.
> I’m looking at channel packing because UE limits you to 16 texture maps but you might feel squeezed. I obviously need some XP before I can judge this.




Just so you know, that's 16 texture maps per material, not in an entire scene. UE is only limited by the amount of system and GPU memory you have available.

16 textures would roughly equate to 4 full materials, and you could probably double or triple that through channel packing. Though keep in mind that you have something of a hard limit if you go the vertex painting route, since you can only use red, green, or blue channels to blend your textures together. If you try to get clever by throwing in a 4th material, thinking you can separate RGB then recombine, say, R and B to get a texture on purple, it'll default back to your original materials, giving you a 50/50 mix of your base red and blue textures.

And remember, not everything HAS to be on a single master material. You can mix and match accordingly.



> The bad thing about the UE tutorial is they spend a lot of time setting things up, but very little showing how something like a master material is used, after it is set up.




The way I see it, master materials are there for anything you need a tweakable amount of variety from to prevent repetition. Like for your forest floor, you could just use two basic materials for it, dirt and grass, and assign them to different faces on your mesh. That'd look like crap though. A master material lets you blend these materials together onto a single mesh through a single material. You can have your dirt and grass textures, and also a pebble texture to break up the monotony. Then you can smear them together with vertex colors, creating transitions, or little blotches of dirt amidst your grass to make things look more naturally random.

Or say you're making a hallway for an old Victorian style hotel. You could slap a single plaster texture down for the whole thing, but what if you want variety? You could combine three textures, a smooth plaster, cracked plaster, and broken up plaster onto a single master material, then mask between the three on your vertex colors to get more variety.

There's a lot of stuff you can do with them.



> What I’m not clear on about height/displacement maps when it comes to blending because I think the Forest Scene Tutorial man may have used a texture height map, and what I’m not sure about is if the average person has the ability to create a displacement map, or if you just search around online for a material that includes a displacement map?
> 
> We are getting ready to drive from Broken Arrow, Ok back to Houston, and this week, I anticipate, I will start messing with the Forest floor textures and vertex painting to see if a displacement map is really needed to get a nice effect for the floor. There are places online, including UE Marketplace that has free textures, so I need to open them up and see what is there, such as a displacement map and then figure out if it was used in the Forest scene (rewatch the video) and what is actually required to make a nice floor texture For my purposes.




You can make your own heightmaps, but it can be tedious to do. One way to do it would be to apply your texture to a heavily subdivided plane, sculpt in your height details, then bake that out to a texture. 

There's also a cool free program that can generate roughness, height, and normal maps from a single image, though hell if I can remember the name of it at the moment.

Plus, there are tons of sites out there that offer royalty free materials. AmbientCG.com is one I sometimes hit up. https://polyhaven.com/textures is another good one. 

...but hey, as an Unreal Engine user, you have access to the entire Megascan library for free, so use those.


----------



## Huntn

Renzatic said:


> Nodes really aren't that complicated, though they can be busy. You look at some of these node trees, see all those crisscrossing noodles, and think it's doing some weird, arcane thing, but really, it's all just simple actions performed step by step by step.
> 
> 
> 
> Just so you know, that's 16 texture maps per material, not in an entire scene. UE is only limited by the amount of system and GPU memory you have available.
> 
> 16 textures would roughly equate to 4 full materials, and you could probably double or triple that through channel packing. Though keep in mind that you have something of a hard limit if you go the vertex painting route, since you can only use red, green, or blue channels to blend your textures together. If you try to get clever by throwing in a 4th material, thinking you can separate RGB then recombine, say, R and B to get a texture on purple, it'll default back to your original materials, giving you a 50/50 mix of your base red and blue textures.
> 
> And remember, not everything HAS to be on a single master material. You can mix and match accordingly.
> 
> 
> 
> The way I see it, master materials are there for anything you need a tweakable amount of variety from to prevent repetition. Like for your forest floor, you could just use two basic materials for it, dirt and grass, and assign them to different faces on your mesh. That'd look like crap though. A master material lets you blend these materials together onto a single mesh through a single material. You can have your dirt and grass textures, and also a pebble texture to break up the monotony. Then you can smear them together with vertex colors, creating transitions, or little blotches of dirt amidst your grass to make things look more naturally random.
> 
> Or say you're making a hallway for an old Victorian style hotel. You could slap a single plaster texture down for the whole thing, but what if you want variety? You could combine three textures, a smooth plaster, cracked plaster, and broken up plaster onto a single master material, then mask between the three on your vertex colors to get more variety.
> 
> There's a lot of stuff you can do with them.
> 
> 
> 
> You can make your own heightmaps, but it can be tedious to do. One way to do it would be to apply your texture to a heavily subdivided plane, sculpt in your height details, then bake that out to a texture.
> 
> There's also a cool free program that can generate roughness, height, and normal maps from a single image, though hell if I can remember the name of it at the moment.
> 
> Plus, there are tons of sites out there that offer royalty free materials. AmbientCG.com is one I sometimes hit up. https://polyhaven.com/textures is another good one.
> 
> ...but hey, as an Unreal Engine user, you have access to the entire Megascan library for free, so use those.



Just got in from Broken Arrow.

I looked through the comments in the Forest Scene tutorial and apparantly the author placed a file of the master material he used In the description. It’s the second file I think. Someone said to just copy paste it into a grid or a graph , whatever that means. Others complained that it needs to be connected to textures to work. I realize that I’d love to have this material while acknowledging I would not understand what is going on now, but might in the future. Any clue how to convert this second link into a master material?








			https://pastebin.com/vdxBbUUS


----------



## Renzatic

Let me install UE right fast. It's a pain in the ass doing so on Linux, because Epic, for reasons entirely unknown, don't provide a nice little executable to install it like everyone else does for their engines. They make you compile the damn thing from source, cuz they're a bunch of buttholes.

Gimme a few.


----------



## Renzatic

Here we go!


----------



## Huntn

Renzatic said:


> Let me install UE right fast. It's a pain in the ass doing so on Linux, because Epic, for reasons entirely unknown, don't provide a nice little executable to install it like everyone else does for their engines. They make you compile the damn thing from source, cuz they're a bunch of buttholes.
> 
> Gimme a few.



I understand this is a lot of work and don’t expect you to bend over backwards for me, but I appreciate it.  Check out this section of the comments. On the right are the 16 replies that add more info like where material graph is mentioned.


----------



## Huntn

Renzatic said:


> Here we go!
> 
> View attachment 9523



So what is this, asks the novice?  I see it is the code, but how is that converted into a functional material with UE? Oh, I’m using UEv4.7 if that makes any difference.


----------



## Renzatic

Huntn said:


> I understand this is a lot of work and don’t expect you to bend over backwards for me, but I appreciate it.  Check out this section of the comments. On the right are the 16 replies that add more info like where material graph is mentioned.




It's no problem. This is my song and dance right here, so I'm more than happy to nerd out for you. For reference though, the one thing you're trying to do is recreate the ground material in the forest video, right?

As for what I'm doing above, programs usually come precompiled out of the box, and all you have to do is click on the executable to run them. UE for Linux doesn't do this. They make you take the raw code, and compile your own executable to run. It's not that big of a deal, since most of it is automated through a few handy scripts, but you have to wait about an hour or so for it to bake.

Wish you picked Unity to learn with. All I have to do with that is download it.


----------



## Huntn

Renzatic said:


> It's no problem. This is my song and dance right here, so I'm more than happy to nerd out for you. For reference though, the one thing you're trying to do is recreate the ground material in the forest video, right?
> 
> As for what I'm doing above, programs usually come precompiled out of the box, and all you have to do is click on the executable to run them. UE for Linux doesn't do this. They make you take the raw code, and compile your own executable to run. It's not that big of a deal, since most of it is automated through a few handy scripts, but you have to wait about an hour or so for it to bake.
> 
> Wish you picked Unity to learn with. All I have to do with that is download it.



How many gigabytes is there?

Apologies, but I’ve been vested emotionally with the Unreal Engine since 1998: 




*Unreal* (game)​


----------



## Renzatic

Huntn said:


> Sorry, but I’ve been vested emotionally with the Unreal Engine since 1998:
> 
> View attachment 9526
> *Unreal* (game)​




I still have the box for that game. It was awesome!


----------



## Huntn

Renzatic said:


> Well, yeah! I mean, comeon! It's _right there!_
> 
> *From what it looks like from far away, he's creating a master material for all the bits and pieces he'll need for a forest floor. The dirt, leaves, and grass, all blended together using Red, Green, and Blue vertex colors, alongside some transitional effects at the edges for extra blending beyond what you'd get from the vertex paint.*
> 
> I can't tell you EXACTLY what's he doing, because Blender and Unreal are similar enough that you can get the jist of what's going on by looking at it, different enough that you have to learn different nodes to perform the same actions. The beat's the same, but the melody's a little different.
> 
> Now, lerps seem sorta complicated at first, but they're actually the easiest things in the world. Lerp is short for Linear Interpolation. It's a straightforward gradient from 0 (black) to 1 (white), and all the numbers between that 0 and 1, such as 0.357 or 0.81, are the shades of the grey between the black and white. Lerps are put in place to take you from an arbitrarily defined 0, to another defined 1 based upon some set parimeters. In short, it creates a transition.
> 
> As far as height maps go, you could use lerps for a number of things, most of which blend two textures together. Like say you want to fill the cracks of a brick texture with sand, with the bricks being various different heights. You have two materials, your bricks on top, and your sand on the bottom. You combine them together on a lerp node, then apply a parameter to control the contrast, mixing them together.
> 
> If your lerp contrast is a perfect grey between black and white, or 0.5 in computer terms, then all the parts of the brick texture's heightmap that are below 0.5 will be filled with the sand material, leaving the bricks that are above 0.5 exposed and unsanded.
> 
> ...I feel like I've forgotten to address something, so if you've got more questions, feel free to ask.



Regarding the Forest floor, I need to rewatch the video. As I recall he packed a material with leaves in one channel, branches in another and a color in a third. But then he went over it again, placing other small grassy and twig elements.

I also remember him saying he used 4 different tress, and then just painted them in. In other words he just ran the curser over landscape and with randomness set in, the tress just plopped themselves down. Another thing to figure out but I’m not anticipating that to be difficult. Maybe it is related to vector painting…


----------



## Renzatic

Huntn said:


> Regarding the Forest floor, I need to rewatch the video. As I recall he packed a material with leaves in one channel, branches in another and a color in a third. But then he went over it again, placing other small grassy and twin elements.




I'll watch it again too once Unreal finishes it's thing. It's compiling the actual editor now, and is 681 out of 3040 compiled modules. 

...this'll take a minute. Wish I had a faster computer.



> I also remember him saying he used 4 different tress, and then just painted them in. In other words he just ran the curser over landscape and with randomness set in, the tress just plopped themselves down. Another thing to figure out but I’m not anticipating that to be difficult. Maybe it is related to vector painting…




That's just basic scattering, handled totally in-engine. You don't have to set up a material for that. You just choose your models, set up their randomness, and go at it with the cursor.


----------



## Huntn

*Channel Packing- *In the UE market place I’ve seen 2 inexpensive products for channel packing within UE so you don’t have to rely  on  a seperate 2D program like Photoshop to do it. I don’t know if they are extensions, but they are advertised to function within UE.  This seems appealing although I am still in the beginning stages. I’m going to watch a couple of channel packing tutorials and then decide if this would be a good choice. I definitely don’t want to buy PS, so If it comes to that, I’ll look for something open source or inexpensive, GitHub?


----------



## Renzatic

Huntn said:


> *Channel Packing- *In the UE market place I’ve seen 2 inexpensive products for channel packing within UE so you don’t have to rely  on  a seperate 2D program like Photoshop to do it. I don’t know if they are extensions, but they are advertised to function within UE.  This seems appealing although I am still in the beginning stages. I’m going to watch a couple of channel packing tutorials and then decide if this would be a good choice. I definitely don’t want to buy PS, so If it comes to that, I’ll look for something open source or inexpensive, GitHub?




Just get GIMP. It's free, and can handle channel packing easily. If you want something a little more refined, more on the level of Photoshop, then get Affinity Photo.

Oh, and I just now launched the editor.


----------



## Renzatic

I've got the road mesh, and have started playing around with the material. There are a ton of little things I need to come to terms with, so it'll probably take me a bit to figure out the material fully.

...like why he has all these math nodes for the green vertex mask. That's usually pretty straightforward in Blender, but here he's using clamps and powers for reasons I'm not entirely sure of. 

Here's what it currently looks like on my end.


----------



## Huntn

Renzatic said:


> I've got the road mesh, and have started playing around with the material. There are a ton of little things I need to come to terms with, so it'll probably take me a bit to figure out the material fully.
> 
> ...like why he has all these math nodes for the green vertex mask. That's usually pretty straightforward in Blender, but here he's using clamps and powers for reasons I'm not entirely sure of.
> 
> Here's what it currently looks like on my end.
> 
> View attachment 9530



I know there is a master material, vertex painting, and some nodes for adding noise., and maybe a hundred other things.  I’m not asking you to figure this all out for me, but of course I appreciate  what you have done already. If I can just look at this intact, with the nodes connected, I’m sure I can figure out eventually what processes are going on.

Now is there an easy way to get this to me?


----------



## Renzatic

Huntn said:


> Now is there an easy way to get this to me?




It's easy to get into Unreal. First off, your Pastebin link doesn't lead to anything. This is the proper link here.









						Begin Object Class=/Script/UnrealEd.MaterialGraphNode_Root Name="MaterialGraphNo - Pastebin.com
					

Pastebin.com is the number one paste tool since 2002. Pastebin is a website where you can store text online for a set period of time.




					pastebin.com
				




Or here for the raw text, which I recommend because you can just hit Ctrl-A to highlight everything, Ctrl-C to copy it, then Ctrl-V to paste it.



			https://pastebin.com/raw/vdxBbUUs
		


To get it into Unreal, open up your material in the Material Editor, hover the mouse over the node space, then hit Ctrl+V there. The text you highlighted above will magically turn into nodes, which you can then play with.

Though you still need to get some textures into there. You can import them into Unreal by either dragging and dropping them into your Content Browser, or by using Quixel Bridge to import them for you (after some setting up). I'd recommend the latter, since you get some high quality assets into your scene with a minimal amount of effort.

And if I were to recommend anything else, it'd be to use what you learn in the vertex painting video you posted earlier, and go from there. Going full tilt with a semi-complicated node tree will do nothing but frustrate you. Take baby steps. Learn how to lerp two materials together using vertex paints, THEN move on to the fancy transitions.

If it helps, think of setting up a node tree as being a lot like layering in Photoshop. You have your dirt material at the bottom of the stack. You add a grass material on top of it. You use lerps and vertex colors to create a basic mask that allows you to blend the two. Then you create a sub-layer on that mask to further refine your transition between your dirt and grass materials based upon some preset parimeters. In his case, he's mixing a noise texture with a gradient to get a splotchy falloff.

This is basically what the guy's doing with his nodes in the forest video. Nodes appear confusing at first because they're not easily readable to the unitiated. Instead of trying to figure them out all at once, break them down into a step by step by step process, and you'll be building fancy shaders in no time.

Also, this isn't a problem for me, because I'm using you to do something I've been meaning to do for awhile now: learn Unreal more.


----------



## DT

@Renzatic 

Dude, I have really been enjoying your posts in this thread, kind of makes me want to wade back into 3D design/development, er, if only I could skip sleeping ...


----------



## Huntn

Renzatic said:


> It's easy to get into Unreal. First off, your Pastebin link doesn't lead to anything. This is the proper link here.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Begin Object Class=/Script/UnrealEd.MaterialGraphNode_Root Name="MaterialGraphNo - Pastebin.com
> 
> 
> Pastebin.com is the number one paste tool since 2002. Pastebin is a website where you can store text online for a set period of time.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> pastebin.com
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Or here for the raw text, which I recommend because you can just hit Ctrl-A to highlight everything, Ctrl-C to copy it, then Ctrl-V to paste it.
> 
> 
> 
> https://pastebin.com/raw/vdxBbUUs
> 
> 
> 
> To get it into Unreal, open up your material in the Material Editor, hover the mouse over the node space, then hit Ctrl+V there. The text you highlighted above will magically turn into nodes, which you can then play with.
> 
> Though you still need to get some textures into there. You can import them into Unreal by either dragging and dropping them into your Content Browser, or by using Quixel Bridge to import them for you (after some setting up). I'd recommend the latter, since you get some high quality assets into your scene with a minimal amount of effort.
> 
> And if I were to recommend anything else, it'd be to use what you learn in the vertex painting video you posted earlier, and go from there. Going full tilt with a semi-complicated node tree will do nothing but frustrate you. Take baby steps. Learn how to lerp two materials together using vertex paints, THEN move on to the fancy transitions.
> 
> If it helps, think of setting up a node tree as being a lot like layering in Photoshop. You have your dirt material at the bottom of the stack. You add a grass material on top of it. You use lerps and vertex colors to create a basic mask that allows you to blend the two. Then you create a sub-layer on that mask to further refine your transition between your dirt and grass materials based upon some preset parimeters. In his case, he's mixing a noise texture with a gradient to get a splotchy falloff.
> 
> This is basically what the guy's doing with his nodes in the forest video. Nodes appear confusing at first because they're not easily readable to the unitiated. Instead of trying to figure them out all at once, break them down into a step by step by step process, and you'll be building fancy shaders in no time.
> 
> Also, this isn't a problem for me, because I'm using you to do something I've been meaning to do for awhile now: learn Unreal more.



I really do agree with you and thanks much. Baby steps, yep. And every video I watch  where they put material nodes together,  I don’t see anything overly complicated when the author takes the time to explain the whys and wherefores.

And compiling  UE so you can install it, just to help me is going above and beyond, Goldstar dude! 


*Renzatic*​


----------



## Renzatic

DT said:


> Dude, I have really been enjoying your posts in this thread, kind of makes me want to wade back into 3D design/development, er, if only I could skip sleeping ...




Hey, feel free to join in at anytime if you feel like it. 

@Huntn I found this video while looking up vertex painting in UE. It does a good job of explaining what those mysterious set of vector math nodes does in the Forest video. In short, it's a height clamp, allowing you to blend textures according to their heightmaps. I'd go into more, but the video does a great job of illustrating it directly.


----------



## Renzatic

If there's one thing I really appreciate about Blender, it's how it provides a bunch of specific nodes specific to an action. You want to change the hue, saturation, and color on a texture? Use an HSL node!

In Unreal, it's like NO! FUCK YOU! USE MATH TO DO IT! And are RGB Color nodes called RGB Color nodes? NO! YOU GO TO HELL! IT'S CALLED A CONSTANT3!

...this is what happens when you let programmers design stuff.


----------



## Renzatic

Well, I've got the basics down, at least. Only two textures blended, but it's looking pretty alright.

I now know what the big deal with instanced materials is: every time you create a new mesh with an instance of your master material, it becomes its own unique surface. You can paint so much variety into your scenes using this. It's so cool.


----------



## Huntn

Renzatic said:


> Well, I've got the basics down, at least. Only two textures blended, but it's looking pretty alright.
> 
> I now know what the big deal with instanced materials is: every time you create a new mesh with an instance of your master material, it becomes its own unique surface. You can paint so much variety into your scenes using this. It's so cool.
> 
> 
> View attachment 9561



I am going to try to get the master material copied and put into UE, who knows how long  that link will remain. And then figure out the best way to store backups of textures. I suppose  you just export them to a folder. Height mapping has a huge impact.

What textures did you use? How many textures can be use in this material?
Are you looking at packed channels in them? I remember a picture where he had a twigs texture and a leaves texture I though were packed into a single material.
Standby, many questions maybe coming.  I don’t necessarily want to try to use this master material right now, unless it is more or less functional when I paste it in.
If you added materials I’ll probably be asking where And what kind did you blend?


----------



## Renzatic

Huntn said:


> I am going to try to get the master material copied and put into UE, who knows how long  that link will remain. And then figure out the best way to store backups of textures. I suppose  you just export them to a folder. Height mapping has a huge impact.
> 
> What textures did you use? How many textures can be use in this material?
> Are you looking at packed channels in them? I remember a picture where he had a twigs texture and a leaves texture I though were packed into a single material.
> Standby, many questions maybe coming.  I don’t necessarily want to try to use this master material right now, unless it is more or less functional when I paste it in.
> If you added materials I’ll probably be asking where And what kind did you blend?




I used a gravel and mossy grass texture from Megascans. Seriously, if you haven't already, Get Quixel Bridge, sign into it with your Epic account, and peruse until you can peruse no more.









						Quixel Bridge - Manage 3D content and export with one click
					

Quixel Bridge provides 3D asset management and saves time with one click integrations to your preferred tools, for free.




					quixel.com
				




Right now, I'm using 2 materials with 4 textures in them, an Albedo, Roughness, Normal, and Height. If 16 is the max amount of textures you can stack into a single shader, then I can get 4 full materials out of this one master. Moreso if I do channel packing. But since you're stuck with painting on 3 color channels, that's more than plenty.

Right now, I'm still playing around with it. I've already added a space for a 3rd material, but I haven't decided which one to use yet. It's fairly easy to do once you understand it, you just, er, lerp a lerp for the 3rd vertex color channel. Once I got the basics down, and I figure out how to group and annotate, I'll send it your way.

You'll have to add your own materials though. Learn how to do that in the meanwhile.


----------



## Huntn

Renzatic said:


> I used a gravel and mossy grass texture from Megascans. Seriously, if you haven't already, Get Quixel Bridge, sign into it with your Epic account, and peruse until you can peruse no more.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Quixel Bridge - Manage 3D content and export with one click
> 
> 
> Quixel Bridge provides 3D asset management and saves time with one click integrations to your preferred tools, for free.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> quixel.com
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Right now, I'm using 2 materials with 4 textures in them, an Albedo, Roughness, Normal, and Height. If 16 is the max amount of textures you can stack into a single shader, then I can get 4 full materials out of this one master. Moreso if I do channel packing. But since you're stuck with painting on 3 color channels, that's more than plenty.
> 
> Right now, I'm still playing around with it. I've already added a space for a 3rd material, but I haven't decided which one to use yet. It's fairly easy to do once you understand it, you just, er, lerp a lerp for the 3rd vertex color channel. Once I got the basics down, and I figure out how to group and annotate, I'll send it your way.
> 
> You'll have to add your own materials though. Learn how to do that in the meanwhile.



Quixel Bridge- HOT DAMN! 
Ok, Imported this master material and it looks good…so far. I had an idea that you might be able to export this out of UE for safe keeping but what I’m seeimg is to export it as a .COPY or a .T3D file have you heard of those?  I’m happy I snagged this material and eventually will start picking at it to figure out what all the nodes do.

Sometimes UE pops up a little tutorial. The upper right that looks like a top hat. i just did the one for Materials and it was helpful.

Learn how to pack materials?
I’ll check out your vertex painting video, the heightlerp is what I want to get a good look at. Thanks again! More to come…. Of course.


----------



## Huntn

@Renzatic, that Vertex Painting Tutorial is stellar!  Not only vertex painting, but Height Settings, Specular settings, UV settings , tesselation, and he had includes desaturation or something like that and it did not work so he removed those nodes. This 15 minute video has only taken me about 5 hours to get though it. I’m taking comprehensive notes, otherwise if I try to go back and repeat this based on memory, I’d be _Duhhh… _

There is a lot to know regarding materials, how to put the nodes together. This is the most complex aspect of the UE that I have run into so far.


----------



## Renzatic

Huntn said:


> There is a lot to know regarding materials, how to put the nodes together. This is the most complex aspect of the UE that I have run into so far.




At least until you get into programming, which is something you're gonna have to handle on your own. I am a not a coder.

So what all have you done so far? I haven't messed with UE much since I last posted the shot above, since I've started working on my own thing again in the meanwhile.

Also, I've read somewhere that Quixel Bridge can channel pack for you. I haven't read much about it beyond that, but it shouldn't be too hard to figure out, and when you do, it'll make your node trees considerably more manageable.


----------



## Huntn

Renzatic said:


> At least until you get into programming, which is something you're gonna have to handle on your own. I am a not a coder.
> 
> So what all have you done so far? I haven't messed with UE much since I last posted the shot above, since I've started working on my own thing again in the meanwhile.
> 
> Also, I've read somewhere that Quixel Bridge can channel pack for you. I haven't read much about it beyond that, but it shouldn't be too hard to figure out, and when you do, it'll make your node trees considerably more manageable.



I don’t see myself getting into code. 

What have I done? Sadly just study and take notes, but I am getting close to making a move on the Forest floor. The master material used by the Forest scene author is very complicated. I have not yet decided if I need that level of complexity to get an outcome that I like.

And the Vertex Painting video link you posted in 146 is pretty incredible because it covers most of the aspects of master materials or maybe I should call it a material instance. That video show comprehensively how to make a material and apply settings to it, then how to work with it in the project.

The only thing not covered is packing channels, but I’m thinking that might not be needed for the Forest floor In this project.  I remember when I was working with Blender, I was rushing through that just to get a mesh created. But for UE I felt it is necessary to have a decent handle on the ins and outs of materials so I am not stumbling about getting frustrated. That video went along way to get me semi-fluent in the mechanics of materials, it takes a while for me to produce the comprehensive reference notes I want, and there is still a ton to learn.

However, I’m not expecting to learn a ton before I start, just enough that I can feel semi-confident in what I am doing. And It’s not as if I am applying myself 8 hours per day learning this. I have a couple more sections of the official UE Tutorial to cover, one small section of the Vertex Painting tutorial and then I’ll seriously move on the Forest project.

Now, regarding your experimentation with the Master material from the Forest Scene video, do you remember anything about it? Now that I know more watching the Vertex Painting Material, I know that you need associated texture maps: normal, diffuse, height, roughness, etc so if the material structure we downloaded from the Forest scene video is minus the actual textures,  then I will be looking at blank texture samples, I think, and have to figure out what kind of textures I need to plug into them.

In the Vertex Painting tutorial the author has 2 textures (materials?)  which included 5 maps: a grass map normal, grass map diffused, tile map normal, tile map diffused, tile map height. So that is 5 maps each producing a texture sample node in material used in the Vertex Painting tutorial.

So soon, I’ll be looking at the Forest Scene tutorial trying to pick that apart, guessing what kind of maps were plugged into which texture sample nodes. As I said, it is very possible, that for me at this stage, the Forest tutorial material is overkill. And it’s likely I’ll be able to use the Vertex Painting tutorial material to produce a satisfactory result. Stay toned.


----------



## Renzatic

You know what? I'm gonna try a different tact on this.

See, Blender's node setup is much, MUCH easier to wrap your head around (though admittedly, I might be saying this just because I'm used to it), and easier to follow, thanks to the colored noodles. They both do the exact same things, so if you're able to understand the basics of what's going on in one, you'll be able to repeat it in the other.

So I just did some vertex painting in Blender with some Megascan assets. I'll upload the .blend file here in a second, but here's a shot of the node tree and results in the meanwhile.






And what you're actually painting is this:


----------



## Renzatic

...and the file. I really shouldn't be distributing this, since it has Megascan files in it, but hell, you and some people here are gonna be the only ones who'll see this, and you can all get them anyway.





__





						RoadBase.zip
					






					drive.google.com


----------



## Huntn

Renzatic said:


> ...and the file. I really shouldn't be distributing this, since it has Megascan files in it, but hell, you and some people here are gonna be the only ones who'll see this, and you can all get them anyway.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> __
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> RoadBase.zip
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> drive.google.com



I appreciate this effort, but I’m going to leave blender set aside until I reach a defined (maybe perceived) threshold In UE. I don’t need to be muddling my brain with competing 3D graphic programs at this point. . 

I’m not saying that UE is overly difficult, I just need to see the node explanations and examples of how they work with each other as provided in that Vertex Painting tutorial. That is outstanding. 

I may just hold off on the Forest Scene master material for now, but if you remember which type of maps you inserted into it, and where based on your educated guesses, this would be good info, but I am not asking you to break out UE again and do a lot of work with that material to provide me with answers.


----------



## Huntn

*Update: Issue resolved*
In the Material UV Multiplyer area, specifically the Scalar Parameter, the Grass Default was reverted to 0.0. Putting it back to 1.0 gave me my grass texture back. 

I really don’t expect an answer from you @Renzatic but last night after 4 hours finishing up the Vertex Painting tutorial, the author made a suggestion on how to group related nodes, so I highlightEd all of my grass nodes and instead of grouping them I ended up renaming them, and then the grass texture stopped working.

I fixed all the node names, but in the viewfinder instead of seeing grass, I’m seeing just a blob of green minus the texture. I’ve tried reinserting the texture but that’s no good. I see no apparpant changes in the node wiring. And  I realize without a first hand copy of the material, it would be difficult to troubleshoot this, but if there is a possibility that it is apparant and easily answered I’m throwing this out for you. 

But I realize UE is not your forte, and I don’t want you breaking out UE to help if that is your inclination. What I’ll end up doing is rebuilding this material from scratch and then learn the best way to export things like this to a file so when I screw up I can actually recover, without starting from scratch. Even though UE has a “go back” feature, it does not seem to want to fix this and maybe I’ll  learn something starting this material over…


----------



## Renzatic

Huntn said:


> I’m not saying that UE is overly difficult, I just need to see the node explanations and examples of how they work with each other as provided in that Vertex Painting tutorial. That is outstanding.




The one thing that might help you the most is to break it down to it's most basic settings. In this case, the color/albedo textures. When you get right down to it, what' you're basically doing is repeating the same thing three or more times for each image that makes up a material.

Here's a shot of my material in UE, lerp only the three images in the albedo channel. If it looks like I'm covering old ground, or being condescending, don't be offended. I'm just trying to demystify the whole process as much as possible.





The nodes on the far left are probably the most mysterious. All they're doing is taking the UV map, and using a parameter to multiply it to shrink and grow the texture on your surface. This is good for those times when you grab a neat material you like, but it turns out it's out of scale with the rest of your stuff, giving you some HUGE ASS leaves or whatnot. 1 is UV x 1, or no change. 2 is UV x 2, or the texture repeated 2 by 2 times on the surface, 3 is UV x 3, or the texture repeated 3 by 3 times on your surface, and etc. etc.

The next stop on the noodle path is your image texture node (called Texture Sample in UE). In this case, your albedo. It's the texture that'll show up on your surfaces.

Further on down, you hit your lerp. This is where the magic happens. You want to blend two textures, your A and B. So you hook your nodes into socket A on the lerp, copy and paste them down below, add a new texture into your image texture node, and plug this new set of nodes into socket B.

Now you need a parameter to tell the engine how and where to blend these two nodes together. That's done by plugging a single color channel, in this case red, from the Vertex Color node into the alpha socket on the lerp node. This tells the engine that when you paint red in the vertex color channel, your 2nd texture will appear there. The topmost texture will go to the next undefined socket, which in this case is green. Now, when you paint red, you get your gravel, green will give you grass.

But you want that third texture, right? That's easy. Just lerp again. Copy one set of texture coordinates and image texture nodes, paste it down below, lead the Image Texture node to your 3rd texture, and hook your initial lerp to A, and your new texture to B onto another lerp. To define where it goes, take the blue color channel socket, and plug it the alpha on your 2nd lerp.

Why blue instead of green? Remember, the topmost texture defaults to the undefined color. I wanted green to be grass, so I made the 3rd texture blue.

Now, you can paint red, green, and blue on your surface to mix your grass, gravel, and dirt.

But what if you want to add in a roughness map, make your simple images more materially? Copy the image nodes and lerps above, and paste them down below your initial three. Change your textures so that the roughness image on A corresponds to the albedo on A, and so on and so on. You don't want to copy your Vertex Colors node, because you can just reuse it. Drag it down, and plug Red and Blue into the appropriate lerps.

But what about your texture coordinates? Well, you don't want your roughness map image to scale differently than its corresponding albedo. You'll want them to share the same size and space. To do that, just link your first texture coordinate nodes to the first set on your albedo and roughness, and repeat accordingly.

You'll end up with something like this:





For any other maps, just repeat the process, and plug the new lerps into their appropriate socket on the material node at the end.





So you can see what you're doing here. You're making a material out of three materials, and setting parameters to tell it how to blend the various parts of these materials together. Like I said, it's very simple, it just looks complicated because you're defining every little thing step by step by step.

Yeah, you probably gathered this from the videos you've watched, but I'm really wanting to hammer down the very basics here, to make triply sure you understand how this all works. Once you get the basics down, you can expand upon it, and start getting truly fancy.

The reason why I initially wanted to show you how to do things in Blender is because it's basically doing the same thing, but it's easier to follow, since it abstracts a lot of fiddly bits.


----------



## Renzatic

Huntn said:


> And I realize without a first hand copy of the material, it would be difficult to troubleshoot this, but if there is a possibility that it is apparant and easily answered I’m throwing this out for you.




A screenshot would be handy here. If you're in Windows, you can make one by hitting Winkey + Prntscrn. It'll pop it over into your pictures folder.


----------



## Huntn

Renzatic said:


> A screenshot would be handy here. If you're in Windows, you can make one by hitting Winkey + Prntscrn. It'll pop it over into your pictures folder.



I resolved the issue and posted in 158 hoping I’d catch you before you replied.  Thanks for post 159. I’ll digest this and report back.


----------



## Huntn

I finished the vertex painting tutorial and liked it despite the mistakes the author made. 
I’m almost finished with the UE Intro Tutorial. Thanks for posting your screenshots as I said I am digesting.  I’ve gone from one video (the Vertex Painting tutorial)  that covers UV, Spectral, Height maps for manipulating texture appearance, and World displacement, making for a complicated  material to another author who is using much simpler material structures. I’ll say at first glance your examples are in the middle. So I’m seeing there is more than one way to skin a cat and the question becomes how much complexity is required to get a satisfactory result? Yes, I realize that much of the answer is getting into the  rodeo and riding.

Since the Forest Scene author relied on channel packing, this is one other area I want to get educated about, I assume I need a 2D program like Gimp. Adobe is on the software rental bandwagon for some of their products, but can you actually buy Photoshop for $50?





						Adobe Photoshop cc 2021 Full Version lifetime Activation (WINDOWS) - Accoaz LTD
					

Adobe Photoshop 2021 Final Full Version for (Windows / Mac) ✔️ ADOBE PHOTOSHOP CC 2021 FULL VERSION ✔️ NO ACTIVATION CODE NEEDED, THE SOFTWARE IS PRE-ACTIVATED ✔️ LIFETIME ACTIVATION ???? FAST DELIVERY IN YOUR EMAIL Package will be included: ✔ Lifetime – Unlimited Installation LINK ✔ No Monthly...




					accoaz.com
				




More likely I would Gimp for this purpose, but I notice there is at least two products in the UE Marketplace that claims you can use it to pack texture channels within UE, no 3rd party software needed. 









						RGBA Texture Channel Packer in Blueprints - UE Marketplace
					

Texture packer is a tool for custom RGBA texture packing without the need of using third-party software




					www.unrealengine.com
				












						Rapid Packer Textures Toolset in Blueprints - UE Marketplace
					

Fast, smart and easy to use selection based textures packing, repacking and generation tool. Editor tool, no need to drop into scene.




					www.unrealengine.com


----------



## Huntn

I just watched this:





And based on a question asked and answered regarding improved performance for a limited texture project, for the Forrest Project, I don’t think I need to worry about it right now. Yet, it is still on my agenda. 

What intrigued me is that the author of the Forest Scene tutorial used a packed channel texture to combine an image of leaves, with an image of twigs, but maybe he is just blending them which I have figured out kind of how to do.

I can see that instead of blending two textures, say grass and forest floor, I might want to combine 3 textures. One thing I remember distinctly is when the author paints with the green channel making green tracks, but maybe he was just using the grass texture To do this? Obviously I need to look at it again.


----------



## Huntn

Renzatic said:


> The one thing that might help you the most is to break it down to it's most basic settings. In this case, the color/albedo textures. When you get right down to it, what' you're basically doing is repeating the same thing three or more times for each image that makes up a material.
> 
> Here's a shot of my material in UE, lerp only the three images in the albedo channel. If it looks like I'm covering old ground, or being condescending, don't be offended. I'm just trying to demystify the whole process as much as possible.
> 
> View attachment 9622
> 
> The nodes on the far left are probably the most mysterious. All they're doing is taking the UV map, and using a parameter to multiply it to shrink and grow the texture on your surface. This is good for those times when you grab a neat material you like, but it turns out it's out of scale with the rest of your stuff, giving you some HUGE ASS leaves or whatnot. 1 is UV x 1, or no change. 2 is UV x 2, or the texture repeated 2 by 2 times on the surface, 3 is UV x 3, or the texture repeated 3 by 3 times on your surface, and etc. etc.
> 
> The next stop on the noodle path is your image texture node (called Texture Sample in UE). In this case, your albedo. It's the texture that'll show up on your surfaces.
> 
> Further on down, you hit your lerp. This is where the magic happens. You want to blend two textures, your A and B. So you hook your nodes into socket A on the lerp, copy and paste them down below, add a new texture into your image texture node, and plug this new set of nodes into socket B.
> 
> Now you need a parameter to tell the engine how and where to blend these two nodes together. That's done by plugging a single color channel, in this case red, from the Vertex Color node into the alpha socket on the lerp node. This tells the engine that when you paint red in the vertex color channel, your 2nd texture will appear there. The topmost texture will go to the next undefined socket, which in this case is green. Now, when you paint red, you get your gravel, green will give you grass.
> 
> But you want that third texture, right? That's easy. Just lerp again. Copy one set of texture coordinates and image texture nodes, paste it down below, lead the Image Texture node to your 3rd texture, and hook your initial lerp to A, and your new texture to B onto another lerp. To define where it goes, take the blue color channel socket, and plug it the alpha on your 2nd lerp.
> 
> Why blue instead of green? Remember, the topmost texture defaults to the undefined color. I wanted green to be grass, so I made the 3rd texture blue.
> 
> Now, you can paint red, green, and blue on your surface to mix your grass, gravel, and dirt.
> 
> But what if you want to add in a roughness map, make your simple images more materially? Copy the image nodes and lerps above, and paste them down below your initial three. Change your textures so that the roughness image on A corresponds to the albedo on A, and so on and so on. You don't want to copy your Vertex Colors node, because you can just reuse it. Drag it down, and plug Red and Blue into the appropriate lerps.
> 
> But what about your texture coordinates? Well, you don't want your roughness map image to scale differently than its corresponding albedo. You'll want them to share the same size and space. To do that, just link your first texture coordinate nodes to the first set on your albedo and roughness, and repeat accordingly.
> 
> You'll end up with something like this:
> 
> View attachment 9623
> 
> For any other maps, just repeat the process, and plug the new lerps into their appropriate socket on the material node at the end.
> 
> View attachment 9624
> 
> So you can see what you're doing here. You're making a material out of three materials, and setting parameters to tell it how to blend the various parts of these materials together. Like I said, it's very simple, it just looks complicated because you're defining every little thing step by step by step.
> 
> Yeah, you probably gathered this from the videos you've watched, but I'm really wanting to hammer down the very basics here, to make triply sure you understand how this all works. Once you get the basics down, you can expand upon it, and start getting truly fancy.
> 
> The reason why I initially wanted to show you how to do things in Blender is because it's basically doing the same thing, but it's easier to follow, since it abstracts a lot of fiddly bits.



I’m going to take a closer look at these tonight. I assume you created a material instance so it’s really easy to adjust setting for how these materials blend. 

In the vertex painting tutorial I just completed, there were 2 textures and 5 associated texture maps,  normal, diffuse, and height.

Tile N
Tile D
Tile H
Grass N
Grass D
And the way this was set up If you want to paint with the tile texture, in the color channels you would have R, G, B checked, but if you wanted to paint with the grass texture, you would just use the just Red channel R.

There was also a group of nodes used to define height (a tile texture). My understanding is that this was to give the tile height so the grass could be painted in the cracks between the tile, not covering the tile immediately in a straight blend.

Anyway, I‘m going to assume for the Forest scene, if I used  3 textures that I want to blend, it will be similiar to above with the RGB channels so to paint with the primary texture, say Forest floor, I would use RGB, then for the grass texture, I would use R, and then for a new third texture, say leaves, it would be tied to another color, like the  G channel?

Another aspect of this blending is the scattering effect, and how to achieve that. Based on our discussion if you are painting with individual trees there is a way to select say 4 tree models and paint with them simo scattering them about. I need to nail this down.

But with painting a texture with grass, I need to play with the setting to see which one, msjes it more scattered ot more dense in appearance.

@Renzatic, as usual thanks for listening and your help!


----------



## Renzatic

Huntn said:


> And the way this was set up If you want to paint with the tile texture, in the color channels you would have R, G, B checked, but if you wanted to paint with the grass texture, you would just use the just Red channel R.




Yup. The painting process itself is fairly straightforward. You go into vertex paint, and choose your colors like so...





You want to use full values, so for whichever color you're picking, in this case blue, you'll want to bump the R and G sliders down to 0, and B to 1.0



> There was also a group of nodes used to define height (a tile texture). My understanding is that this was to give the tile height so the grass could be painted in the cracks between the tile, not covering the tile immediately in a straight blend.




It's blending between two height maps based upon their various shades. What he's doing, but if it helps, think of it as him blending two greyscale images together where black represents the lowest point of a depth, and white the highest, and he's setting it up so that the mask on top is more likely to show up on the dark sections.

It really helps if you think of this as blend modes in Photoshop and/or your other favorite photo editing application (mine's Affinity Photo, but I can't use it here in Linux Land). What he's doing is taking the two heightmaps, applying a mask to one, then taking the mask and multiplying it upon itself.

I did a quick and dirt example here. Notice how on the edge of the brush strokes, where it's not entirely black or white, but shades of grey, you can see more of the underlying heightmap, This is more or less what's going on in his example. It makes it look like the grass is growing in the cracks before it gets to the taller parts of the tile.





And right now I'm a bit short on time, so I'll answer more later.


----------



## Renzatic

> Anyway, I‘m going to assume for the Forest scene, if I used  3 textures that I want to blend, it will be similiar to above with the RGB channels so to paint with the primary texture, say Forest floor, I would use RGB, then for the grass texture, I would use R, and then for a new third texture, say leaves, it would be tied to another color, like the  G channel?




Not quite. Each of your 3 textures is assigned to one of the color channels. Like for your base grass texture, it'll likely be blue, since it's the one color channel you probably won't assign. Remember, the texture on top of the stack will default to the first unused channel, since more often than not you're going to assign that first lerp node to red, and the 2nd lerp to green.

Of course, you can assign colors in any order, but for the sake of simplicity, we'll go from top down.

Also, I remember you asking about he painted twigs and leaves into his scene, and that it seemed like he was painting in more textures beyond the initial three. It's been awhile since I've watched that video, and I still have yet to watch it all the way through, but from what I remember, he uses vertex colors to mask in his three textures, and everything else beyond that is done with objects rather than textures. His twigs, leaves, and tall, 3D grass are all models he scattered about through the asset painter.

That's much easier to understand than vertex colors and materials, and yeah, you can set the density and randomness of the objects you're scattering in the brush settings. I'm not 100% sure how it's done in UE, but this is how it's done in Blender.

...and it isn't NEARLY as complicated as it looks.


----------



## Renzatic

I was curious about what exactly was going on with the height lerp in the vertex painting tutorial I posted earlier, and how best to illustrate it so that it really sticks. So I decided to recreate it in Blender and record it there.

What it's doing is using the height not for pure height value, but as a mask, mathing up the results so that it hightlights the darker sections first before filling in the rest. Or to better explain...


----------



## Huntn

Renzatic said:


> Not quite. Each of your 3 textures is assigned to one of the color channels. Like for your base grass texture, it'll likely be blue, since it's the one color channel you probably won't assign. Remember, the texture on top of the stack will default to the first unused channel, since more often than not you're going to assign that first lerp node to red, and the 2nd lerp to green.
> 
> Of course, you can assign colors in any order, but for the sake of simplicity, we'll go from top down.
> 
> Also, I remember you asking about he painted twigs and leaves into his scene, and that it seemed like he was painting in more textures beyond the initial three. It's been awhile since I've watched that video, and I still have yet to watch it all the way through, but from what I remember, he uses vertex colors to mask in his three textures, and everything else beyond that is done with objects rather than textures. His twigs, leaves, and tall, 3D grass are all models he scattered about through the asset painter.
> 
> That's much easier to understand than vertex colors and materials, and yeah, you can set the density and randomness of the objects you're scattering in the brush settings. I'm not 100% sure how it's done in UE, but this is how it's done in Blender.
> 
> ...and it isn't NEARLY as complicated as it looks.
> 
> View attachment 9647



In this tutorial:





There were 2 textures a tile and a grass, In UE when you selected all of the color channels RGB, at the beginning because of the way the author set it up, when RGB is turned on it covered the mesh with black  (or grass with the color select turned off), yet the channels can still be selected or deselected to make changes, when color viewer was on, the tile texture was red, when off, it was tile.

This was the authors screw up because later he switched them so that the tile which had a diffuse, a normal, and a height map, became the primary texture on the bottom, because as I understand it, the tile needs the height element so the grass can be painted into the grout areas.

I still need to look at your example materials  and will do so soon. Ideally I would like to be able to blend 3 textures, a rock or forest floor, a dirt, and a grass. I’m thinking like the tile-grass example before that you’d want a height map for the bottom texture, or maybe  make rock or forest floor on bottom flat,  and the middle texture  with height. the the top one can be scattered on the middle texture?

So if 3 textures them I imagine it would be as you said  one texture per R,G, and B.


----------



## Renzatic

Huntn said:


> There were 2 textures a tile and a grass, In UE when you selected all of the color channels RGB, at the beginning because of the way the author set it up, when RGB is turned on it covered the mesh with black (or grass with the color select turned off), yet the channels can still be selected or deselected to make changes, when color viewer was on, the tile texture was red, when off, it was tile.




Let's see if I can explain this from the very basics on up...

First, let's break down what a mask is. A mask, by itself, is a greyscale image that allows you to blend two textures together. Black is completely opaque, so if you flood your mask with black, it'll only show only the texture on top of the stack. White is completely transparent, so flooding it will completely remove the texture on top, showing the one on the bottom. The shades of grey between act as blends, with perfect grey being a 50/50 mix between your two textures.

But what if you want to add in another texture? That's where vertex color painting comes into play.

Think of your RGB channels as being three greyscale images. A computer will look at the shades of grey on these three channels to determine where to place, mix, and match these three colors on your image. As far as mask work goes, when you paint pure blue onto your object, it's laying down a big splotch of white on the B channel, but nothing on the R and G. The same obviously applies when you paint red or green for R and G. You can use this information to create three masks, which can be used to add and combine two extra textures onto a single material.

In the vertex painting video, he only has two textures on the material, the grass on top, and the tiled floor on the bottom. He can actually use straight black and white to paint between the two, since black and white are common across all three color channels, so painting shades of pure, desaturated grey will add information across all three channels. Since he only has two textures assigned to vertex colors, grey will work just as well to blend them together. If he had three textures, grey would be exposing blends of all three.

For painting in all three colors, think of your shades of your color + black. So painting a 50% desaturated blue, or blue darkened down to black halfway, will be exposing your topmost texture, and the texture you've assigned to the blue channel 50/50.

Yeah, it's confusing as shit starting out, but once it clicks, and it eventually will, you'll see it's all fairly straightforward. You just have to start thinking like a computer does.


----------



## Huntn

Renzatic said:


> The one thing that might help you the most is to break it down to it's most basic settings. In this case, the color/albedo textures. When you get right down to it, what' you're basically doing is repeating the same thing three or more times for each image that makes up a material.
> 
> Here's a shot of my material in UE, lerp only the three images in the albedo channel. If it looks like I'm covering old ground, or being condescending, don't be offended. I'm just trying to demystify the whole process as much as possible.
> 
> View attachment 9622
> 
> The nodes on the far left are probably the most mysterious. All they're doing is taking the UV map, and using a parameter to multiply it to shrink and grow the texture on your surface. This is good for those times when you grab a neat material you like, but it turns out it's out of scale with the rest of your stuff, giving you some HUGE ASS leaves or whatnot. 1 is UV x 1, or no change. 2 is UV x 2, or the texture repeated 2 by 2 times on the surface, 3 is UV x 3, or the texture repeated 3 by 3 times on your surface, and etc. etc.
> 
> The next stop on the noodle path is your image texture node (called Texture Sample in UE). In this case, your albedo. It's the texture that'll show up on your surfaces.
> 
> Further on down, you hit your lerp. This is where the magic happens. You want to blend two textures, your A and B. So you hook your nodes into socket A on the lerp, copy and paste them down below, add a new texture into your image texture node, and plug this new set of nodes into socket B.
> 
> Now you need a parameter to tell the engine how and where to blend these two nodes together. That's done by plugging a single color channel, in this case red, from the Vertex Color node into the alpha socket on the lerp node. This tells the engine that when you paint red in the vertex color channel, your 2nd texture will appear there. The topmost texture will go to the next undefined socket, which in this case is green. Now, when you paint red, you get your gravel, green will give you grass.
> 
> But you want that third texture, right? That's easy. Just lerp again. Copy one set of texture coordinates and image texture nodes, paste it down below, lead the Image Texture node to your 3rd texture, and hook your initial lerp to A, and your new texture to B onto another lerp. To define where it goes, take the blue color channel socket, and plug it the alpha on your 2nd lerp.
> 
> Why blue instead of green? Remember, the topmost texture defaults to the undefined color. I wanted green to be grass, so I made the 3rd texture blue.
> 
> Now, you can paint red, green, and blue on your surface to mix your grass, gravel, and dirt.
> 
> But what if you want to add in a roughness map, make your simple images more materially? Copy the image nodes and lerps above, and paste them down below your initial three. Change your textures so that the roughness image on A corresponds to the albedo on A, and so on and so on. You don't want to copy your Vertex Colors node, because you can just reuse it. Drag it down, and plug Red and Blue into the appropriate lerps.
> 
> But what about your texture coordinates? Well, you don't want your roughness map image to scale differently than its corresponding albedo. You'll want them to share the same size and space. To do that, just link your first texture coordinate nodes to the first set on your albedo and roughness, and repeat accordingly.
> 
> You'll end up with something like this:
> 
> View attachment 9623
> 
> For any other maps, just repeat the process, and plug the new lerps into their appropriate socket on the material node at the end.
> 
> View attachment 9624
> 
> So you can see what you're doing here. You're making a material out of three materials, and setting parameters to tell it how to blend the various parts of these materials together. Like I said, it's very simple, it just looks complicated because you're defining every little thing step by step by step.
> 
> Yeah, you probably gathered this from the videos you've watched, but I'm really wanting to hammer down the very basics here, to make triply sure you understand how this all works. Once you get the basics down, you can expand upon it, and start getting truly fancy.
> 
> The reason why I initially wanted to show you how to do things in Blender is because it's basically doing the same thing, but it's easier to follow, since it abstracts a lot of fiddly bits.



I just downloaded these for closer examination. I can't see which maps you used for each texture, but I'm assuming it's 3 textures with 3 maps each, a normal, an albedo, and a roughness or something else? Can you tell me the order of the maps from top to bottom? 


I'll assume you turned this into a material instance to change parameters in real time? Thanks!


----------



## Renzatic

Huntn said:


> I just downloaded these for closer examination. I can't see which maps you used for each texture, but I'm assuming it's 3 textures with 3 maps each, a normal, an albedo, and a roughness or something else? Can you tell me the order of the maps from top to bottom?
> 
> 
> I'll assume you turned this into a material instance to change parameters in real time? Thanks!




Yup, I used three map types, and put them in order of how they appear on the material output on the right. 

Albedo Grass - Lerp 1 Socket A
Albedo Gravel - Lerp 1 Socket B
Albedo Dirt - Lerp 2 Socket B

Roughness Grass - Lerp 1 Socket A
Roughness Gravel - Lerp 1 Socket A
Roughness Dirt - Lerp 2 Socket B

Normal Grass - Lerp 1  Socket A
Normal Gravel - Lerp 1 Socket A
Normal Dirt - Lerp 2 Socket B

The three textures in each map are all organized the same way to make them easier to follow.

And yeah, I did make it an instance.


----------



## Huntn

@Renzatic thanks for the info above.

I got a very interesting reply in a thread I've got going about UE Basics over at unrealengine.com forums. A guy jumps in and says drop UE...








						UE Basics Thread, Talking, Learning, and Maybe More
					

Wasn’t really following whole of the discussion, but I feel like you should be told not to stop, drop this engine, and transition off to something that actually offers both look and performance.  This engine is dying and getting worse with every “upgrade” they release, at a constant pace.  It...




					forums.unrealengine.com
				




This guy thinks I should drop UE and go to CryEngine. Hmm, most likely if I was to switch it would be to Unity, but what do I know? I'm looking for something easy to learn, that is basically free, and includes a good availability of low cost assets. One thing that caught my attention is that Quixel/Megascans is basically free with a UE account. I wonder if the same thing applies for either Unity or CryEngine?
Thoughts?



MostHost_LA said:


> Wasn’t really following whole of the discussion, but I feel like you should be told not to stop, drop this engine, and transition off to something that actually offers both look and performance.
> This engine is dying and getting worse with every “upgrade” they release, at a constant pace.
> 
> It isn’t capable of running anything “realistic” at a satisfactory speed not even with top of the line equipment.
> In fact, is not even really capable of doing raytracing correctly, so much so that nvidia has to go out of their way and release their own branches.
> 
> For realistic looks and performance, in my opinion -because after all it’s just an opinion - go to CryEngine.
> 
> Since you are just starting to learn, you won’t miss out on much.
> 
> If your intent is to just render a single screenshot, or to make a rendered movie, then I guess ue4 can work, since performance doesn’t matter with those.
> You’ll probably spend over a day on a 10m scene at 4k though.
> Even 1080p logo work takes around 10m to properly render sometimes.
> 
> If your intent is to generate something playable - then UE 4.18 or even before is more likely a better choice.
> 
> I’d still suggest pulling the source and building from it in *all* occurrences.
> 
> Particularly since currently .27 is beyond broke off the launcher.


----------



## Renzatic

Huntn said:


> This guy thinks I should drop UE and go to CryEngine. Hmm, most likely if I was to switch it would be to Unity, but what do I know? I'm looking for something easy to learn, that is basically free, and includes a good availability of low cost assets. One thing that caught my attention is that Quixel/Megascans is basically free with a UE account. I wonder if the same thing applies for either Unity or CryEngine?
> Thoughts?




UE4 is dying on the sense that UE5 is on the horizon, and does some absolutely freakishly amazing things that no other engine does. 

Though if you do want to jump ship for some reason, I'd recommend Unity. CryEngine is okay from what I've seen, but it hasn't garnered the same amount of support as the other two. I think Crytek ended up selling the engine to Amazon recently, and they're now marketing it as Lumberyard or something like.

As for the Megascan stuff, they're only available for free when used with UE. Epic and Quixel are running something of an honor system here, because there's nothing stopping you from taking their assets to use elsewhere, but if you want to stay above board legally, you'll need to buy them.


----------



## Huntn

@Renzatic, looking over the images of  your materials and thought I'd mention that if you make them Texture Sample Parameters instead of Texture Samples, when you create an instance, you can use that instance, and either replace the textures in that instance or make a copy of it, and then swap the textures, very handy, all without messing with the original material.
The key here is that when they become Texture Sample Parameters, they must each have unique names on the nodes or you'll end up with issues because the engine recognizes the node based on the parameter's given name. So they'd have to be Param1, Param2, etc or Albedo, Cavity, Roughness etc.

I got bogged down with a create a photorealistic world tutorial. the author talks about lighting and post processing setup with is important for my forest scene, since in the original the author flies thought it all.

Regarding your materials, I like that they have 3 textures in them, and am going to revisit the vortex painting tutorial where the author there adds in a height component in the material, and I'm going to see if I can incorporate height in yours or add a 3rd texture in his.  Of course  it is always possible that I don't need a 3 textures, nor need height.

To determine that, I'm going to start messing with the mesh I created in Blender.
As an experiment, first I'll hit it with 2 texture material and see what kind of results I get, then a 3 texture, and somewhere try out height too.

Btw, I went over to the Unity forum and started a thread called Game Engine comparisons, seeking opinions about why Unity users felt that  Unity had advantages over UE, but worded neutrally. And I felt like I almost waked into a shit storm. The first comment was from a mod who said he might shut the thread down because they had "been there, done that and the best thing to do was just check it out".  I'm like holy shit... It felt almost like being in PRSI.  Anyway, last time I looked the thread was still open. Some responders were reasonable and some were pissy, _like how can you possibly trust someone in our forum's trustworthiness and expertise??? It almost made me want to flee. _


----------



## MEJHarrison

Huntn said:


> I wonder if the same thing applies for either Unity or CryEngine?
> Thoughts?




If only there was a way to search the Unity Asset Store for free assets...


----------



## Renzatic

Huntn said:


> Regarding your materials, I like that they have 3 textures in them, and am going to revisit the vortex painting tutorial where the author there adds in a height component in the material, and I'm going to see if I can incorporate height in yours or add a 3rd texture in his. Of course it is always possible that I don't need a 3 textures, nor need height.




Remember, he's using his height map to act more as a controller for the mask rather than height displacement, since he only has the one in there, and he's running it alongside the vertex color node, and through the alpha channel on the lerps.



> Btw, I went over to the Blender forum and started a thread called Game Engine comparisons, seeking opinions about why Unity users felt that   Unity had advantages over UE, but worded neutrally.




I looked for your thread over on Blenderartist, and couldn't find it.  Which Blender forum did you post it to?

As for my opinion, I'd recommend Unity over Unreal for the simple reason that it's a little more newbie friendly, and because I'm not good at compiling stuff, so UE takes me a good minute or two to load up on my computer, while the prebaked Unity binaries fire up in about almost immediately.

If it's quality you're worried about, check out this Unity demo from 2018. 






...though if you were insistent on using UE5 rather than 4, we'd be having an entirely different conversation. UE5 has Nanite and Lumen, which are game changing features that nothing else can touch at the moment.


----------



## Huntn

Renzatic said:


> Remember, he's using his height map to act more as a controller for the mask rather than height displacement, since he only has the one in there, and he's running it alongside the vertex color node, and through the alpha channel on the lerps.
> 
> 
> 
> I looked for your thread over on Blenderartist, and couldn't find it.  Which Blender forum did you post it to?
> 
> As for my opinion, I'd recommend Unity over Unreal for the simple reason that it's a little more newbie friendly, and because I'm not good at compiling stuff, so UE takes me a good minute or two to load up on my computer, while the prebaked Unity binaries fire up in about almost immediately.
> 
> If it's quality you're worried about, check out this Unity demo from 2018.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> ...though if you were insistent on using UE5 rather than 4, we'd be having an entirely different conversation. UE5 has Nanite and Lumen, which are game changing features that nothing else can touch at the moment.



My bad, I went to the Unity not Blender forum.


----------



## Renzatic

Huntn said:


> My bad, I went to the Unity not Blender forum.




You were asking about Unreal in the Unity forum? You're lucky you didn't die!


----------



## Huntn

Renzatic said:


> You were asking about Unreal in the Unity forum? You're lucky you didn't die!



Actually I asked Unity users what they thought made Unity the better choice as a game engine in a neutral tone. 

Impressive video btw.
I’m not insisting on UE5 yet because it is in beta. I assumed that all of the support resources would be focused on UE4.

One thing I’m not sure about is when they speak of engine load when you are putting the project together, can I assume this load remains when the projected is converted into game status? Btw, I am oblivious (no surprise) to the transition from project to finished game that can be clicked on to launch. There are all these behind the scene nodes that dictate appearance in the game,  Multiple materials and such, do all of these factors remain as is when the project is turned into a final project? Is there a step that converts the project into a game, and from the game, it can no lnger be taken apart in the same way as when it is being developed?


----------



## Huntn

Renzatic said:


> Remember, he's using his height map to act more as a controller for the mask rather than height displacement, since he only has the one in there, and he's running it alongside the vertex color node, and through the alpha channel on the lerps.




My impression which maybe in error that this is how height is handled when it come to blending textures, you don’t want it to be a 50-50 situation, and you want one to appear to have height, such as the tile so the moss can appear to growing in the grout between the tiles? I see this as a significant factor when trying to naturally blend say grasses with a Forest floor. Or maybe for the latter a scattering kind of blend which I’m working on figuring out how to do.


----------



## Renzatic

Huntn said:


> One thing I’m not sure about is when they speak of engine load when you are putting the project together, can I assume this load remains when the projected is converted into game status? Btw, I am oblivious (no surprise) to the transition from project to finished game that can be clicked on to launch. There are all these behind the scene nodes that dictate appearance in the game, Multiple materials and such, do all of these factors remain as is when the project is turned into a final project? Is there a step that converts the project into a game, and from the game, it can no lnger be taken apart in the same way as when it is being developed?




I'm not the best person to ask this question, since I've never made a game before, but my very general understanding is that while the editor does add some overhead to the performance deficit, your performance there will be reflected in when you compile it to a binary. There are some things that will be more efficient when you're running it by itself, like your code won't be in active debug mode, but performance hits from your shader stacks and whatnot will be the same in the editor as they are in the game itself.

Though with that said, having to worry about things like how many draw calls your various particles, materials, and shadowmaps are producing if you're really pushing the engine to its limit, and you probably won't have to get that into the weeds with it.



> My impression which maybe in error that this is how height is handled when it come to blending textures, you don’t want it to be a 50-50 situation, and you want one to appear to have height, such as the tile so the moss can appear to growing in the grout between the tiles? I see this as a significant factor when trying to naturally blend say grasses with a Forest floor. Or maybe for the latter a scattering kind of blend which I’m working on figuring out how to do.




The weird thing about that is that it's using the heightmap to derive height, but it's kinda cheating it. It's acting more like a blend layer in Photoshop, pulling the darker areas of your height map image out first when you splat your paintbrush on your surface, rather than actually looking at it and calculating the height differences.

A good image editor equivalent to it would be to say that you're running a burn tool over your heightmap to produce the mask. It's not actually painting in the cracks, it's just coloring in the dark areas already there first, which happen to be your cracks.


----------



## Huntn

Renzatic said:


> The one thing that might help you the most is to break it down to it's most basic settings. In this case, the color/albedo textures. When you get right down to it, what' you're basically doing is repeating the same thing three or more times for each image that makes up a material.
> 
> Here's a shot of my material in UE, lerp only the three images in the albedo channel. If it looks like I'm covering old ground, or being condescending, don't be offended. I'm just trying to demystify the whole process as much as possible.
> 
> View attachment 9622
> 
> The nodes on the far left are probably the most mysterious. All they're doing is taking the UV map, and using a parameter to multiply it to shrink and grow the texture on your surface. This is good for those times when you grab a neat material you like, but it turns out it's out of scale with the rest of your stuff, giving you some HUGE ASS leaves or whatnot. 1 is UV x 1, or no change. 2 is UV x 2, or the texture repeated 2 by 2 times on the surface, 3 is UV x 3, or the texture repeated 3 by 3 times on your surface, and etc. etc.
> 
> The next stop on the noodle path is your image texture node (called Texture Sample in UE). In this case, your albedo. It's the texture that'll show up on your surfaces.
> 
> Further on down, you hit your lerp. This is where the magic happens. You want to blend two textures, your A and B. So you hook your nodes into socket A on the lerp, copy and paste them down below, add a new texture into your image texture node, and plug this new set of nodes into socket B.
> 
> Now you need a parameter to tell the engine how and where to blend these two nodes together. That's done by plugging a single color channel, in this case red, from the Vertex Color node into the alpha socket on the lerp node. This tells the engine that when you paint red in the vertex color channel, your 2nd texture will appear there. The topmost texture will go to the next undefined socket, which in this case is green. Now, when you paint red, you get your gravel, green will give you grass.
> 
> But you want that third texture, right? That's easy. Just lerp again. Copy one set of texture coordinates and image texture nodes, paste it down below, lead the Image Texture node to your 3rd texture, and hook your initial lerp to A, and your new texture to B onto another lerp. To define where it goes, take the blue color channel socket, and plug it the alpha on your 2nd lerp.
> 
> Why blue instead of green? Remember, the topmost texture defaults to the undefined color. I wanted green to be grass, so I made the 3rd texture blue.
> 
> Now, you can paint red, green, and blue on your surface to mix your grass, gravel, and dirt.
> 
> But what if you want to add in a roughness map, make your simple images more materially? Copy the image nodes and lerps above, and paste them down below your initial three. Change your textures so that the roughness image on A corresponds to the albedo on A, and so on and so on. You don't want to copy your Vertex Colors node, because you can just reuse it. Drag it down, and plug Red and Blue into the appropriate lerps.
> 
> But what about your texture coordinates? Well, you don't want your roughness map image to scale differently than its corresponding albedo. You'll want them to share the same size and space. To do that, just link your first texture coordinate nodes to the first set on your albedo and roughness, and repeat accordingly.
> 
> You'll end up with something like this:
> 
> View attachment 9623
> 
> For any other maps, just repeat the process, and plug the new lerps into their appropriate socket on the material node at the end.
> 
> View attachment 9624
> 
> So you can see what you're doing here. You're making a material out of three materials, and setting parameters to tell it how to blend the various parts of these materials together. Like I said, it's very simple, it just looks complicated because you're defining every little thing step by step by step.
> 
> Yeah, you probably gathered this from the videos you've watched, but I'm really wanting to hammer down the very basics here, to make triply sure you understand how this all works. Once you get the basics down, you can expand upon it, and start getting truly fancy.
> 
> The reason why I initially wanted to show you how to do things in Blender is because it's basically doing the same thing, but it's easier to follow, since it abstracts a lot of fiddly bits.



Just want to confirm the nodes on the left side of your material with red labels are texture coordinates?  I'm going to construct this material and play with it along with the others I've made via tutorial to see what kind of results I get. I might even get brave and look at the forest scene tutorial material, but that is a reach for me at this point. 



			Coordinates Expressions | Unreal Engine 4.27 Documentation


----------



## Huntn

Renzatic said:


> I'm not the best person to ask this question, since I've never made a game before, but my very general understanding is that while the editor does add some overhead to the performance deficit, your performance there will be reflected in when you compile it to a binary. There are some things that will be more efficient when you're running it by itself, like your code won't be in active debug mode, but performance hits from your shader stacks and whatnot will be the same in the editor as they are in the game itself.
> 
> Though with that said, having to worry about things like how many draw calls your various particles, materials, and shadowmaps are producing if you're really pushing the engine to its limit, and you probably won't have to get that into the weeds with it.
> 
> 
> 
> The weird thing about that is that it's using the heightmap to derive height, but it's kinda cheating it. It's acting more like a blend layer in Photoshop, pulling the darker areas of your height map image out first when you splat your paintbrush on your surface, rather than actually looking at it and calculating the height differences.
> 
> A good image editor equivalent to it would be to say that you're running a burn tool over your heightmap to produce the mask. It's not actually painting in the cracks, it's just coloring in the dark areas already there first, which happen to be your cracks.



That's one area where I have yet to venture, what turns a UE Project into a stand alone game...


----------



## Renzatic

Huntn said:


> Just want to confirm the nodes on the left side of your material with red labels are texture coordinates?  I'm going to construct this material and play with it along with the others I've made via tutorial to see what kind of results I get. I might even get brave and look at the forest scene tutorial material, but that is a reach for me at this point.
> 
> 
> 
> Coordinates Expressions | Unreal Engine 4.27 Documentation




Yup, it is indeed. I combined it with a multiply node to shrink and grow the texture on the surface.

Here's what I'm working on, if you're interested.


----------



## Huntn

Renzatic said:


> Yup, it is indeed. I combined it with a multiply node to shrink and grow the texture on the surface.
> 
> Here's what I'm working on, if you're interested.
> 
> View attachment 9747



This art style reminds me of the Road 96 game art style. Is this for fun or work? Interesting material logic if that what I'm looking at. 

​Tonight was a UE milestone, I actually sat down at my computer and worked on a project (Forest Scene) not attached to tutorial. It started slow, because with one of the materials I had, it would not vertex paint. Then I played with it a bit, did not change the material in any way, but it started to work. I think I remembered a step or keystroke/  Then I combined two materials I had, that blended two materials by  adding height and cavity nodes to the one that did not have it when I started. Amazingly it still seems to function after I altered it. . Still looking at a way to blend 3 textures, with these other features, that's why I want to play with your material schematic.


----------



## Renzatic

Huntn said:


> Still looking at a way to blend 3 textures, with these other features, that's why I want to play with your material schematic.




Try this. You should be able to copy and paste it into the material editor like the forest material you posted earlier.









						UE4 Vertex Color Material - Pastebin.com
					

Pastebin.com is the number one paste tool since 2002. Pastebin is a website where you can store text online for a set period of time.




					pastebin.com


----------



## Huntn

Renzatic said:


> Try this. You should be able to copy and paste it into the material editor like the forest material you posted earlier.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> UE4 Vertex Color Material - Pastebin.com
> 
> 
> Pastebin.com is the number one paste tool since 2002. Pastebin is a website where you can store text online for a set period of time.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> pastebin.com



Thanks! I’ll look at this.The question in my mind regarding how height works with 3 textures together, and it might be possible that it primary value of this kind of height is when use with something brick and moss (2 textures) where you want the moss in the cracks. When it comes to natural materials, just scattering it maybe good enough. This is a little different from elevation based height landscape blending that deals with things like layers up the side of a mountain.


----------



## Renzatic

Huntn said:


> Thanks! I’ll look at this.The question in my mind regarding how height works with 3 textures together, and it might be possible that it primary value of this kind of height is when use with something brick and moss (2 textures) where you want the moss in the cracks. When it comes to natural materials, just scattering it maybe good enough. This is a little different from elevation based height landscape blending that deals with things like layers up the side of a mountain.




If you're referring back to the Vertex Color tutorial from earlier, remember, it's not actually calculating height in this instance. Rather, it's using the blacks, greys, and whites of height map texture to assist the mask to fill in those lower parts before hitting the higher bits.

Though if you want to blend three heightmaps together, you can do that with an extra three textures, and another set of lerps.

As for totally random, natural settings, that technique can help with blends, since it'll make it so that you can set the grass texture to fill in the lower spaces of a gravel texture without having to put as much effort into it.


----------



## Renzatic

On my end, I got more of my camper done!


----------



## Huntn

Renzatic said:


> Try this. You should be able to copy and paste it into the material editor like the forest material you posted earlier.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> UE4 Vertex Color Material - Pastebin.com
> 
> 
> Pastebin.com is the number one paste tool since 2002. Pastebin is a website where you can store text online for a set period of time.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> pastebin.com



Did you upload this to pastebin? If so thanks for the extra effort. I imported this material and put some texture into it, dirt, forest ground, and grass.

Remembering a previous  blending tutorial that included height (masking) where the bottom texture (in that case tile) was considered primary, there were two textures (tile and grass) and the grass would fill in the grout part of the tile. And the author was always commenting the “primary” texture goes  to the  Lerp A pin. With multiple lerps in a chain, not always true, but for the last Lerp that connects to the Material node, primary or dominant texture would connect to the Lerp A pin, if that makes any sense.

So in this case there are 3 textures, no height/masking  action (yet), and I wanted to keep the same hierarchy if that is possible, where the most dominant texture is the texture that is on the bottom, functioning as a base in the world. Ie, if you dig down, you cut the grass, and push aside the forest floor, to hit dirt.

Prioritized, that would be the bottom texture (dirt), with forest ground middle, and grass as the top texture (in the world).  But in material structuring, as I have seen it displayed, based on how nodes/Lerps are strung together, in relationship with each other, the highest priority (primary) texture is listed on top. That is an organizational choice or preference. 

So in the material structure, from top to bottom, it would be dirt, forest floor, and grass in the bottom. It has to do with blending mechanics based on a chosen material structure, and because I want the primary texture on top to mimic what I’ve seen before In previous tutorials and I like making organizational decisions based on a primary texture first, 

I used the same relationship as in the previous 2 texture vector blending tutorial organizing the textures by heiarchy. So in the material below in each of the 3 groups base color (albedo), roughness, and normal, I stacked these 3 textures in each group from top to bottom as  dirt (highest priority), forest ground (middle priority) and grass (bottom priority), prioritizing their values because as previously explained, in the world, I want dirt to be primary on the bottom, forest ground to be middle, and grass to be top. But to repeat myself,  in the material the top priority goes on top, at least the way I am organizing the materials I’m making.
Not confusing right? Hey, I’m confused. 
I’m getting to my point… 

So based on the hierarchy I created, when I drag this material to a mesh, what I first see is the dirt as the texture covering the mesh! Which is great because I’m considering the dirt to be the base. And based on how everything is connected, with 3 textures, grass should be the one that sits on top of the other two because of it’s height.  In other words when grass grows, it will cover the other 2 And this is what is displayed,

So for painting controls:

With a freshly applied material, all you see is dirt whuch I have described  as the primary texture or base. Forest ground and grass are in competition with each other above the dirt as follows:
R- paints forest ground over dirt, zero effect on grass.
R Shift- removes forest ground to reveal dirt, zero effect on grass.
B- paints grass.
B-Shift removes grass.
So far, so good. No I just need to see if I should or want to add more features. I’m comparing this to the Vertex Painting tutorial that has only 2 textures, but includes, UV, Spectral, Height, and World Displacement elements,


----------



## Renzatic

Huntn said:


> So far, so good. No I just need to see if I should or want to add more features. I’m comparing this to the Vertex Painting tutorial that has only 2 textures, but includes, UV, Spectral, Height, and World Displacement elements,




Show off some screenshots of what you've made thus far. I'm interested in seeing them.


----------



## Renzatic

Ah, the joys of baking. One of these is 30,000 tris, the other is 2.

This could be you one day, Huntn. You just have to believe!


----------



## Huntn

Renzatic said:


> Show off some screenshots of what you've made thus far. I'm interested in seeing them.



All I’ve made are texture tests so far experimenting. Last night I burned 3 hours working on it. It’s a handful understanding material mechanics and experimenting with nodes. When I have something worthy I’ll post it,

Pretty soon I’ll be tackling the infamous blender mesh for the Forest scene. Still deciding on if I like that material of yours or to expand on it’s capabilities, But I’m also considering expanding on that scene, I might just curve the road off to the side where the camera is located If that is not too hard,

Do you remember the mesh with the raised center portion?  

​I’m assuming to make this curve to the left at the end close to the camera. you could just grab a series of vertices and start pulling them left? It might take a segment devoted just to this.


----------



## Huntn

Here is a good example of me wasting an evening. I made this static mesh in blender, 2 parts a center and a side. It looked like the image in the previous post. So I imported them into UE, fox file format, the center one comes in looking normal with the gray checker pattern on it. But the side comes in as just an outline. You can see the outline on the right in the image below. Well I'll just apply a texture or a material to it. Nope it wil not accept any of that. I double checked the texture settings to see if there are any obvious differences in these two files and I can't find any. Any idea? I've also asked this over at the UE forums, and one guy has been helpful there so maybe I'll get an answer by tomorrow. This virtually stopped me in my tracks as I dickered with trying to figure this out...

​


----------



## Renzatic

Huntn said:


> I’m assuming to make this curve to the left at the end close to the camera. you could just grab a series of vertices and start pulling them left? It might take a segment devoted just to this.




What I did when I made that mesh was grab the outermost edge on that side, extruded it up, then ran a second extrude, and pulled it out. After that, I ran a couple of loop cuts, and doctored it up a bit to make it lumpy.



> Pretty soon I’ll be tackling the infamous blender mesh for the Forest scene. Still deciding on if I like that material of yours or to expand on it’s capabilities, But I’m also considering expanding on that scene, I might just curve the road off to the side where the camera is located If that is not too hard,




It's a simple material, pretty straightforward. It provides the basics, which can be expanded upon easily.

Curving the road? There's a number of different ways you can do that. One, you can model it by hand, which is the most obvious solution to it. But you can also get fancy, and array your road piece along a curve. That's what I did with my train tracks in my last project. You can do this in both Blender and Unreal, though, par for the course, I'm not 100% sure how to do it in the latter.








> This virtually stopped me in my tracks as I dickered with trying to figure this out...




If I had take a stab at a guess, I'd say your normals are flipped on the wrong side. If you move the camera underneath the mesh, you can see the surface there right? If so, do this...


----------



## Huntn

Renzatic said:


> What I did when I made that mesh was grab the outermost edge on that side, extruded it up, then ran a second extrude, and pulled it out. After that, I ran a couple of loop cuts, and doctored it up a bit to make it lumpy.
> 
> 
> 
> It's a simple material, pretty straightforward. It provides the basics, which can be expanded upon easily.
> 
> Curving the road? There's a number of different ways you can do that. One, you can model it by hand, which is the most obvious solution to it. But you can also get fancy, and array your road piece along a curve. That's what I did with my train tracks in my last project. You can do this in both Blender and Unreal, though, par for the course, I'm not 100% sure how to do it in the latter.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> If I had take a stab at a guess, I'd say your normals are flipped on the wrong side. If you move the camera underneath the mesh, you can see the surface there right? If so, do this...



Thank you! Yep texture on the bottom side. Normals were flipped for one of the meshes.  I looked this up for Unreal Engine how to flip normals and the answer eluded me.  I went back to Blender, checked the mesh, and under maybe coordinates(?) one of them was -1 while the other two were 1.0. Simple changing the -1 to 1 fixed the issue.

As far as the curve in the road, I just don’t like the idea of the road running into the camera. It looks fine for an image, or a painting,  but the way it was made, everything behind the camera is unfinished. I want it to be finished all around and a road that curves and dissapears around terrain seems better if I can do that.

I’m going back into Blended and see if I can make that happen. An issue I think is the way I made the road. Where as, you made the road and elevated sides as one piece, I did as the tutorial did with 3 pieces, a bottom central piece of road and two elevated sides, separate that butt into the center road portion. 

I think ultimately I want the outside of most of the road pieces to remain square so they can be tiled to give the road length receding from the camera. But closest to the camera where I want to make the road curve, I could take a segment composed of the 3 pieces, two sides and the center, some how merge them so when I start dragging a curve into the road part, the vertical sides that define the road area, will be dragged along. Maybe I could do this in just one segment, or maybe it will take 2. I’ll have to see how tight I can make this curve.


----------



## Renzatic

Huntn said:


> I’ll have to see how tight I can make this curve.




The nicest thing about working with 3D is that you don't have to stick to straight square tiles. When you get your tile to follow a curve, it'll deform the underlying geometry to conform to the curve you've tied it to, allowing you to do all kinds of cool stuff.

It allows you to do things like, say, make a fence that twists along the edge of the road without having to design the whole thing by hand. So long as the mesh has enough geometry to deform properly, it'll look completely natural.

For example...






Then you can fill in the outside edges with free floating geo that crosses with your road geometry.


----------



## Huntn

Renzatic said:


> The nicest thing about working with 3D is that you don't have to stick to straight square tiles. When you get your tile to follow a curve, it'll deform the underlying geometry to conform to the curve you've tied it to, allowing you to do all kinds of cool stuff.
> 
> It allows you to do things like, say, make a fence that twists along the edge of the road without having to design the whole thing by hand. So long as the mesh has enough geometry to deform properly, it'll look completely natural.
> 
> For example...
> 
> 
> View attachment 9824
> 
> Then you can fill in the outside edges with free floating geo that crosses with your road geometry.



Holy crap, did you do this from the mesh you made?? Looking forward to your tutorial! 
See I have some preconceptions that are wrong, such as keeping meshes confirming to the grid. I had no clue you could make a serpentine shape like this and then easily mesh it with the rest of the world.


----------



## Renzatic

Huntn said:


> Holy crap, did you do this from the mesh you made?? Looking forward to your tutorial!
> See I have some preconceptions that are wrong, such as keeping meshes confirming to the grid. I had no clue you could make a serpentine shape like this and then easily mesh it with the rest of the world.




I'll do a quick one for you right fast.

Like I said, the grid is primarily there to act as a measuring guide. For objects that are meant to tile, like modular modeling, you'll want to stick to the grid for simplicity sake, but for the most part, you can use it or ignore it at your own discretion.

What I usually do is just slap my geometry into a scene, and start working at it. Once I'm done, I'll compare to some shape that has a specific size, and scale it up or down accordingly. This isn't CAD or architectural work. You don't have to be exactingly exact down to the barest millimeter. Your primary concern is that it's all sized realistically enough to look natural, and all your various parts gel well together.


----------



## Renzatic

Huntn said:


> Tutorial!




Okay, here's a very slow and plodding tutorial, just for you! If you're wondering what I did near the start of the curving, I flatted the bezier curve to make the initial two nodes aligned, because by default, Blender gives you this weird bend on their beziers that will mess you up if you're aligning big objects.


----------



## Huntn

Renzatic said:


> Okay, here's a very slow and plodding tutorial, just for you! If you're wondering what I did near the start of the curving, I flatted the bezier curve to make the initial two nodes aligned, because by default, Blender gives you this weird bend on their beziers that will mess you up if you're aligning big objects.



Slow and plodding, exactly what I need, seriously fantastic!  I’ll try this. By the way I’ll assume there is a way to merge my 3 mesh pieces into one for the purpose of bending it, putting a curve in it 90 degrees.  If there is not a very easy way to do this,  I can research it.

I find this forest scene to be fantastic, but do you agree that a road that just ends at the camera is ok for a non interactive scene, like a painting, but if you want interaction with this scene a better choice is to run this road around a corner out of site? Yes the scene will have its boundaries no matter what,  but having  a road run straight up to a boundary is not the best imo If the scene will be interactive as in you can turn around and see what’s behind you. It’s ok if you disagree.


----------



## Renzatic

Huntn said:


> Slow and plodding, exactly what I need, seriously fantastic!  I’ll try this. By the way I’ll assume there is a way to merge my 3 mesh pieces into one for the purpose of bending it, putting a curve in it 90 degrees. If there is not a very easy way to do this, I can research it.




If you're talking about making a set 90 degree tile, that's easy to do. Take your road bit, set an array modifier, put in however many iterations as you need to get a smooth curve without overlapping any geo (at least 3), then slap a simple deform modifier, set it to bend, and set the angle at 90 degrees on the Z axis. You'll get this:





As you can see, you get some texture pinching at the pivot point and outermost edges, but you can fix that by redoing your UVs for this specific piece, and repainting your vertex colors.



Huntn said:


> I find this forest scene to be fantastic, but do you agree that a road that just ends at the camera is ok for a non interactive scene, like a painting, but if you want interaction with this scene a better choice is to run this road around a corner out of site? Yes the scene will have its boundaries no matter what, but having a road run straight up to a boundary is not the best imo If the scene will be interactive as in you can turn around and see what’s behind you. It’s ok if you disagree.




No, I very much agree. Since you're going for an interactive scene, you'll need to do more with your environment than what's shown in the forest video to sell the illusion. Just having the road end, floating off into the void won't work for you. You'll need to do something like set up a roadblock that prevents the player from moving past it, but still having the road stretch off or curve into the distance to give them the impression that they're in a little world. 

Plus, you'll need to make your road a part of the environment beyond. You don't want the road floating 10 feet above your forest floor. That'll look weird. It needs to be in the scene entirely as one contiguous whole.

For that, you might want to look at the forest video for design pointers, but hit up an environment modeling tutorial for Blender and/or Unreal to learn how to do what you want to do.


----------



## Huntn

Renzatic said:


> If you're talking about making a set 90 degree tile, that's easy to do. Take your road bit, set an array modifier, put in however many iterations as you need to get a smooth curve without overlapping any geo (at least 3), then slap a simple deform modifier, set it to bend, and set the angle at 90 degrees on the Z axis. You'll get this:
> 
> View attachment 9831
> 
> As you can see, you get some texture pinching at the pivot point and outermost edges, but you can fix that by redoing your UVs for this specific piece, and repainting your vertex colors.
> 
> 
> 
> No, I very much agree. Since you're going for an interactive scene, you'll need to do more with your environment than what's shown in the forest video to sell the illusion. Just having the road end, floating off into the void won't work for you. You'll need to do something like set up a roadblock that prevents the player from moving past it, but still having the road stretch off or curve into the distance to give them the impression that they're in a little world.
> 
> Plus, you'll need to make your road a part of the environment beyond. You don't want the road floating 10 feet above your forest floor. That'll look weird. It needs to be in the scene entirely as one contiguous whole.
> 
> For that, you might want to look at the forest video for design pointers, but hit up an environment modeling tutorial for Blender and/or Unreal to learn how to do what you want to do.



*Nevermind, Got it...*

*To Duplicate and mirror.*
Select Object (Object mode)
RC and Duplicate, try not to move it, LC.
Object Mode> Object> Select Mirror and then select a axis. This will mirror, reorient the existing item, not create a new mirrored item.

A little confusion on my part because when I say mirror an item, I expect a new object to be created as a mirror, not change the orientation of an existing object.

--------------
Ok this request might piss you off a little, but hopefully not.  As I've said I have my blender mesh in 3 pieces, well actually it's 2 right now, the center road area and a side. In UE it's pretty easy to mirror a side, flip it and move it to the opposite side  But in Blender,  I've been dicking around with taking the side piece of mine and trying to mirror it. Sure I can duplicate it and rotate it to move it, but if I can get it to duplicate and mirror, or just mirror (not sure), then it will be at the exact orientation, just reversed.

I've been reading tutorials on it, the Blender documentation, and so far I've not been able to mirror it. As I see it the advantage of mirroring is that you've got a mirror image that maintains orientation. My concern here is tiling. I want additional pieces to tile properly.  Frankly I'm wondering why this is so difficult. Whimper...


----------



## Renzatic

Huntn said:


> Ok this request might piss you off a little, but hopefully not.  As I've said I have my blender mesh in 3 pieces, well actually it's 2 right now, the center road area and a side. In UE it's pretty easy to mirror a side, flip it and move it to the opposite side  But in Blender,  I've been dicking around with taking the side piece of mine and trying to mirror it. Sure I can duplicate it and rotate it to move it, but if I can get it to duplicate and mirror, or just mirror (not sure), then it will be at the exact orientation, just reversed.
> 
> I've been reading tutorials on it, the Blender documentation, and so far I've not been able to mirror it. As I see it the advantage of mirroring is that you've got a mirror image that maintains orientation. My concern here is tiling. I want additional pieces to tile properly.  Frankly I'm wondering why this is so difficult. Whimper...




Yeah, I'm pretty furious right now. How dare you ask me such a question!

You can find mirroring in the modifier tab along the right side of the screen (the little wrench icon), and it's easy to set up. Just keep in mind that it mirrors according to the position of your origin point (the little orange dot you usually see floating around), rather than world space.

Oh, and if you want to mirror the bank, make sure it's it's own object, rather than attached to the road mesh. If they're both a combined object, it'll try to mirror both the bank, and the road, giving you some messy results. You can separate objects by hitting L to select one continuous mesh, then hitting P, and choosing Separate By Selection.


----------



## Huntn

Renzatic said:


> Yeah, I'm pretty furious right now. How dare you ask me such a question!
> 
> You can find mirroring in the modifier tab along the right side of the screen (the little wrench icon), and it's easy to set up. Just keep in mind that it mirrors according to the position of your origin point (the little orange dot you usually see floating around), rather than world space.
> 
> Oh, and if you want to mirror the bank, make sure it's it's own object, rather than attached to the road mesh. If they're both a combined object, it'll try to mirror both the bank, and the road, giving you some messy results. You can separate objects by hitting L to select one continuous mesh, then hitting P, and choosing Separate By Selection.



Do you think I'd be better off merging my 3 pieces into one mesh for this curving?


----------



## Renzatic

Huntn said:


> Do you think I'd be better off merging my 3 pieces into one mesh for this curving?




You could keep them separate, but it's a little more busywork to manage, since you'd have to set the modifiers on both models.


----------



## Huntn

Renzatic said:


> You could keep them separate, but it's a little more busywork to manage, since you'd have to set the modifiers on both models.



Easiest way to merge? I'm online right now looking at descriptions, you can't just pick two objects and use the merge command on them?


----------



## Renzatic

Huntn said:


> Easiest way to merge? I'm online right now looking at descriptions, you can't just pick two objects and use the merge command on them?




You join them together in object mode. Select the objects you wanna merge, and hit Ctrl-J


----------



## Huntn

Renzatic said:


> You join them together in object mode. Select the objects you wanna merge, and hit Ctrl-J



That easy? Shoot me.  I've looked up several articles on merging and none said that...at least not where I saw. Thanks I'll try that. This is when I get frustrated when something like this comes up and I spend an hour researching the simplest of things.

I also figured out I don't want mirror, because then it makes the opposite sides of the road look the same. So instead I do want to duplicate and rotate....


----------



## Renzatic

Huntn said:


> That easy? Shoot me.  I've looked up several articles on merging and none said that...at least not where I saw. Thanks I'll try that. This is when I get frustrated when something like this comes up and I spend an hour researching the simplest of things.
> 
> I also figured out I don't want mirror, because then it makes the opposite sides of the road look the same. So instead I do want to duplicate and rotate....




That easy. It ain't your fault though. These programs are so endlessly complicated, finding exactly what you need without knowing the magic keywords can be a chore in and of itself sometimes.

As for your mirroring conundrum, what I'd do is mirror both sides, work on one, then apply the mirror, and readjust the opposite side so it doesn't look the same at a casual glace. It might save you a couple few minutes doing it that way.

But if you want to duplicate your mesh, you can do this...and I'm amazed that I can do this entirely by muscle memory by this point...

Select the object you want to duplicate, hit Shift-D, then R to activate rotate, Z to constrain the rotate to the Z axis, type 180 on the keypad to rotate it a perfect 180 degrees, then move into position. If you want to further constrain it, you can hit the X or Y keys to constrain the move to that axis.


----------



## Huntn

Renzatic said:


> Okay, here's a very slow and plodding tutorial, just for you! If you're wondering what I did near the start of the curving, I flatted the bezier curve to make the initial two nodes aligned, because by default, Blender gives you this weird bend on their beziers that will mess you up if you're aligning big objects.



I've tried to do this several times, but things happen differently when I do it. For example:

Array- that part went ok, second section of road appeared,  I changed the X off set from 1.0 to .95 to get rid of the gap.
When Fit Curve selected- the second section of road disappeared as in the video.
When Curve: Benzier curve selected- the second piece of road came back for me, but not in the video.
So at this point I still have 2 segments of road appearing butted into each other, and in the video there is one.
Click on the Benzier Curve (yellow curved line) attached to the road segment.
I had to look under the road to see it. No problem.
At this point you did something to make mode choice appear: edit mode or object mode. You chose edit. Since I could not figure out what you selected,  I just hit Tab and I got two straight line segments angled with each other, as you did.
Then. you did something else to take the curve out of the road, I watched your key strokes several times but no joy,  could not figure out how to get the two line segments associated with  the benzier curve, straightened out which in the video made the road look straight again. In my project, the  road remained curved. Of note I'm showing two road segments butted together,  and the front one is straight, and the back one is curved to the left away from the camera.

I'm kind of lost at this point. When I hover my cursor over one of the line segments and hit S, I can swing it around, but the road if it grows, tries to grow away from the camera in a straight line. I want to build my road towards the camera.

Don't worry about it. If there is an easy explanation, I'm all ears.  Otherwise I don't want you to get overworked trying to talk me though this. I'll also take a look at the video about making curves you posted.


----------



## Huntn

I played with it some more. Got the road growing with a left turn, selected the curve on my road, got the 2 line segments at angles.
I just need to know the keystrokes you used to straighten this road out temporarily. Then you went to a wireframe mode of somekind and started growing it. Not sure of the controls you used to set points along the curve, bend the curve, and manipulate the handles on the curve to reshape it.

​


----------



## Renzatic

Huntn said:


> So at this point I still have 2 segments of road appearing butted into each other, and in the video there is one.




I wouldn't worry too much about that. Your road is probably slightly smaller than mine, and the modifiers will output a new piece once the underlying bezier curve is long enough to account for two of them.



> I had to look under the road to see it. No problem.




One thing that'll help you out considerably is to make your vertex points a little bigger. By default, Blender sets them to 3px, and I find they're easier to work with when they're double that size, 6px. To change that, go to edit in the menu at the top left of the screen, choose preferences, go to the Themes tab, expand the 3D Viewport box, and scroll down a good ways until you see Vertex Size. Change that to 6px.



> At this point you did something to make mode choice appear: edit mode or object mode. You chose edit. Since I could not figure out what you selected,  I just hit Tab and I got two straight line segments angled with each other, as you did.




By default, the Tab key is a toggle between Object and Edit mode. I prefer the Pie Menu setup, where Tab gives me all the options for all the various modes. If you want to change your setup to be more like mine, go to edit/preferences again, scroll down to Keymap, and turn on Tab For Pie Menu, and Extra Shading Pie Menu Items. Also, while you're there, I'd recommend changing the Spacebar Action to Search. That is really handy to have around.



> Then. you did something else to take the curve out of the road, I watched your key strokes several times but no joy,  could not figure out how to get the two line segments associated with  the benzier curve, straightened out which in the video made the road look straight again. In my project, the  road remained curved. Of note I'm showing two road segments butted together,  and the front one is straight, and the back one is curved to the left away from the camera.




I watched through that part of the video again, and realized that the screencast key viewer isn't showing my keystrokes for that action. What I'm doing there is hitting A to select all my nodes and handles, Y to constrain the scale to the Y axis, then Numpad 0 to even them all out along along the same axis, straightening them up.



> I'm kind of lost at this point. When I hover my cursor over one of the line segments and hit S, I can swing it around, but the road if it grows, tries to grow away from the camera in a straight line. I want to build my road towards the camera.




Your camera can be positioned freely anywhere, at any time. Worry more about building your scene as a whole.



> I played with it some more. Got the road growing with a left turn, selected the curve on my road, got the 2 line segments at angles.
> I just need to know the keystrokes you used to straighten this road out temporarily. Then you went to a wireframe mode of somekind and started growing it. Not sure of the controls you used to set points along the curve, bend the curve, and manipulate the handles on the curve to reshape it.




There's a few things I did there to make things easier on me. First off, I went to an overhead viewport, which will, by default, constrain all rotations and movements to the same plane. 

I also switched to Wireframe Viewport by hitting the Z key, and choosing Wireframe. You can also activate by looking at the 4 little sphere icons at the top right of the screen, and clicking the leftmost one. In order, they're Wireframe, Solid, Material Preview, and Render.

To grow it, I'd both move one of the bezier points to get it to a certain length with G, and extrude a new point out by hitting E when I have one node already selected. I also added an extra point between two existing nodes by selecting two of them, rightclicking, and selecting Subdivide, which will add an extra point between the two highlighted nodes.

At this point, since you're starting to play more with Blender, I'd really recommend watching an intro to modelling video to help you out. You're jumping into the deep end before you've even learned how to kick your feet here.


----------



## Huntn

Renzatic said:


> I wouldn't worry too much about that. Your road is probably slightly smaller than mine, and the modifiers will output a new piece once the underlying bezier curve is long enough to account for two of them.
> 
> 
> 
> One thing that'll help you out considerably is to make your vertex points a little bigger. By default, Blender sets them to 3px, and I find they're easier to work with when they're double that size, 6px. To change that, go to edit in the menu at the top left of the screen, choose preferences, go to the Themes tab, expand the 3D Viewport box, and scroll down a good ways until you see Vertex Size. Change that to 6px.
> 
> 
> 
> By default, the Tab key is a toggle between Object and Edit mode. I prefer the Pie Menu setup, where Tab gives me all the options for all the various modes. If you want to change your setup to be more like mine, go to edit/preferences again, scroll down to Keymap, and turn on Tab For Pie Menu, and Extra Shading Pie Menu Items. Also, while you're there, I'd recommend changing the Spacebar Action to Search. That is really handy to have around.
> 
> 
> 
> I watched through that part of the video again, and realized that the screencast key viewer isn't showing my keystrokes for that action. What I'm doing there is hitting A to select all my nodes and handles, Y to constrain the scale to the Y axis, then Numpad 0 to even them all out along along the same axis, straightening them up.
> 
> 
> 
> Your camera can be positioned freely anywhere, at any time. Worry more about building your scene as a whole.
> 
> 
> 
> There's a few things I did there to make things easier on me. First off, I went to an overhead viewport, which will, by default, constrain all rotations and movements to the same plane.
> 
> I also switched to Wireframe Viewport by hitting the Z key, and choosing Wireframe. You can also activate by looking at the 4 little sphere icons at the top right of the screen, and clicking the leftmost one. In order, they're Wireframe, Solid, Material Preview, and Render.
> 
> To grow it, I'd both move one of the bezier points to get it to a certain length with G, and extrude a new point out by hitting E when I have one node already selected. I also added an extra point between two existing nodes by selecting two of them, rightclicking, and selecting Subdivide, which will add an extra point between the two highlighted nodes.
> 
> At this point, since you're starting to play more with Blender, I'd really recommend watching an intro to modelling video to help you out. You're jumping into the deep end before you've even learned how to kick your feet here.



It’s your fault, you made it look easy, 

What you are doing in the tutorial does not look hard, if the keystrokes are displayed, which they are not.

Another thing that is different, I am used to graphic programs where a bezier curve is easier to control and intuitive, just grab, click on, or hold the LMB button to latch onto a handle and pull it around, lengthen or shorten it.  For the life of me, in Bender,  I’ve not been able to figure out how to grab the bezier curve handles.

I watched another video wher the author draws a line freehand. Then he uses the Array to follow it, As he was drawing this, I was reminiscing about the days where I could do the same thing with a bezier curve. Can you draw a stand alone bezier curve in Bender, if so how? I’m thinking it might be easier to draw the line, but I want a nice smooth line, and then use the Fit to Curve function.


----------



## Renzatic

Huntn said:


> Another thing that is different, I am used to graphic programs where a bezier curve is easier to control and intuitive, just grab, click on, or hold the LMB button to latch onto a handle and pull it around, lengthen or shorten it. For the life of me, in Bender, I’ve not been able to figure out how to grab the bezier curve handles.




You manipulate the bezier curves just like everything else in Blender: left-click to select, GSR to grab, rotate, and scale, and E to extrude. If you want to grab the handles, you first select the main node, then click on which handle you want to grab. It's set up that way so that everything is relatively homogenous.

You can make freehand curves by droping in a grease pencil object, drawing out your shape, then converting your stroke to a bezier curve.


----------



## Huntn

Renzatic said:


> If you're talking about making a set 90 degree tile, that's easy to do. Take your road bit, set an array modifier, put in however many iterations as you need to get a smooth curve without overlapping any geo (at least 3), then slap a simple deform modifier, set it to bend, and set the angle at 90 degrees on the Z axis. You'll get this:
> 
> View attachment 9831




Regarding the above I’d like to try this, based on what you said:


array modifier- understood 
put in however many iterations as you need to get a smooth curve without overlapping any geo (at least 3)- iterations? Please be more specific. At least 3 of what, road pieces? How to ovoid overlapping geo?
 then slap a simple deform modifier- I’ll assume this an additional modifier like a curve but something else? I’ll look to see if there is something called deform. 
set it to bend, and set the angle at 90 degrees on the Z axis- I assume these are parameter within the deform modifier.



Renzatic said:


> You manipulate the bezier curves just like everything else in Blender: left-click to select, GSR to grab, rotate, and scale, and E to extrude. If you want to grab the handles, you first select the main node, then click on which handle you want to grab. It's set up that way so that everything is relatively homogenous.
> 
> You can make freehand curves by droping in a grease pencil object, drawing out your shape, then converting your stroke to a bezier curve.




This might be a case in the Blender world where something is considered so obvious that it is not mentioned. Last night I watched a couple of tutorials on curving and the original issue I was running into, not getting handles I could manipulate, that was because I had the object selected with the select pointer versus using the *move* *selection*. I mean DUH. I spent quite a bit of time watching videos where no one seemed to say “select move”, including you.  During a video, I just happened to notice “move” was selected instead of “select”. 

Other programs, selecting the object alone pulls up manipulation handles by virtue of being selected allowing you to manipulate them. Ok now I know how to manipulate curves. 

Also last night, I made a road using road segments, using the “array” and “fit to curve method”, following a curve I drew.  *Please confirm  that at the end of this you must save this as a mesh?*

The problem I had is when I exported this road into  UE, I ended up with sections that had no surface to apply texture to, so I went back to Blender, saw that one of the coordinates was negative (normal flipped) and fixed that, but what I got back in UE was kind of messy looking, and part of the surface was still invisible. So I have no clue.

So at this point, I’m spending too much time on this. I’ll try to do the 90 degree turn as per you example above, that is good enough, and see if that works and if it does not, I’ll just forget that aspect for now and get back to doing the forest scene as is,

Btw, I’m not frustrated at anything you have done, I appreciate your bounty of help.


----------



## Renzatic

Huntn said:


> array modifier- understood




Woot! 



> put in however many iterations as you need to get a smooth curve without overlapping any geo (at least 3)- iterations? Please be more specific. At least 3 of what, road pieces? How to ovoid overlapping geo?




Yup, at least three iterations of your road on the array modifier to provide it enough room to smoothly bend the road 90 degrees without overlapping your geo. If you want to see exactly what I mean, you can try the Simple Deform with two iterations, and see the results.



> then slap a simple deform modifier- I’ll assume this an additional modifier like a curve but something else? I’ll look to see if there is something called deform.
> 
> set it to bend, and set the angle at 90 degrees on the Z axis- I assume these are parameter within the deform modifier.




Yup. You can find it here in the Modifiers tab.





Look at the right side of my screenshot. That's my modifier stack. The array is on top, and the simple deform is on bottom

FYI, the modifier stack does perform actions in the order they're stacked. Like if you were to add the Simple Deform First and bend it, adding the Array Modifier afterwards would give you copied iterations of that bended piece of road. You have to array first, then bend the results of the array.

...yeah, it's confusing starting out, but there's a logical flow to everything you do here.



> This might be a case in the Blender world where something is considered so obvious that it is not mentioned. Last night I watched a couple of tutorials on curving and the original issue I was running into, not getting handles I could manipulate, that was because I had the object selected with the select pointer versus using the *move* *selection*. I mean DUH. I spent quite a bit of time watching videos where no one seemed to say “select move”, including you.  During a video, I just happened to notice “move” was selected instead of “select”.




Yeah, the way all 3D editors work by default is you first select your elements, then you transform them with a command. It's probably doubly confusing for you, since I don't use the transform gizmos to do anything, preferring the freehand method Blender defaults to.

You can activate translate (move), rotate, and scale with the gizmos by choosing one of those three from the toolbar on the lefthand side of the viewport. When they're active, you'll automatically have the appropriate gizmo pop up when you select an element.



> Also last night, I made a road using road segments, using the “array” and “fit to curve method”, following a curve I drew.  *Please confirm  that at the end of this you must save this as a mesh?*




Yeah, if you're sending it to Unreal, you'll need to apply all your modifiers. You do it by clicking the little downpointing chevron symbol on the top right of the modifier box. Like so...







> The problem I had is when I exported this road into  UE, I ended up with sections that had no surface to apply texture to, so I went back to Blender, saw that one of the coordinates was negative (normal flipped) and fixed that, but what I got back in UE was kind of messy looking, and part of the surface was still invisible. So I have no clue.




The fact that it worked at all without you applying your modifiers is surprising as hell. The FBX exporter must try to realize all procedural geometry during the export process (and only does have a halfassed job of it). Yeah. Apply your modifiers, then try it again.


----------



## Huntn

Renzatic said:


> Woot!
> 
> 
> 
> Yup, at least three iterations of your road on the array modifier to provide it enough room to smoothly bend the road 90 degrees without overlapping your geo. If you want to see exactly what I mean, you can try the Simple Deform with two iterations, and see the results.
> 
> 
> 
> Yup. You can find it here in the Modifiers tab.
> 
> View attachment 9862
> 
> Look at the right side of my screenshot. That's my modifier stack. The array is on top, and the simple deform is on bottom
> 
> FYI, the modifier stack does perform actions in the order they're stacked. Like if you were to add the Simple Deform First and bend it, adding the Array Modifier afterwards would give you copied iterations of that bended piece of road. You have to array first, then bend the results of the array.
> 
> ...yeah, it's confusing starting out, but there's a logical flow to everything you do here.
> 
> 
> 
> Yeah, the way all 3D editors work by default is you first select your elements, then you transform them with a command. It's probably doubly confusing for you, since I don't use the transform gizmos to do anything, preferring the freehand method Blender defaults to.
> 
> You can activate translate (move), rotate, and scale with the gizmos by choosing one of those three from the toolbar on the lefthand side of the viewport. When they're active, you'll automatically have the appropriate gizmo pop up when you select an element.
> 
> 
> 
> Yeah, if you're sending it to Unreal, you'll need to apply all your modifiers. You do it by clicking the little downpointing chevron symbol on the top right of the modifier box. Like so...
> 
> View attachment 9863
> 
> 
> 
> The fact that it worked at all without you applying your modifiers is surprising as hell. The FBX exporter must try to realize all procedural geometry during the export process (and only does have a halfassed job of it). Yeah. Apply your modifiers, then try it again.



When you apply the modifiers does this in itself convert the object into a mesh? That is what seemed to happen, in the Modifier Properties, everything went away. I undid that because, I wanted the option to keep playing with it. For this circumstance, would you make a copy and then apply modifiers?

The other problem it seems if I duplicate this object that has been modified with array to follow a curve and I move it away from the curve it distorts. So how do you make an intermediate mesh, but preserve the original object as is for further editing?


----------



## Renzatic

Huntn said:


> When you apply the modifiers does this in itself convert the object into a mesh? That is what seemed to happen, in the Modifier Properties, everything went away. I undid that because, I wanted the option to keep playing with it. For this circumstance, would you make a copy and then apply modifiers?




In those situations, it wouldn't be a bad idea to make a duplicate with Shift-D, hide it by hitting the little eye icon in the outliner, then apply the modifiers on the original. That way you can further experiment without risking losing the original.



> The other problem it seems if I duplicate this object that has been modified with array to follow a curve and I move it away from the curve it distorts. So how do you make an intermediate mesh, but preserve the original object as is for further editing?




You could parent the road to the bezier curve. First, select the curve, then shift-select the road, then hit Ctrl-P to active the parent menu, and select Parent to Object. If you did it right, when you move the road, you'll move the curve along with it, keeping your shape.

Though keep in mind that you can still move the curve independently.


----------



## Huntn

Renzatic said:


> If you're talking about making a set 90 degree tile, that's easy to do. Take your road bit, set an array modifier, put in however many iterations as you need to get a smooth curve without overlapping any geo (at least 3), then slap a simple deform modifier, set it to bend, and set the angle at 90 degrees on the Z axis. You'll get this:
> 
> View attachment 9831
> 
> As you can see, you get some texture pinching at the pivot point and outermost edges, but you can fix that by redoing your UVs for this specific piece, and repainting your vertex colors.
> 
> 
> 
> No, I very much agree. Since you're going for an interactive scene, you'll need to do more with your environment than what's shown in the forest video to sell the illusion. Just having the road end, floating off into the void won't work for you. You'll need to do something like set up a roadblock that prevents the player from moving past it, but still having the road stretch off or curve into the distance to give them the impression that they're in a little world.
> 
> Plus, you'll need to make your road a part of the environment beyond. You don't want the road floating 10 feet above your forest floor. That'll look weird. It needs to be in the scene entirely as one contiguous whole.
> 
> For that, you might want to look at the forest video for design pointers, but hit up an environment modeling tutorial for Blender and/or Unreal to learn how to do what you want to do.



Ok, just tried this. My only issue is that looking down on it, it curves to the left from origin when 90d is applied. I tried getting it to curve to the right by using -90d, no worky. Is there a setting that controls the direction of the bend?

I also noticed that the original piece is rotated out of it’s orientation during this process. Is there a way to keep the backside of the original piece in place as you build this?
Thanks!


----------



## Renzatic

Huntn said:


> I also noticed that the original piece is rotated out of it’s orientation during this process. Is there a way to keep the backside of the original piece in place as you build this?




There sure is. See, by default, the bend modifier will try to bend it from the origin point of your object, which is usually in the middle. You'll get the shape you want, but as you can see, it rotates the entire mesh except for the very center. So how do you make it so that it bends away from a starting point?

You give the modifier a reference to bend from. To do that, you use an Empty.

An Empty is pretty much a null object. It doesn't do anything itself. It's just a Blender specific marker placed in your scene that won't render, or export in any way. What it does is act as a reference point for other things in your scene. This could be a point to pivot around for a radial array, an effector for geometry nodes, or, in your case, a way to mark a starting point for a bend.

While in Object Mode, Ctrl-A to bring up your Add menu, and go down to the Empty menu. Choose any one of them that you want. I usually choose the unmarked axis, because the center point of it lets you see at a glance where the center of the empty, the origin point, actually is.

Move it to the beginning of your road. In your Simple Deform modifier box, you'll see a space labeled Origin. Hit it, and select your Empty. Now, when you bend your road, it's always going to bend from that point on to the end. If you're feeling brave, you can move the origin around to see how it twists and bends your road.


----------



## Huntn

Renzatic said:


> There sure is. See, by default, the bend modifier will try to bend it from the origin point of your object, which is usually in the middle. You'll get the shape you want, but as you can see, it rotates the entire mesh except for the very center. So how do you make it so that it bends away from a starting point?
> 
> You give the modifier a reference to bend from. To do that, you use an Empty.
> 
> An Empty is pretty much a null object. It doesn't do anything itself. It's just a Blender specific marker placed in your scene that won't render, or export in any way. What it does is act as a reference point for other things in your scene. This could be a point to pivot around for a radial array, an effector for geometry nodes, or, in your case, a way to mark a starting point for a bend.
> 
> While in Object Mode, Ctrl-A to bring up your Add menu, and go down to the Empty menu. Choose any one of them that you want. I usually choose the unmarked axis, because the center point of it lets you see at a glance where the center of the empty, the origin point, actually is.
> 
> Move it to the beginning of your road. In your Simple Deform modifier box, you'll see a space labeled Origin. Hit it, and select your Empty. Now, when you bend your road, it's always going to bend from that point on to the end. If you're feeling brave, you can move the origin around to see how it twists and bends your road.
> 
> View attachment 9869



How to make it bend right instead of left?


----------



## Renzatic

Also, I feel the need to remind you that you're getting into some Modeling 202 bits, when you should be doing 101 courses. You're getting into empties, modifiers, deformations, and all that good stuff right out the gate, when most people start out doing, well, this...


----------



## Renzatic

Huntn said:


> How to make it bend right instead of left?




-90 to 90. You had the right idea before.


----------



## Huntn

Renzatic said:


> -90 to 90. You had the right idea before.



Hmm, that works! But last time I tried it I got something funky,  Maybe because last time  I typed -90d vs -90? Thanks so much! Now apply modifiers and export with fingers crossed.


----------



## Huntn

One other question at your leisure, when I’m moving or rotating stuff I see no place to use a number  versus eye balling it. I assume there is a way to rotate or move by increment in Blemder?


----------



## Huntn

Renzatic said:


> Also, I feel the need to remind you that you're getting into some Modeling 202 bits, when you should be doing 101 courses. You're getting into empties, modifiers, deformations, and all that good stuff right out the gate, when most people start out doing, well, this...
> 
> View attachment 9871



Remember my primary focus is to make something happen in UE at this specific place in time. That’s not to play down Bender, it has a big part to play. But instead of doing beginner stuff, I’m learning how to do more advance stuff in Blender to achieve a specific item for use in UE. I think I’m there now. 

And I realize that because I latched onto something at a higher level than beginner in UE, that there is a ton of crap to learn. This has been why it has taken me so long to get out of the starter gate with UE. I felt I must get a handle on materials or I’d be setting myself up for frustration. And despite the delay, I am not frustrated. I should be able to get going on the replication of the Forest scene today after I get my chores done around the house.


----------



## Renzatic

Huntn said:


> One other question at your leisure, when I’m moving or rotating stuff I see no place to use a number  versus eye balling it. I assume there is a way to rotate or move by increment in Blemder?




There are a number of ways you can do that. The most straightforward is to activate rotate with the R key, click, and you'll see a little bar open up at the bottom left of the viewport. Expand it, and you'll see options to rotate on angles, axis, and orientations. 

Almost every tool has these raw tool options that show up after you commit a command, but it defaults to minimized for some dumb reason.

Also, when you're actively rotating before hitting your left mouse button, you can hit the appropriate rotation axis key, then type in a number on the numpad, like R Z - 4 5 will rotate it negative 45 degrees on the Z axis. 

You can also hold down the Ctrl key to lock your rotations to 5 degree increments.


----------



## Renzatic

Huntn said:


> Remember my primary focus is to make something happen in UE at this specific place in time. That’s not to play down Bender, it has a big part to play. But instead of doing beginner stuff, I’m learning how to do more advance stuff in Blender to achieve a specific item for use in UE. I think I’m there now.




For what you're doing, you're probably fine. Though generally speaking, you should be treating Blender as your toy workship, and Unreal Engine as the sandbox where you're going to play with the toys you make.


----------



## Renzatic

This popped up in my Youtube feed today. Figured you'd get a little kick out of it.


----------



## Huntn

Had trouble getting that road segment array-bend into UE. It looks fine in Blender, but in UE the middle road section the texture is flipped. I have no idea why. In Blender the road is positive coordinates, so I’ll post in the UE forum and see if someone knows.

I also discovered that tiling out the road pieces after applying texture does not work that well because unless the textures are benignedges stick out. I ended up merging them into one mesh, and then blending on it.

And I’m considering adding some features to my material. One material has 3 textures, the other has 2 but it has noise and other stuff. I’ll see if I can add some of those features to the 3 texture material or, add another texture to the first one.


----------



## Renzatic

Huntn said:


> Had trouble getting that road segment array-bend into UE. It looks fine in Blender, but in UE the middle road section the texture is flipped. I have no idea why. In Blender the road is positive coordinates, so I’ll post in the UE forum and see if someone knows.




You might still have some normals flipped due to the way it's calculating the spread of the curve. You can fix it by hitting Alt-N, and selecting Recalculate Outside.

It can be confusing, since Blender automatically defaults to rendering faces two-sided, while UE sticks to one-sided unless told otherwise, so to check it, you can go to your Overlays menu, and select Face Orientation. If your model is all blue, then all the faces are oriented outside, but from the way you're explaining things, I'm expecting it to be a bunch of blues and reds.







> I also discovered that tiling out the road pieces after applying texture does not work that well because unless the textures are benignedges stick out. I ended up merging them into one mesh, and then blending on it.




You just have to make sure it tiles when splatting your colors around. Any change you make to the edge of one tile should be reflected on the other. Considering both Unreal and Blender only let you paint one tile at a time, it can be a little stodgy to do, but not too difficult. 



> And I’m considering adding some features to my material. One material has 3 textures, the other has 2 but it has noise and other stuff. I’ll see if I can add some of those features to the 3 texture material or, add another texture to the first one.




Do it! EXPERIMENTATION IS KEY! Screw around, see how stuff works! That's how you learn the most!


----------



## Huntn

Renzatic said:


> You might still have some normals flipped due to the way it's calculating the spread of the curve. You can fix it by hitting Alt-N, and selecting Recalculate Outside.
> 
> It can be confusing, since Blender automatically defaults to rendering faces two-sided, while UE sticks to one-sided unless told otherwise, so to check it, you can go to your Overlays menu, and select Face Orientation. If your model is all blue, then all the faces are oriented outside, but from the way you're explaining things, I'm expecting it to be a bunch of blues and reds.
> 
> View attachment 9903
> 
> 
> 
> You just have to make sure it tiles when splatting your colors around. Any change you make to the edge of one tile should be reflected on the other. Considering both Unreal and Blender only let you paint one tile at a time, it can be a little stodgy to do, but not too difficult.
> 
> 
> 
> Do it! EXPERIMENTATION IS KEY! Screw around, see how stuff works! That's how you learn the most!



In the process of making the wedge with the road segment, at what point do I select (the road piece, the wedge) and do the Alt-N, recalculate outsides?

Regarding experimenting with materials, I took my somewhat fancy (2texture) material I got from a vertex painting tutorial and inserted a third texture, making some guesses along the way about how the extra plumbing would work. However when i paint with it, the  colors are blocky, filling in little rectangles and geometric shapes, not naturally diffuse like I am used to seeing. I remember something about this in one of the many tutorials I watched, but I can’t remember what they said about fixing it, removing the blockyness.


----------



## Renzatic

Huntn said:


> In the process of making the wedge with the road segment, at what point do I select (the road piece, the wedge) and do the Alt-N, recalculate outsides?




I'd say after you apply the modifiers, since you're then working with real geometry. Though for a test, I went and created a little road strip to see if it was doing anything weird with the normals, and it's all orienting the faces as I'd expect.

A screenshot of your mesh and curve would help me out here.



> Regarding experimenting with materials, I took my somewhat fancy (2texture) material I got from a vertex painting tutorial and inserted a third texture, making some guesses along the way about how the extra plumbing would work. However when i paint with it, the  colors are blocky, filling in little rectangles and geometric shapes, not naturally diffuse like I am used to seeing. I remember something about this in one of the many tutorials I watched, but I can’t remember what they said about fixing it, removing the blockyness.




Vertex painting isn't actually painting in a normal sense. It's more like you're marking vertices to output a certain color on the surface of your mesh. Due to such, the resolution of your individual marks is defined by the number of vertices on your face. Or to put in slightly plainer english, giving it more geometry to work with gives you smaller, smoother strokes.

Normally, it isn't something you'll notice too much because it does such a good job of blending all the random shapes and colors of your various textures together, but if you throw in a texture that stands out a little too much, the effect will become apparent.

To give an example, here's a shot of my little road as it looks textured contrasted against it's underlying vertex paints.









Notice how the shading spreads away from the individual vertices.

If you want to add more resolution to it, you can apply a simple subdivide by selecting all the faces on your model with the A key, rightclicking, and choosing Subdivide.


----------



## Huntn

Wedge in Blender.


After imported to UE. Center portion flipped. Before creating the wedge, I verified all the coordinates of the original piece were 1.0, not - something.


Here  using the new material is the blocky painting with RGB turned on, it is really blocky compared to the samples next to it Using the original material, not my altered material. No clue why it’s blocky.  My guess is I connected something wrong in the material Imaltered, or made a bad assumption. 


Not that this will help much in any, the culprit material.


----------



## Renzatic

Huntn said:


> After imported to UE. Center portion flipped. Before creating the wedge, I verified all the coordinates of the original piece were 1.0, not - something.




It's either a material error, or a normal orientation one. You can see the face when you float underneath it, and are applying the modifiers before bringing them in?



> Here  using the new material is the blocky painting with RGB turned on, it is really blocky compared to the samples next to it Using the original material, not my altered material. No clue why it’s blocky.  My guess is I connected something wrong in the material Imaltered, or made a bad assumption.




Like I said, it's all based upon the underlying geometry. The other materials look fairly similar when you're viewing the raw vertex colors, right?


----------



## Huntn

Renzatic said:


> It's either a material error, or a normal orientation one. You can see the face when you float underneath it, and are applying the modifiers before bringing them in?
> 
> 
> 
> Like I said, it's all based upon the underlying geometry. The other materials look fairly similar when you're viewing the raw vertex colors, right?



I have not looked in Blemder at the underside of the object because there it looks normal. But I can look at the underside. In Blender should the underside look transparent? I’m not applying any texture there. Yes, I have applied the modifiers in Blender before moving it to UE.

I may have discovered in UE that a texture displacement map input may make the texture fill in less blocky Looking. I’m still experimenting.

I rewatched the Forest scene author paint a single section of road with blended textures and when he tiled the road (duplicated the same piece and butted them together),  you can’t see where one ends and the next one starts. This is very interesting because with the single piece if you don’t make the blending exactly the same on both ends, that blending will make the boundary between each new section show the edge because the blending Is slightly different on one end versus the other.  Is he that good?


----------



## Renzatic

Huntn said:


> I have not looked in Blemder at the underside of the object because there it looks normal. But I can look at the underside. In Blender should the underside look transparent? I’m not applying any texture there. Yes, I have applied the modifiers in Blender before moving it to UE.




It'll be two-sided in Blender. I was talking about viewing the mesh inside of UE.



Huntn said:


> I may have discovered in UE that a texture displacement map input may make the texture fill in less blocky Looking. I’m still experimenting.




From what I gathered, he's using a mask for the mask, so it's painting in more than just the raw vertex colors. I wish I had more to tell you on that front, but I'm still not 100% sure what he did there.



> I rewatched the Forest scene author paint a single section of road with blended textures and when he tiled the road (duplicated the same piece and butted them together),  you can’t see where one ends and the next one starts. This is very interesting because with the single piece if you don’t make the blending exactly the same on both ends, that blending will make the boundary between each new section show the edge because the blending Is slightly different on one end versus the other.  Is he that good?




It's actually fairly easy to do. You just have to be mindful of where you're painting, and make sure that anything you paint on one end is reflected on the other. It also helps that the underlying textures are tiled by default, so you don't have to do that much more to make it look good.


----------



## Huntn

Renzatic said:


> It'll be two-sided in Blender. I was talking about viewing the mesh inside of UE.
> 
> 
> 
> From what I gathered, he's using a mask for the mask, so it's painting in more than just the raw vertex colors. I wish I had more to tell you on that front, but I'm still not 100% sure what he did there.
> 
> 
> 
> It's actually fairly easy to do. You just have to be mindful of where you're painting, and make sure that anything you paint on one end is reflected on the other. It also helps that the underlying textures are tiled by default, so you don't have to do that much more to make it look good.



I've explored textures and materials a whole bunch of late and what I have for the road looks like it could be acceptable. My stupid question for today. In the forest video, he takes some stumps and rock groupings (assemblies?) and places a couple of them along the edge of the road.









						Quixel Mossy Embankment
					

Discover a  world of unbounded creativity. Explore a massive asset library, and Quixel’s powerful tools, plus free in-depth tutorials and resources.




					quixel.com
				




Or go to megascans and search on rbBaw for an individual rock asset. 

So I'm thinking I'll just go over to megascans and download some stumps and rocks. Well I have some of those, but when I look through them, beside the preview, I'm seeing tons of textures and LODs, but those are textures too.I don't see anything called meshes. Ok so a rock should have a mesh somewhere, I just can't find them. 
And if I'm actually using LOD textures, no clue how to get those inserted into the project. More studying on my part if you can point me in the right direction.


----------



## Huntn

I am so reminded of how little I know. 
I get through the material aspect of UE, get ready to plunk down some actors in my project and realize I just hit another wall. And it turns out the LODs is one thing I ended up skipping in the official UE Intro Tutorial. I think it's because he had made an object in 3DMax, I did not have that,  and I did not realize at that point that there was a course project I could download to follow along.  I spent the afternoon watching that section, and  will attack my project tomorrow.


----------



## Renzatic

Huntn said:


> And it turns out the LODs is one thing I ended up skipping in the official UE Intro Tutorial.




Fortunately, LODs aren't all that difficult to grasp. They're literally just lower poly versions of your objects.

Most of the work is handled in Unreal. For Blender, all you need to do is make multiple versions of your model, and export them individually. Give them a name like Object_lod0, and Object_lod1 for easy reference.

If you use the Blender To Unreal addon from Epic, you may be able to do it all at once by piling everything into the Mesh collection before exporting.


----------



## Renzatic

After thinking about it a bit, I realized you could throw anything you want into those LOD fields. For example, you could have your trees turn into giant woodchucks once they're a certain distance away from the camera.

It'd be a great way to screw with people's expectations.


----------



## Huntn

Renzatic said:


> After thinking about it a bit, I realized you could throw anything you want into those LOD fields. For example, you could have your trees turn into giant woodchucks once they're a certain distance away from the camera.
> 
> It'd be a great way to screw with people's expectations.



Note: Don't worry if this is a lot to ask. I've also posted this over at the UE forums...

This is my situation. I am ready to throw rocks and stumps into the forest scene. I found what I thought was good stuff Using Quixel Bridge. So I've downloaded a bunch of rocks, stumps, grasses, etc. Now when it comes time to use it, I've picked for example a Mossy Embankment (Ti0qeiuda) and I've got all sorts of textures, textures allocated to LODs, but there is no static mesh associated with this.

In the Unreal Engine tutorial regarding LODs there are some static meshes with LOD in the label but they are static meshes. I'm trying to figure out why this Mossy Embankment has no static meshes.

Might this have something to do with this being labeled as an assembly?
Even so if this assembly represents multiple static meshes, shouldn't they be in the package?
The stump is just an asset, it does not seem to have static meshes with it either.
Now I have looked at my Quixel download setting and it might be there, it is set to the default download and I'm not seeing any place to choose to download static meshes.
I've included screenshots of my download settings from Quixel Bridge.

If you have any thoughts on this, it would be appreciated... at your leisure. 





For the mossy embankment I downloaded this:








						Quixel Mossy Embankment
					

Discover a  world of unbounded creativity. Explore a massive asset library, and Quixel’s powerful tools, plus free in-depth tutorials and resources.




					quixel.com
				





The stump:








						Quixel Megascans
					

Discover a  world of unbounded creativity. Explore a massive asset library, and Quixel’s powerful tools, plus free in-depth tutorials and resources.




					quixel.com


----------



## Renzatic

When you bring the object into Unreal, do you only see the textures in the asset folder? I just downloaded it, didn't import it into anything, and it's given me all the various textures, and the .fbx files for the various meshes. From there, I opened it up in Blender, and assigned all the various textures to it no problem.

I'd try to import into Unreal for you, but since my install of UE is janky, the plugin won't work for some reason. I have to do it all manually, which isn't difficult to do, but doesn't help you out directly.

Here's a shot of all the various LODs on the model. As you can see, each progressive step on the LOD field is has fewer and fewer polygons.


----------



## Huntn

Renzatic said:


> When you bring the object into Unreal, do you only see the textures in the asset folder? I just downloaded it, didn't import it into anything, and it's given me all the various textures, and the .fbx files for the various meshes. From there, I opened it up in Blender, and assigned all the various textures to it no problem.
> 
> I'd try to import into Unreal for you, but since my install of UE is janky, the plugin won't work for some reason. I have to do it all manually, which isn't difficult to do, but doesn't help you out directly.
> 
> Here's a shot of all the various LODs on the model. As you can see, each progressive step on the LOD field is has fewer and fewer polygons.
> 
> View attachment 9998



Have a pleasant TDay!

Apparently dragging the asset folder into  UE did not bring in the .fbx files or it’s just another case of newb error.  

Ok, now I have picked them specifically, imported them and see the static meshes. When I double clicked on them I expected to see an associated material, They have no materials or textures assigned to them. There is an empty material slot and under a texture label, there are two textures listed, T_Default_Materil Grid_N and T_Default_Materil Grid_M, but if I select either of these, nothing happens.

Now I remember from another landscape  tutorial that the author actually built materials (which I have) for his rocks and plants. I’ll have to revisit this.

I’d like to ask in Blender what general steps you had to take to “assign textures”? Was there a material included  with this  downloaded asset? In my brief experience, I have been working with materials where I plug in textures into it at the appropriate slots, and then assign that material to an asset (static mesh), but mostly aI have been working with landscape materials, versus objects like rocks/trees so this is new territory for me.

For UE I’m seeing all the textures sitting in the asset folder, but no material. From a landscape tutorial I do have 2 materials designed for rocks and plants.  I can try those and until I try it, I assume I can assign the textures to the material, and assign the material to the “material” slot in this mesh and see what happens.

As I just completed the Intro to Unreal Engine tutorial, LOD section, I’m going to let UE create the LODs so I’ll just keep the LOD0 and work from that.


----------



## Renzatic

Huntn said:


> Apparently dragging the asset folder into UE did not bring in the .fbx files or it’s just another case of newb error.




No idea as far as the .fbx files go. I'm not sure how Bridge does its thing between it and UE. A manual import would work though, just rightclick in the asset browser, and select "import from folder."



Huntn said:


> Ok, now I have picked them specifically, imported them and see the static meshes. When I double clicked on them I expected to see an associated material, They have no materials or textures assigned to them. There is an empty material slot and under a texture label, there are two textures listed, T_Default_Materil Grid_N and T_Default_Materil Grid_M, but if I select either of these, nothing happens.




By default, it should have all the textures applied in their specific places without any extra work on your end. Why it's not? I dunno. You'll have to ask them. 

Though it sounds like the basic framework for the material is already set up, and you just have to lead the various nodes to their various texture images.



Huntn said:


> I’d like to ask in Blender what general steps you had to take to “assign textures”? Was there a material included with this downloaded asset? In my brief experience, I have been working with materials where I plug in textures into it at the appropriate slots, and then assign that material to an asset (static mesh), but mostly aI have been working with landscape materials, versus objects like rocks/trees so this is new territory for me.




Just like this. It's not vastly different, other than working with a single material stack, rather than 3.


----------



## Huntn

Renzatic said:


> No idea as far as the .fbx files go. I'm not sure how Bridge does its thing between it and UE. A manual import would work though, just rightclick in the asset browser, and select "import from folder."
> 
> 
> 
> By default, it should have all the textures applied in their specific places without any extra work on your end. Why it's not? I dunno. You'll have to ask them.
> 
> Though it sounds like the basic framework for the material is already set up, and you just have to lead the various nodes to their various texture images.
> 
> 
> 
> Just like this. It's not vastly different, other than working with a single material stack, rather than 3.



That’s what I was expecting to see that material node structure! When I double click on the static mesh, I’m just seeing it‘s picture and details. I need to get that grid to show up.  
Thanks!


----------



## Renzatic

Huntn said:


> That’s what I was expecting to see that material node structure! When I double click on the static mesh, I’m just seeing it‘s picture and details. I need to get that grid to show up.
> Thanks!




You can make a new material yourself by rightclicking in the asset menu, and selecting the appropriate field. From there, just add your textures in, then drag and drop it onto the mesh.


----------



## Huntn

Renzatic said:


> You can make a new material yourself by rightclicking in the asset menu, and selecting the appropriate field. From there, just add your textures in, then drag and drop it onto the mesh.



Thanks for your help!

Update, I found what I was missing, on the LOD0 Static Mesh, double clicking on the Material Slot, pulled up the material node structure I was looking for.  There is a material there. I just have to figure out which textures go where.
In this asset pack there are the following textures:
* Albedo
* Cavity
* Displacement
* Normal
* Roughness

In the material structure there are places for texture samples to go in
* Noise- would that be Cavity, Displacement, or Roughness?

A texture that feeds both (Albedo?)
* Create Base Color
* Roughness

The one I've not seem before is a texture located in a grouping called  "Checkerboard Divisions", which texture would this be? My guess I can play with the textures I have and see what happens.




*Update2:*
UE can be complicated, and sorry for the flailing online. Now I’m wondering if the material node structure I pulled up above was part of the downloading of this asset or if it is different part of the project that I just happened to choose. And if I am expected to use a material I made or if one is included with the download.

Maybe I’ll go eat some turkey and think about it...


----------



## Renzatic

Huntn said:


> UE can be complicated, and sorry for the flailing online. Now I’m wondering if the material node structure I pulled up above was part of the downloading of this asset or if it is different part of the project that I just happened to choose. And if I am expected to use a material I made or if one is included with the download.




If I had to take a guess, I'd say that's a part of another material meant for something else entirely. The Megascan material shouldn't be anywhere near that complicated.


----------



## Renzatic

Also, this looks like it might be right up your alley.



			https://www.artstation.com/learning/courses/adP/planning-a-game-environment/chapters/2D1O/series-project-planning-introduction


----------



## Huntn

Renzatic said:


> If I had to take a guess, I'd say that's a part of another material meant for something else entirely. The Megascan material shouldn't be anywhere near that complicated.



I think I have it sorted out. I’m almost certain I dragged in a folder for several assets (rocks and stumps) from megascans, after downloading them, but there was no meshes, then there were all these textures with LOD labels on them I started thinking these were somehow supposed to be meshes.

So it turns out there were .fbx files associated with these assets those folders that had not been transferred into the project, and that there are no materials that come with them. So I used the material I made following along with a landscape tutorial which works well.

So megascans does not include materials with their asset downloads and a material must be assigned to this asset. (I knew the latter ). Materials  are not included which makes sense in hind sight since each DCC program would have it’s own methodology to handle textures. At a minimum you could always just make a simple material and attach the associated textures to the appropriate nodes,

I’ve assumed up till now that a material simply applies textures to an entire mesh, spreading this textures or qualities over the entire object, and that any variation in the color if a rock is because those textures have the variations painted into them. Yesterday I looked at some  rock assemblies that seem to include say moss, or a log and wondered would  there be separate meshes that require separate materials? Yet, the mesh seemed to be one piece. Maybe aI need to look at it again. Here is an example:

​


----------



## Renzatic

Right. If you're downloading all your assets straight from Bridge, it's going to give you just the files necessary to get it working elsewhere. It won't provide you any tailor made materials specific to whatever engine or DCC you're using. Though you can add in a plugin that will link Bridge to UE, and export the assets directly into your project without any more futzing on your end. 








> I’ve assumed up till now that a material simply applies textures to an entire mesh, spreading this textures or qualities over the entire object, and that any variation in the color if a rock is because those textures have the variations painted into them. Yesterday I looked at some  rock assemblies that seem to include say moss, or a log and wondered would  there be separate meshes that require separate materials? Yet, the mesh seemed to be one piece. Maybe aI need to look at it again.




Materials are very versatile things, that can range from one specific type of surface, like, say, wet stone, to a mix and match of many textures, like an rotting log with and old rusted truck door resting against it. 

Think of it in terms of what you want to do, and how much memory can be saved by grouping more and more together. Like you have one object that's the center of your scene. For the sake of conversation, we'll say it's an old cannon propped up on a wooden chest next to a big rock. You could do all these objects separately, but then you'd need a material for the rock, the cannon, and the chest. That's at least 9 image textures right there. But if you combine them on the same UV sheet, and bake them out, you can have all three of these separate surfaces on one material stack.

...of course you'd need to consider resolution/texel density once you start getting good, but don't worry about that for now.

So in the case of your example above, the log, the ground, the sticks, and the moss are all on the same texture sheet, combined into the same mesh. You save a bit of memory doing things that way, but you lose some flexibility, only being able to splash that entire object around without having access to its individual parts unless you break them by hand in a DCC.


----------



## Renzatic

Hey, Huntn. I know this is more Blender than UE, but it does an excellent job of teaching you the basics of procedural texturing, which itself isn't vastly removed from what you're doing, in a way that's very intuitive and easy to follow.

Yeah, it costs $45 (normally $60), but I'm finding it to be a godsend. I bought it mainly because I wanted to learn more about math nodes, and thus far, it's been worth every penny.









						Master Procedural Texturing In Blender
					

Tap into the unlimited potential of Blender’s incredibly powerful node editor, and learn how to create advanced and highly customizable procedural textures step by step.




					www.blendermarket.com


----------



## Renzatic

And another one for you. Even better, this one's free!

It explains all the various settings in the PBR stack, which are the same across Blender and UE.


----------



## Huntn

Renzatic said:


> And another one for you. Even better, this one's free!
> 
> It explains all the various settings in the PBR stack, which are the same across Blender and UE.



On my to do list.

Right now I’m frustrated with the Official Intro to Unreal Engine Tutorial. While throwing out a ton of info, there are areas that do not do a good job getting a novice started. Regarding my learning project, the Forest Scene, I’ve reshaped the road structure, got the textures down (subject to change) and have placed some assets. I reminded myself to set up the LODs using UE’s automated system.  So I went back to this tutorial and it is awful, from this standpoint, it does not explain how to set them up from scratch. The narrator, when he starts talking about LODs, he already has multiple LODs sitting in his project, he is  in _giving tips_ mode, but never gets around to explaining how to create these things from scratch. I’ve found the UE LOD documentation which seems to have potential so i’ll be looking at this this evening along  with a third party tutorial, and actually deciding whether setting these things up manually or using the automated system is better.


----------



## Renzatic

Huntn said:


> The narrator, when he starts talking about LODs, he already has multiple LODs sitting in his project, he is in _giving tips_ mode, but never gets around to explaining how to create these things from scratch.




I hate when they do that. Those tutorials that take these complicated setups as self evidence, and just breeze their way through it without explaining of the fine details.

Yeah, they're obvious..._when you're used to it_, but there are a couple of steps between A and Z that need to be discussed for the newbies.


----------



## Huntn

I'm not asking you Ren, to do anything.  Another day, another *4%@!! road block. This is getting frustrating.

I posted this over at Unreal Forums...
_I'm following this tutorial: https://docs.unrealengine.com/4.27/...es/StaticMeshes/HowTo/AutomaticLODGeneration/_

_I’m following the instructions. I have altered the BaseEngine.ini file by copy/pasting the text into the link as the last item._
_I have opened a static mesh’s editor (for a small rock), opened the LOD settings section in details, changed the LOD Group to: Small Prop. The number of LODs is set to 4._
_At this point according to the link, in the SM details sections, in addition to LOD 0, new LODs 1-3 should auto appear. They are not appearing.
Any idea what might be the issue? I’m stumped at this point, no surprise there. 

Update: Now that I’ve made this change to the SM_Rock LOD group, if I look at this static mesh in the content browser, it does say “LODs:4”. And I realized that this tutorial was probably made under an older version of UE?

So if there are 4 LODs, where do I find them in the Details section for this mesh? In the link above, after you have assigned this message to the LOD Group: Small Prop, it shows right under Material Slots in the details section, LODs listed one above the other, LOD0, LOD1, LOD2, LOD3. This is not happening when I follow these instructions.
Thanks!_


----------



## Renzatic

You're really dealing with stuff here you shouldn't be worried about until way later. Though LODs are important, it's something you could comfortably skip for the time being, and come back to later once you have a better foundation of the basics.


----------



## Huntn

Renzatic said:


> You're really dealing with stuff here you shouldn't be worried about until way later. Though LODs are important, it's something you could comfortably skip for the time being, and come back to later once you have a better foundation of the basics.



They were mentioned in the intro, there is nothing in the description that should be difficult about this. Either there is something basic I overlooked or there is something not working properly. I’m realizing now (I think) that in the UE Intro tutorial, when the narrator assigns an asset to a LOD group, this is where the auto system kicks in, you get a message about settings being overwritten, this is when the new LOD categories like LOD1, LOD2, are supposed to appear in the asset description, but they are not. Hopefully I’ll get an answer from the forum.

Regarding not worrying about it now, are you saying at this point in the project, or are you saying in the big picture of learning?


----------



## Renzatic

Huntn said:


> Regarding not worrying about it now, are you saying at this point in the project, or are you saying in the big picture of learning?




A bit of column A, and a bit of column B.

You're still square in newbie land, and learning how to set up LODs while you're still learning the ins and outs of basic mesh work strikes me as putting the cart before the horse. Stick to learning materials and modeling. They're the foundation of everything you'll be doing. Efficiency can come later.


----------



## Huntn

Renzatic said:


> A bit of column A, and a bit of column B.
> 
> You're still square in newbie land, and learning how to set up LODs while you're still learning the ins and outs of basic mesh work strikes me as putting the cart before the horse. Stick to learning materials and modeling. They're the foundation of everything you'll be doing. Efficiency can come later.



OMG, not directed at you but to the UE teaching system. Watching all of this content to better understand LODs, teeth nashing for several days, all I have to do is pick an asset, assign it to a LOD Group (like small prop), and UE does the rest.  It still appears as a single asset in UE, but it magically works now with however many LODs the UE engine gave it, all contained in one. And by looking at it in the editor, by moving away from it you can see the lower LOD resolutions kick in.

Yes there is more to learn about LOD settings, the intro seems to be a confusing mess.  But eventually I will return to the tutorial LOD section and see if I can glean any wisdom from it
Now I did have to add some script to the UE ini file. 




Work in progress
Maybe too cluttered in the foreground?
Working on thinning it out...
But there will be tall grass too... ​


----------



## Renzatic

Huntn said:


> OMG, not directed at you but to the UE teaching system. Watching all of this content to better understand LODs, teeth nashing for several days, all I have to do is pick an asset, assign it to a LOD Group (like small prop), and UE does the rest.




Yeah, the official UE material is more than likely to get super technical on you, and lead you the long way around when it comes to doing things. I've always found it best to find 3rd party tutorials that explain things a little more straightforwardly, and only hit up the official documentation when you're looking for something specific.

You're road's looking great, by the way. A couple things I'd recommend you do is up the scaling on the grass texture a bit, so the individual blades aren't so big and noticeable. Also, tweak the colors of your diffuse textures a bit, so they'll blend together a little more nicely.

UE handles things a little weirdly when it comes to tweaking hue, saturation, and light values, but it can be done.



			Image Adjustment | Unreal Engine 4.27 Documentation
		




			Unreal Materials Parameters - Tip of the Week - Evermotion


----------



## Huntn

Renzatic said:


> Yeah, the official UE material is more than likely to get super technical on you, and lead you the long way around when it comes to doing things. I've always found it best to find 3rd party tutorials that explain things a little more straightforwardly, and only hit up the official documentation when you're looking for something specific.
> 
> You're road's looking great, by the way. A couple things I'd recommend you do is up the scaling on the grass texture a bit, so the individual blades aren't so big and noticeable. Also, tweak the colors of your diffuse textures a bit, so they'll blend together a little more nicely.
> 
> UE handles things a little weirdly when it comes to tweaking hue, saturation, and light values, but it can be done.
> 
> 
> 
> Image Adjustment | Unreal Engine 4.27 Documentation
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Unreal Materials Parameters - Tip of the Week - Evermotion



I’ve been looking at that grass, but I’ve wondered how it will look after I add tall grass, and post processing. It’s easy to scale it down, and agree it should not be that big.

The next job is to learn how to scatter paint assets like twigs and small rocks.


----------



## Renzatic

Huntn said:


> I’ve been looking at that grass, but I’ve wondered how it will look after I add tall grass, and post processing. It’s easy to scale it down, and agree it should not be that big.



It probably won't be too noticeable once you get the tall grass in, but it'd be one of those things I'd tweak just in case. If it looks good by itself, it'll look good in any situation.



> The next job is to learn how to scatter paint assets like twigs and small rocks.




The good news there is that, from what I understand, that's fairly easy to do. You bring in your model, go to your paint panel, guff around with the scatter settings, and go to town.


----------



## Huntn

Renzatic said:


> It probably won't be too noticeable once you get the tall grass in, but it'd be one of those things I'd tweak just in case. If it looks good by itself, it'll look good in any situation.
> 
> 
> 
> The good news there is that, from what I understand, that's fairly easy to do. You bring in your model, go to your paint panel, guff around with the scatter settings, and go to town.




Gonna do a scatter painting tutorial today.  When the Forest Scene  guy does it he picks what looks like bunches of small assets together. I’m going to assume at this point for each one, he has to apply a material to it first. I’ve got another thing I have to quickly look at, the HLOD hierarchal level of detail.


----------



## Renzatic

Huntn said:


> Gonna do a scatter painting tutorial today.  When the Forest Scene guy does it he picks what looks like bunches of small assets together. I’m going to assume at this point for each one, he has to apply a material to it first. I’ve got another thing I have to quickly look at, the HLOD hierarchal level of detail.




Yeah, each model has its own materials and LODs. Think of the scatter paint not as some special mode that uses specific materials and model types, but as an easy way to bring in lots of little models into your scene quickly without having to copy/paste them all in one at a time by hand.


----------



## Renzatic

Man, you've gone silent on me! 

I've been working on upping my sculpting skills recently. It is fun as hell. Made these weird little things I call Yard Idols.


----------



## Huntn

Renzatic said:


> Man, you've gone silent on me!
> 
> I've been working on upping my sculpting skills recently. It is fun as hell. Made these weird little things I call Yard Idols.
> 
> View attachment 10243



Wow, looks great! 
I've been working silently instead of overwhelming you with daily questions... so here is my latest just for you, well and the UE Forums where I just posted it there too, but I usually get a better response here than there. 

*Texture Streaming Pool over 162.827 MiB Budget. *Ok I just read this article:





						Fixing ‘Texture Streaming Pool Over Budget’ in UE4 – techarthub
					






					www.techarthub.com
				




I'm still working on a forest scene, getting up to speed with painting in assets, and it's not that big at all at this point, 5 small sections of road maybe 150' long, and maybe 20 actors  consisting of a surface texture and textures to support some rocks, stumps, 1 log, and some sticks.  This is not a lot, and I am surprised I am getting this message.

*Yes I have been using 4k textures, should I go to 2k?
*Yes, many of the rocks and plants, I've loaded separate textures for each one. I'm looking at consolidating my textures, so all the rocks are basically using the same textures instead of 6 texture sets.

But I have a question about texture load. Is there an extra texture load if a texture is just sitting in a project of only if this textures are displayed in the project? I assume the latter.

Material Instances, does making a separate Instance based on the same master material for each set of textures a bad thing or should I just duplicate an instance or does it matter for instances from a texture streaming perspective? If you want to see an image of this road section take a look at my post 262.

Any suggestions would be appreciated about the best way to reduce the streaming load. Thanks!


----------



## Renzatic

Huntn said:


> But I have a question about texture load. Is there an extra texture load if a texture is just sitting in a project of only if this textures are displayed in the project? I assume the latter.




It's the latter. If it's sitting in your projects file folder unused, it's taking up harddrive space, and nothing more. It's only active in video memory if it's being drawn in your scene.



> Material Instances, does making a separate Instance based on the same master material for each set of textures a bad thing or should I just duplicate an instance or does it matter for instances from a texture streaming perspective?




All instances are references of a source material, with only the original taking up memory. I'm still not 100% sure how far you can push a material instance relative to its source, but most of the changes I've seen shown in these various tutorials I've glanced through only concern color changes, texture scales, and other odds and ends, all of which add negligible memory costs.

Take your road for an example. You could have 500 individual road tiles in your scene, each with its own instance, and they'll use no more video memory than what the source material they're all instanced from uses. The only variable is the RGB map on each of your road tiles, but that only takes up mere bytes in memory.



> Any suggestions would be appreciated about the best way to reduce the streaming load. Thanks!




 You've yet to even come close to having to consider this, but the general rule of thumb is to use texture resolutions appropriate to the size of your objects, and to use a fairly limited amount of textured assets per scene.

If you look at some random complicated scene, you'd think they're having to use hundreds or thousands of separate objects to create, but in reality, it's usually just 20 or 30 objects cleverly placed.

...and remember, even budget GPUs have 4 to 6 GB of video ram to play with these days.


----------



## Huntn

Renzatic said:


> It's the latter. If it's sitting in your projects file folder unused, it's taking up harddrive space, and nothing more. It's only active in video memory if it's being drawn in your scene.
> 
> 
> 
> All instances are references of a source material, with only the original taking up memory. I'm still not 100% sure how far you can push a material instance relative to its source, but most of the changes I've seen shown in these various tutorials I've glanced through only concern color changes, texture scales, and other odds and ends, all of which add negligible memory costs.
> 
> Take your road for an example. You could have 500 individual road tiles in your scene, each with its own instance, and they'll use no more video memory than what the source material they're all instanced from uses. The only variable is the RGB map on each of your road tiles, but that only takes up mere bytes in memory.
> 
> 
> 
> You've yet to even come close to having to consider this, but the general rule of thumb is to use texture resolutions appropriate to the size of your objects, and to use a fairly limited amount of textured assets per scene.
> 
> If you look at some random complicated scene, you'd think they're having to use hundreds or thousands of separate objects to create, but in reality, it's usually just 20 or 30 objects cleverly placed.
> 
> ...and remember, even budget GPUs have 4 to 6 GB of video ram to play with these days.



Yet I am getting this message and textures are not being drawn in the scene. I’ll look and see about upping the settings.


----------



## Renzatic

Huntn said:


> Yet I am getting this message and textures are not being drawn in the scene. I’ll look and see about upping the settings.




Question is, what kinda GPU do you have?


----------



## Huntn

Renzatic said:


> Question is, what kinda GPU do you have?



GeForce 2070 plus 16GB RAM. I’d have to check if I have 8 or 16 GB VRAM


----------



## Renzatic

Huntn said:


> GeForce 2070 plus 16GB RAM. I’d have to check if I have 8 or 16 GB VRAM




Yeah, you're solid on that front. You have a better GPU than me. 

I guess just try to up your settings, though I didn't know UE had an artificial hard limit like that.


----------



## Huntn

Renzatic said:


> Yeah, you're solid on that front. You have a better GPU than me.
> 
> I guess just try to up your settings, though I didn't know UE had an artificial hard limit like that.



I found the answer, you have to edit the unrealengine.ini file. Default is 1000, I set mine to 4000, I suppose that is MB.

I’ve been playing with scatter assets and for the groups of dead leaves I downloaded from Megascans, I’m finding they go down as a group and because of the size of this group, on uneven ground some of these leaves are either buried in the ground or floating above the ground, I need to find some leaves that go down individually…


----------



## Renzatic

Huntn said:


> I found the answer, you have to edit the unrealengine.ini file. Default is 1000, I set mine to 4000, I suppose that is MB.
> 
> I’ve been playing with scatter assets and for the groups of dead leaves I downloaded from Megascans, I’m finding they go down as a group and because of the size of this group, on uneven ground some of these leaves are either buried in the ground or floating above the ground, I need to find some leaves that go down individually…




You can do that easily yourself. Make a plane in Blender, take one of the leaf textures from the Megascan assets (make sure it's 4k, since you're gonna need some fine resolution for what you're about to do), apply your materials, then go into the UV editor, and scale down the UV so it covers a single leaf. Rinse and repeat, add some bumps on your plane, and bam! You now have a bunch of leaves that can now be scattered across a mesh, and will conform to your landscape.


----------



## Huntn

Renzatic said:


> You can do that easily yourself. Make a plane in Blender, take one of the leaf textures from the Megascan assets (make sure it's 4k, since you're gonna need some fine resolution for what you're about to do), apply your materials, then go into the UV editor, and scale down the UV so it covers a single leaf. Rinse and repeat, add some bumps on your plane, and bam! You now have a bunch of leaves that can now be scattered across a mesh, and will conform to your landscape.
> 
> View attachment 10312



Just have to figure out how to do that. Don’t they need to be divided into separate meshes?


----------



## Renzatic

Huntn said:


> Just have to figure out how to do that. Don’t they need to be divided into separate meshes?




Yeah, for when you're scattering them in Unreal. For the sake of simplicity, you can just duplicate them inside the same mesh in Blender, then separate them after you're done.


----------



## Eric

Found on Reddit, just wow.


This is not a real photo. It's Unreal Engine 5. from
      gaming


----------



## Huntn

Eric said:


> Found on Reddit, just wow.
> 
> 
> This is not a real photo. It's Unreal Engine 5. from
> gaming



Yeah, WOW.


----------



## Huntn

Renzatic said:


> Yeah, for when you're scattering them in Unreal. For the sake of simplicity, you can just duplicate them inside the same mesh in Blender, then separate them after you're done.



...a couple of days off visiting family. Back now.
Yeah, it was suggested to me in the Unreal Forums to take the group leaf mesh from Quixel/Megascans, import it into a Blender and break it up into smaller pieces. ...just another thing to research. 

If there is an easy way to describe this, or I can go find a tutorial. Thanks! 
On second thought I think I've done something like this before...back to my Blender notes.


----------



## Renzatic

Huntn said:


> ...a couple of days off visiting family. Back now.
> Yeah, it was suggested to me in the Unreal Forums to take the group leaf mesh from Quixel/Megascans, import it into a Blender and break it up into smaller pieces. ...just another thing to research.
> 
> If there is an easy way to describe this, or I can go find a tutorial. Thanks!
> On second thought I think I've done something like this before...back to my Blender notes.




It's easy. Import the mesh you want to break up, select it, go into Edit Mode with tab, then...

...if it's a mesh with multiple separate parts, then go into edit mode with Tab, select the whole thing by hitting A, hit P to bring up the Separate Menu, and choose "By Loose Part." It'll break the mesh into individual objects, with names like leafmesh.001, leafmesh.002 etc. etc.

...if it's a contiguous mesh, then, while in edit mode, select the faces you want to separate with shift-leftclick, hit P, then choose "Selection." Do this for each leaf you want.

Exporting it from that point on is the standard fare. If you're using Epic's official Send To UE plugin, I believe popping all your leaves into the Mesh collection should export them all as indivudal objects into UE.


----------



## Renzatic

I saw this pop up in my feed. Might be good for you.






...but don't switch to Rightclick select. He's an oldschool Blender user, and almost everyone has moved on to leftclick these days, me included.


----------



## Huntn

Renzatic said:


> It's easy. Import the mesh you want to break up, select it, go into Edit Mode with tab, then...
> 
> ...if it's a mesh with multiple separate parts, then go into edit mode with Tab, select the whole thing by hitting A, hit P to bring up the Separate Menu, and choose "By Loose Part." It'll break the mesh into individual objects, with names like leafmesh.001, leafmesh.002 etc. etc.
> 
> ...if it's a contiguous mesh, then, while in edit mode, select the faces you want to separate with shift-leftclick, hit P, then choose "Selection." Do this for each leaf you want.
> 
> Exporting it from that point on is the standard fare. If you're using Epic's official Send To UE plugin, I believe popping all your leaves into the Mesh collection should export them all as indivudal objects into UE.



Will report back. Thanks!  What I see is a lot of tasks which seem to be easy, but for myself they require research and learning which slows me down to a crawl. Not complaining, and I am not hitting this like a job, so it can be slow progress. At this point, I don’t have to add leaves, but the author did it, so I want to do it too.

With the leaf group, when I apply it as is, because of the uneven ground(?), most of these leaves don’t appear on the surface, which makes me think they are below the surface or they are floating, which makes me want to break them up into smaller groups, so, they place better. I’m not sure but I think the leaves the author is placing are either individual or smaller groups being painted.


----------



## Renzatic

Huntn said:


> What I see is a lot of tasks which seem to be easy, but for myself they require research and learning which slows me down to a crawl.




That's pretty much it. Most of the stuff you do isn't nearly as hard as you initially think, but there are about a billion different moving parts you won't immediately account for until you've had some experience with it. It's easy to get overwhelmed when you're starting out.



> With the leaf group, when I apply it as is, because of the uneven ground(?), most of these leaves don’t appear on the surface, which makes me think they are below the surface or they are floating, which makes me want to break them up into smaller groups, so, they place better.




Static meshes won't automatically deform to the underlying topology by default. If you have a bunch of leaf models as a single mesh, all aligned on a flat plane, when you go to place it, it's not going to follow the lay of the land. It's going to do a best guess happy medium, aligning that plane primarily where you click, and clipping through and floating on top of all the hills and bumps that make up your landscape.

But if you have your individual leaves as separate objects, all meshes unto themselves, then the engine can scatter them about, flush with the ground, since these meshes aren't constrained to a predefined shape.

If you can't quite wrap your head around it, I can do a quick visual representation that can help you more easily understand.


----------



## Renzatic

Hey, guess what? Your life's about to get a helluva lot easier.









						Megascans Trees are now in early access
					

Scanned, photoreal Megascans Trees are here. The first batch of 3D trees is now live on the UE Marketplace, and is free for use with Unreal Engine.




					quixel.com


----------



## Renzatic

And a nice link to the Marketplace.









						Megascans Trees: European Black Alder (early access) in Megascans - UE Marketplace
					

Megascans - This collection is an early access tree pack with 22 unique models of various maturity to build a photorealistic black alder forest. The pack includes a powerful foliage master material to control seasons and wind.




					www.unrealengine.com


----------



## Huntn

Renzatic said:


> That's pretty much it. Most of the stuff you do isn't nearly as hard as you initially think, but there are about a billion different moving parts you won't immediately account for until you've had some experience with it. It's easy to get overwhelmed when you're starting out.
> 
> 
> 
> Static meshes won't automatically deform to the underlying topology by default. If you have a bunch of leaf models as a single mesh, all aligned on a flat plane, when you go to place it, it's not going to follow the lay of the land. It's going to do a best guess happy medium, aligning that plane primarily where you click, and clipping through and floating on top of all the hills and bumps that make up your landscape.
> 
> But if you have your individual leaves as separate objects, all meshes unto themselves, then the engine can scatter them about, flush with the ground, since these meshes aren't constrained to a predefined shape.
> 
> If you can't quite wrap your head around it, I can do a quick visual representation that can help you more easily understand.



I think I understand. Let’s see how it goes before I whimper for help.


----------



## Huntn

Well, I am not whimpering exactly… 
_
...if it's a mesh with multiple separate parts, then go into edit mode with Tab, select the whole thing by hitting A, hit P to bring up the Separate Menu, and choose "By Loose Part." It'll break the mesh into individual objects, with names like leafmesh.001, leafmesh.002 etc. etc._

This worked, I got a list of about 150 files labeled like you said. They were organized as a collection with the 150 individual meshes. I created new collections with smaller groups of these meshes (the original collection stayed intact), and then selected the smaller groups of them (individually all selected) and exported them into single .fbx  files. These however, when I imported them into UE gave a fault, no mesh detected, or something like that.

So, I’ll have to keep experimenting.

My question: When I see the list of individual files are they truly separated? Or is there another step to make them seperate entities?


----------



## Renzatic

Show me a screenshot of the meshes inside of Blender. I want to see what they look like.


----------



## Huntn

​


----------



## Renzatic

Let's start slow here. Find 5 of your favorite leaves out of the bunch, delete the rest, then move them all so that they're positioned at 0,0,0 on the grid. Once you've done that, hit Ctrl-A, and select All Transforms for each of your 5 leaves individually.

Also, how does UE generate LODs? Does it automatically create them based off the name of the object? If so, for the sake of making things a little easier, delete the LOD0 at the end of each named leaf, and see what that does.


----------



## Huntn

Renzatic said:


> Let's start slow here. Find 5 of your favorite leaves out of the bunch, delete the rest, then move them all so that they're positioned at 0,0,0 on the grid. Once you've done that, hit Ctrl-A, and select All Transforms for each of your 5 leaves individually.
> 
> Also, how does UE generate LODs? Does it automatically create them based off the name of the object? If so, for the sake of making things a little easier, delete the LOD0 at the end of each named leaf, and see what that does.



It may do that. Those are all called LODs cause they came from LOD0, the highest resolution, mesh/collection. . I presume a collection from UE, that  Blender treats as a collection, I split up In Blender following your directions, so they all say LOD0.001 to LOD0.150, variation of the original mesh.

What does transform do?


----------



## Renzatic

Huntn said:


> What does transform do?




Blender basically has two major modes when it comes to moving your objects about: edit and object mode. This is one of the biggest points of confusion to anyone first learning Blender, because what you do in object mode will effect the way some tools behave in edit mode.

In short, edit mode always assumes your origin point (the little orange dot) for your model sits at 0,0,0 on the grid. Your origin point will be where your objects will move from, scale from, or rotate from. When you move or scale something in object mode, it effects the positioning, rotation, and scaling data on the object itself, while edit mode assumes you're at 0 on transform and rotate, and 1.0/1.0/1.0 on scale.

It also effects how things behave in Unreal, doing much the same thing. If you scale your model in object mode, and don't reset its values, it'll end up either bigger or smaller than you'd expect

Stupid, right? Don't worry. It screws with everyone at first. There's actually a good reason for this confusing setup, which you'll learn about the more you use Blender, but starting out, it's a complete teetotal mindscrew.

What you want to do is, while in edit mode, move your geometry to the center of the grid, orient it, and scale it to taste, then hop back over to object mode, hit Ctrl-A, and apply it's rotation, location, and scale (or hit All Transforms, which does all three). This will reset all your transforms back to their default.

...and will make it so that things will perform more predictably in Unreal.


----------



## Huntn

Renzatic said:


> Blender basically has two major modes when it comes to moving your objects about: edit and object mode. This is one of the biggest points of confusion to anyone first learning Blender, because what you do in object mode will effect the way some tools behave in edit mode.
> 
> In short, edit mode always assumes your origin point (the little orange dot) for your model sits at 0,0,0 on the grid. Your origin point will be where your objects will move from, scale from, or rotate from. When you move or scale something in object mode, it effects the positioning, rotation, and scaling data on the object itself, while edit mode assumes you're at 0 on transform and rotate, and 1.0/1.0/1.0 on scale.
> 
> It also effects how things behave in Unreal, doing much the same thing. If you scale your model in object mode, and don't reset its values, it'll end up either bigger or smaller than you'd expect
> 
> Stupid, right? Don't worry. It screws with everyone at first. There's actually a good reason for this confusing setup, which you'll learn about the more you use Blender, but starting out, it's a complete teetotal mindscrew.
> 
> What you want to do is, while in edit mode, move your geometry to the center of the grid, orient it, and scale it to taste, then hop back over to object mode, hit Ctrl-A, and apply it's rotation, location, and scale (or hit All Transforms, which does all three). This will reset all your transforms back to their default.
> 
> ...and will make it so that things will perform more predictably in Unreal.



What about collections, some of these leaves I duplicated them into a new collection. I assume if I want them to act as a group, I need to keep them as a collection which maybe easier than dealing with 5, 10, or 20, or more individual leaves individual leaves.

Obviously I need to study about Collections. I have a link on docs.blender.org about collections yet...

If I create a new collection with pieces from an existing collection  are the meshes in the new collection completely free from the original collection, or tied to it somehow?

When I was playing with Collections in Blender, I discovered that if I selected items from a collection and moved them to a newly created collection, they did move and no longer remained in the original collection.

If I Right Click on the Collection icon that looks like a file box, and tell it to "unlink" that collection disappears in the list of collections, but I have yet to figure out where it went. Ideas?


----------



## Huntn

In this example I removed all the leaves except one much smaller group and they are still in a collection. When I select all of these leaves or any individual leaf they all show Location XYZ= 0 and rotation XYX= 90,0,0. This is in both edit and object modes.

Ok, so I assme they are all showing zero even though they are clearly not in the center of the grid because they are part of a collection and as far as that collection goes, they are all location 0,0,0.

I don't mind if they act as a group, I'd like them to stay grouped and this is a much smaller group then what i started out with, but I don't see how to get them on the 0,0,0 of the grid, and I recognize that as a group, the group would be 0,0,0 but obviously I don't want all the leaves sitting on top one another at 0,0,0.

I also noticed if I select this group by the collection box, and select unlink they vanish. Where do they go? I would assume I have to unlink them from the collection, move them so they surround the center point, group them into another collection, and then set the group location as 0,.0,0. I don't see how to do that.


*Update: *I played some more may have gotten it, got 18 leaves to transfer over. I'll apply materials to them tomorrow and see how it looks. Don't ask what I did in blender 






						Collections — Blender Manual
					






					docs.blender.org


----------



## Renzatic

Since you're more concerned with getting things over to Unreal, you only need to worry about collections as ways to organize your work. Like the icons show, they're basically just little boxes to put stuff in. All the fancy stuff you can do with them beyond that isn't much of a concern to you.

Though I did notice you're not using the SendtoUE plugin, so putting things into a collection labeled "mesh" isn't even anything you have to do.

What you need to do is position each individual leaf at the origin point of the grid, and reset it's transforms. Like this:





Notice the numbers along the right side of the screen under Transform, how they're all zeroes and 1.0's? That's the way all your models should look before being exported into Unreal. The origin point, that little orange dot that's sitting in the center of the leaf mesh, that's carried over into Unreal. That's an anchor telling both Blender and UE where to orient the mesh in your scene. When you're scattering objects, you're scattering those dots, which the leaf meshes are oriented to.

That's why you always want to put everything in the center of the grid before bringing it into Unreal.


----------



## Huntn

Renzatic said:


> Since you're more concerned with getting things over to Unreal, you only need to worry about collections as ways to organize your work. Like the icons show, they're basically just little boxes to put stuff in. All the fancy stuff you can do with them beyond that isn't much of a concern to you.
> 
> Though I did notice you're not using the SendtoUE plugin, so putting things into a collection labeled "mesh" isn't even anything you have to do.
> 
> What you need to do is position each individual leaf at the origin point of the grid, and reset it's transforms. Like this:
> 
> View attachment 10430
> 
> Notice the numbers along the right side of the screen under Transform, how they're all zeroes and 1.0's? That's the way all your models should look before being exported into Unreal. The origin point, that little orange dot that's sitting in the center of the leaf mesh, that's carried over into Unreal. That's an anchor telling both Blender and UE where to orient the mesh in your scene. When you're scattering objects, you're scattering those dots, which the leaf meshes are oriented to.
> 
> That's why you always want to put everything in the center of the grid before bringing it into Unreal.



My impression is that if it is a collection, that the 0,0,0 is the group center?


----------



## Renzatic

Huntn said:


> My impression is that if it is a collection, that the 0,0,0 is the group center?




In this instance, collections are nothing more than a way for you to organize your models on the outliner. They don't make any changes beyond that.


----------



## Huntn

Renzatic said:


> In this instance, collections are nothing more than a way for you to organize your models on the outliner. They don't make any changes beyond that.



Yet when I clicked on a very large collection of leaves, choosing individual leaves, they all registered as 0,0,0, although they were clearly in different locations.


----------



## Renzatic

Huntn said:


> Yet when I clicked on a very large collection of leaves, choosing individual leaves, they all registered as 0,0,0, although they were clearly in different locations.




Yeah, because they've had their transforms reset. That's now their default position. Thing is, you don't want the default position of your leaf to be above and to the right of where you want to put it. You'll need to move them all back to the center of the grid individually, reset their transforms, then export them out one at a time so they're each their own object inside of Unreal.

Also, while you can use a lot of leaves to do this, it really only takes 4 or 5 to make things look random enough. When they're all scattered, rotated, and scaled individually, you won't notice that much repetition.


----------



## Huntn

Renzatic said:


> Yeah, because they've had their transforms reset. That's now their default position. Thing is, you don't want the default position of your leaf to be above and to the right of where you want to put it. You'll need to move them all back to the center of the grid individually, reset their transforms, then export them out one at a time so they're each their own object inside of Unreal.
> 
> Also, while you can use a lot of leaves to do this, it really only takes 4 or 5 to make things look random enough. When they're all scattered, rotated, and scaled individually, you won't notice that much repetition.



I’m just about done with the road, will be adding some hills and trees soon. I can actually see the end of this project.


----------



## Renzatic

Huntn said:


> I’m just about done with the road, will be adding some hills and trees soon. I can actually see the end of this project.




So, what are you planning on doing next?


----------



## Huntn

Renzatic said:


> So, what are you planning on doing next?



After the Forest scene? More UE tutorials of course!  I’ll need to study post processing for this project, but I can see some rock and water sculpting in my furture.


----------



## Renzatic

Huntn said:


> After the Forest scene? More UE tutorials of course!  I’ll need to study post processing for this project, but I can see some rock and water sculpting in my furture.




I still think you should try low poly stuff.


----------



## Huntn

Renzatic said:


> I still think you should try low poly stuff.



Such as? I’m not sure of the significance of low vs high poly when it comes to learning.


----------



## Renzatic

Huntn said:


> Such as? I’m not sure of the significance of low vs high poly when it comes to learning.




It's good, because you don't have to worry about textures, shading, UVs, or anything of the more complicated bits and pieces. All you're dealing with are colors, shapes, and lighting. It lets you build up your foundational modeling skills, giving you quicker feedback without having to get bogged down in the minutiae.


----------



## Huntn

Renzatic said:


> It's good, because you don't have to worry about textures, shading, UVs, or anything of the more complicated bits and pieces. All you're dealing with are colors, shapes, and lighting. It lets you build up your foundational modeling skills, giving you quicker feedback without having to get bogged down in the minutiae.



I've been thinking about this suggestion and it sounds good. My question: I know UE is not your thing, so I'm wondering for low poly modeling would this be a Blender thing, and then export meshes into UE?

My impression is the huge advantage is that of UE, is that without any effort it gives you a framework for a game, with even a character who can walk around in an interact with a setting. Now in Blender can anything like this be created, with basically a game start position and a character who can interact with the environment?  I'm assuming no.

Even though I've been told modeling can be done in UE, my impression is that it is primarily used to create game environments and something like Blender or Maya would be used to create many, most of the assets that go into a game scene, but really I have no clue.


----------



## Renzatic

Huntn said:


> I've been thinking about this suggestion and it sounds good. My question: I know UE is not your thing, so I'm wondering for low poly modeling would this be a Blender thing, and then export meshes into UE?




Your workflow won't be vastly different than what you've experienced already. You build your toys in Blender, which is your workshop, then boot them over to Unreal, your sandbox, to play with.

By themselves, Blender, Maya, and their ilk are primarily for making still renders and movies out of the objects you create. They don't have anything like player starts, or control schemes. If you want direct interactivity, that's what engines like Unreal are for.

If you want to get started on trying it out yourself, hit up Grant Abbitt's tutorials. He's got tons of tutorials on beginner friendly low poly work.


----------



## Renzatic

Another plus, that video shows the importance of origin points, and object/edit mode scaling, like what we were talking about earlier.


----------



## Huntn

Things are getting scary now,just started working on adding a terrain. I'll show that after it is decent.


​


----------



## Huntn

Actually I'm a little excited with a realization, the more I know, the more i realize I don't know, LOL


----------



## Renzatic

Huntn said:


> Actually I'm a little excited with a realization, the more I know, the more i realize I don't know, LOL
> ​




You did a really good job with that landscape.


----------



## Huntn

Renzatic said:


> You did a really good job with that landscape.



Trees and bushes to come.  For this landscape I had  to review one of my 3rd party tutorials to add in volumetric fog.


----------



## Huntn

@Renzatic, I don't expect you to know what is going on with UE, but after getting the trees I want into my project, I'm trying to paint them in using the  Foliage Tool (procedural painting?) and they appear perfectly perpendicular to the slope, so in essence instead of being vertical in the world, they are perpendicular to the slope and consequently lean down the slope. I'm been playing with for a couple hours, trying to figure out what setting controls this, been searching online, no luck so far.
If I place the trees individually they go in vertical like they should.

So I'll curse UE and put it aside until I get a clue. Also posted this over in the UE Forums. Maybe I'll get lucky. 

I don't expect an answer from you just crying on your shoulder. It reconfirms that after I finish this up going to go back to basics.


----------



## Renzatic

Huntn said:


> @Renzatic, I don't expect you to know what is going on with UE, but after getting the trees I want into my project, I'm trying to paint them in using the  Foliage Tool (procedural painting?) and they appear perfectly perpendicular to the slope, so in essence instead of being vertical in the world, they are perpendicular to the slope and consequently lean down the slope. I'm been playing with for a couple hours, trying to figure out what setting controls this, been searching online, no luck so far.
> If I place the trees individually they go in vertical like they should.
> 
> So I'll curse UE and put it aside until I get a clue. Also posted this over in the UE Forums. Maybe I'll get lucky.
> 
> I don't expect an answer from you just crying on your shoulder. It reconfirms that after I finish this up going to go back to basics.




Yeah, that’s something I can’t answer. There will probably be a setting somewhere in the foliage paint properties that’ll allow you to adjust orientation, but I can’t tell you exactly what.

I’ll see if I can look it up tomorrow, when I’m back at my computer.


----------



## Huntn

Renzatic said:


> Yeah, that’s something I can’t answer. There will probably be a setting somewhere in the foliage paint properties that’ll allow you to adjust orientation, but I can’t tell you exactly what.
> 
> I’ll see if I can look it up tomorrow, when I’m back at my computer.



OMG, I was making setting changes and nothing happened. I did this for a couple of hours, and the program seemed functional but it was not until when I quit in disgust, but then restarted UE, that the settings I had been playing with actually started working the way they should, $%#!!@!!er!!.


----------



## Huntn

This is not finished, more to add, and dark  spots need light
which i assume will happen in post processing...
Despite all the work, this is giving me good vibes about the future. ​
Ok, almost after pulling what hair I have left out trying to figure out which settings I was to use to make my trees straight/verticle and not perpendicular/slanted down the hill with the terrain, and by accident I discovered that this engine program can sometime act like it's working but the settings are not taking effect. Restarting  the app is the answer for that.


----------



## Renzatic

Huntn said:


> and by accident I discovered that this engine program can sometime act like it's working but the settings are not taking effect. Restarting the app is the answer for that.




How often do you rebuild your scenes? That may help.


----------



## Huntn

I’m still working with this, but frequently  take a day or 2 off, or I download something that takes a while or the program takes an un-godly amount of time to process freaking 18000 shaders in a project I loaded up to pluck assets from, in this case bushes… I finally found some bushes to use and fingers crossed I can place them tomorrow. But that is the issue I frequently run into, getting bogged down with this kind of stuff. 

Yes, I’m still going to jump to low poly design, I think that will help a lot in the planning stages of a project besides learning something that will benefit me. my plan will be to build a project first as low poly, to make sure the layout works, and then transistion to high poly.


----------



## Huntn

Believe it or not, I finially got tired of this excellent artist tell his audience "this is just basic stuff" LOL. 
Anyway I realized there is some post processing stuff I need to learn big time and he really gets into making the scene have a lot of depth, but I got tired or adding assets. No there are no ferns in my scene. 

The Post Processing settings requires a real tutorial, there is so much control over atmosphere in those settings and I consider it to be a brilliant capability in Unreal Engine as I imagine my Uncle an artist, hand painting a scene like below.

Anyway I think this is slighty better than what I posted before added some volumetric fog.





Now I' might go back and finish the Intro to UE Tutorial, which is good first exposure, while realizing it's all in my notes, a couple days after watching stuff like this, most of it won't be in my memory.That's why I take notes. 

There is a step I'm missing where I either turn this into a game, or some kind of final product so I can dump the project which is 14GB of background stuff, a lot of it is not necessarily used in the final product.  This is why I'll probably go back and finish the UE Intro Tutorial which is quite lengthy.

And I still plan on jumping into low poly modeling.


----------



## Renzatic

Damn, that's nice looking! The only thing I'd add are some scrubby low lying bushes break things up, make it look a little less like a tended forest. Other than that, awesome job!


----------



## Huntn

Renzatic said:


> Damn, that's nice looking! The only thing I'd add are some scrubby low lying bushes break things up, make it look a little less like a tended forest. Other than that, awesome job!



Yeah you can see the area on the right next to the road that should be filled with grasses, a break so you can’t  see just the green texture of the woods. I might fill that in.

That’s exactly what he did, but as I said, I had added enough stuff to get the idea and I had been playing with this for over a month. Then he started adding ferns, and little sticks, little rocks.etc, His finished scene  looks amazing.  But he goes though his settings so quickly like post processing, I decided enough was enough, this was a learning exercise for me. Yes, I am inspired, but time to move on.


----------



## Huntn

Little better?


----------



## Renzatic

Much better!


----------



## Huntn

I finished up the UE Intro Tutorial, it was long, many chapters, tonight a lot of info on post processing and reflections, however they did not cover turning a project into an executable. Maybe you don't learn that in the Into,  any way there are a lot of tutorials there and I see one on a simple water project. I tried to download the project from the marketplace, but it has yet to show up. Maybe by tomorrow. 

My impression is that UE is not the best place for modeling, a combination of modeling in Blender and moving it over to UE, so while I want to do those low poly tutorials for Blender, the best would be a tutorial which has you model in Blender and move it over to UE as a project to be put together as a project. I'll go back and see if this low poly tutorials had something like this and search online.


----------



## Renzatic

You already have a good idea of how to send things from Blender to UE, then place them in a scene, so the major point should be learning modeling in Blender.

The end result in UE is simply something like this...


----------



## DT

Huntn said:


> ​Little better?




Wow, nice job!


----------



## Renzatic

Here's the start of a 6 part tutorial that do a nice job of covering the basics, and teach you how to build a neat scene.


----------



## Renzatic

You know what? This has kinda inspired me a bit. I haven't done a low poly landscape in awhile, so now I wanna do one.


----------



## Huntn

Renzatic said:


> You know what? This has kinda inspired me a bit. I haven't done a low poly landscape in awhile, so now I wanna do one.



I just found out we are leaving tomorrow for Corpus Christi (Padre Island) for 2 days on the beach. I'll start something when I get back...


----------



## Renzatic

Huntn said:


> I just found out we are leaving tomorrow for Corpus Christi (Padre Island) for 2 days on the beach. I'll start something when I get back...




No! You work now!


----------



## Huntn

Renzatic said:


> No! You work now!



I forgot to ask what are you going to do low poly? Hey, make a tutorial and I’ll  follow along!  just kidding. 

So I’m thinking I should include modeling in Blender and take the time to plunk it into UE. Yes, I plan on making a complete scene in Blender, but taking the extra step to see what happens when I move it over, especially if I end up doing anything other than flat terrain. There seems to be more than just plunking when making this change over.


----------



## Renzatic

Huntn said:


> So I’m thinking I should include modeling in Blender and take the time to plunk it into UE. Yes, I plan on making a complete scene in Blender, but taking the extra step to see what happens when I move it over, especially if I end up doing anything other than flat terrain. There seems to be more than just plunking when making this change over.




You don't want to make your whole scene in Blender, then try to port it over all at once. All that'll do is give you a big headache. You still want to do everything one at a time in Blender, then mix them together in Unreal.

This tutorial is fairly decent for explaining the process. Though I'd ignore his UVing advice, since A. you won't need to UV unwrap if you're dealing with low poly work, and B. it's a janky UV unwrap.






Though if you do want to get fancy with Blender specifically, but not be totally overwhelmed...


----------



## Huntn

Renzatic said:


> You don't want to make your whole scene in Blender, then try to port it over all at once. All that'll do is give you a big headache. You still want to do everything one at a time in Blender, then mix them together in Unreal.
> 
> This tutorial is fairly decent for explaining the process. Though I'd ignore his UVing advice, since A. you won't need to UV unwrap if you're dealing with low poly work, and B. it's a janky UV unwrap.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Though if you do want to get fancy with Blender specifically, but not be totally overwhelmed...



Thanks for the advice! I plan on getting to work maybe Friday. Now I have a very specific idea for a project to be completed in UE, so as I do blender tutorials, while keeping in mind the project I want to accomplish, as I learn things, I’ll probably put this setting together in Blender and see what complications arise when I move stuff over to UE.

One big issue in my mind is setting up my sandbox, the space/ terrain that defines the project boundaries a setting, in the woods, with a pool, boulders, multiple levels, waterfall, moving water, a cliff, a cave, and surrounding the scene to keep the player in this space while keeping it looking natural. These are things in blender I would want to model.

The ground it all sits on might be a little mind boggling. From my limited exposure to creating terrain in UE with the terrain tool, it seems a bit clutzy, yes you can sculpt large hills, but I’m not sure how good it would be for creating a specific landscape/layout for this project, probably not all that good. So in blender this becones a big question, make the ground mesh in blender and export to UE, complicated by inserting a cliff, multiple horizontal levels, an interior space for the cave, indentation for  a pool and flowing water all put together the way I want it.


----------



## Huntn

Renzatic said:


> It's good, because you don't have to worry about textures, shading, UVs, or anything of the more complicated bits and pieces. All you're dealing with are colors, shapes, and lighting. It lets you build up your foundational modeling skills, giving you quicker feedback without having to get bogged down in the minutiae.



LOl, and I thought this link was a tutorial...


----------



## Renzatic

Huntn said:


> LOl, and I thought this link was a tutorial...




Nup! Just a nice little showcase.


----------



## Huntn

I'm working on this:


----------



## Huntn

@Renzatic I'm working on the Blender tutorial and trying to get snapping to work. At one point I remember it working, but nowI have a situation where snapping is set to vertices, but when I drag one cube into the other (snapping turned off, using Ctrl to trigger it) when it hits the point where is should snap vertice to vertice, instead of a straight forward snap together staying in alignment, the cube I am dragging rotates at an out of alignment orientation, the two vertices snap together, but the cube is not now a rectangle, it's some multifaceted object because of the rotation. Any ideas what could trigger this? Thanks.

Ok, I started a new Blender file, and that seems to go away, but I've also noticed that when I used Shift D to create a duplicate cube and then GX to drag it along the X Axis, sometimes when I try to bring the 2 objects back together to snap, they end up snapping overlapped. I've looked up some answers online, but have not found the answer to why both of these happen. If I have vertices snap active or activate it using control, shouldn't they snap at the outer most vertices and not overlap?


----------



## Renzatic

Huntn said:


> @Renzatic I'm working on the Blender tutorial and trying to get snapping to work. At one point I remember it working, but nowI have a situation where snapping is set to vertices, but when I drag one cube into the other (snapping turned off, using Ctrl to trigger it) when it hits the point where is should snap vertice to vertice, instead of a straight forward snap together staying in alignment, the cube I am dragging rotates at an out of alignment orientation, the two vertices snap together, but the cube is not now a rectangle, it's some multifaceted object because of the rotation. Any ideas what could trigger this? Thanks.




I tried a number of different things to see if I could get vertex snapping to weird out like that, but couldn't cause it to act out of character. See if you can provide a screenshot, so I can see exactly what it's doing.



> Ok, I started a new Blender file, and that seems to go away, but I've also noticed that when I used Shift D to create a duplicate cube and then GX to drag it along the X Axis, sometimes when I try to bring the 2 objects back together to snap, they end up snapping overlapped. I've looked up some answers online, but have not found the answer to why both of these happen. If I have vertices snap active or activate it using control, shouldn't they snap at the outer most vertices and not overlap?




Ditto on the above. Though one nice thing to keep in mind is that snap verts will snap the verts according to which verts are nearest to your mouse cursor, not which verts are closest to each other. 

....though why are you doing all the snapping for? Honestly, it's something I rarely, rarely use. You might be trying to be TOO precise here.


----------



## Huntn

Renzatic said:


> I tried a number of different things to see if I could get vertex snapping to weird out like that, but couldn't cause it to act out of character. See if you can provide a screenshot, so I can see exactly what it's doing.
> 
> 
> 
> Ditto on the above. Though one nice thing to keep in mind is that snap verts will snap the verts according to which verts are nearest to your mouse cursor, not which verts are closest to each other.
> 
> ....though why are you doing all the snapping for? Honestly, it's something I rarely, rarely use. You might be trying to be TOO precise here.



I’ll see if I can produce an image. I’m snapping because this is what is being taught in the tutorial at the moment.  I would think that with any construction of a complex object, a clean snap would be desirable.


----------



## Renzatic

Huntn said:


> I would think that with any construction of a complex object, a clean snap would be desirable.




Like everything, it depends on what you're doing, and how precise you want to be. Me personally, I tend to eyeball everything.


----------



## Renzatic

I watched some of that video, and it's solid advice. Being able to use vert snapping to get the legs to line up with the edge of the table was a good example of how to use it, though you don't always HAVE to. 

For example, when he put the caps on the ends of the legs, he aligned it so that the tops of the caps aligned with the bottom faces, which is good, but you could just as easily float those cubes inside the legs, and it wouldn't make any difference to the shading or the geometry efficiency.

Like I said, it all depends on what you're doing. Knowing best practice, and what you can get away with comes with experience.


----------



## Huntn

Renzatic said:


> I watched some of that video, and it's solid advice. Being able to use vert snapping to get the legs to line up with the edge of the table was a good example of how to use it, though you don't always HAVE to.
> 
> For example, when he put the caps on the ends of the legs, he aligned it so that the tops of the caps aligned with the bottom faces, which is good, but you could just as easily float those cubes inside the legs, and it wouldn't make any difference to the shading or the geometry efficiency.
> 
> Like I said, it all depends on what you're doing. Knowing best practice, and what you can get away with comes with experience.



It was putting that table together was when I was getting the wired snapping behavior. Instead of just sliding together the leg with the table base, the leg would flip upside down and be angled. There must be a setting that is effecting this.


----------



## Renzatic

Huntn said:


> It was putting that table together was when I was getting the wired snapping behavior. Instead of just sliding together the leg with the table base, the leg would flip upside down and be angled. There must be a setting that is effecting this.




Were you in Object mode or Edit Mode at the time?


----------



## Huntn

Renzatic said:


> Were you in Object mode or Edit Mode at the time?



I believe object, I remember checking several times the settings I could see  in the author‘s setup as he was demonstrating Snapping.


----------



## Renzatic

Huntn said:


> I believe object, I remember checking several times the settings I could see  in the author‘s setup as he was demonstrating Snapping.




I dunno. I tried seeing if I could get it to mess up in a way similar to what you're describing, and I couldn't get it to do anything out of the ordinary.

Could you post a screenshot of it happening? That might be able to help me.


----------



## Huntn

Renzatic said:


> I dunno. I tried seeing if I could get it to mess up in a way similar to what you're describing, and I couldn't get it to do anything out of the ordinary.
> 
> Could you post a screenshot of it happening? That might be able to help me.



The issues seems to have gone away for the moment. I more or less finished the Day 1 tutorial. The author said ok now just go have fun and then he started getting into rendering and placing the camera, so I turned it off. I'll probably listen to how to bring the camera in and align it to your current view tomorrow. Anyway built a town house, but did not color it all in after I got the gist of it.  Tomorrow...











​


----------



## Renzatic

Huntn said:


> The issues seems to have gone away for the moment. I more or less finished the Day 1 tutorial. The author said ok now just go have fun and then he started getting into rendering and placing the camera, so I turned it off. I'll probably listen to how to bring the camera in and align it to your current view tomorrow. Anyway built a town house, but did not color it all in after I got the gist of it.  Tomorrow...




Moving the camera is actually fairly easy. There's an option under the View tab in the N-panel (that you bring up by, appropriately enough, hitting the N key) called Camera To View.

It doesn't snap the camera to your view like you'd think (that's Align Camera To View, which you activate with Ctrl-Alt-Num0), but it allows you to move the camera about while in camera view, much like you would when navigating the viewport. Using a combination of those, and you'll be able to get any angle you want for your render in three seconds flat.

Also, I went ahead and quickly viewed the Day 2 tutorial. It's the one where it teaches you the true meat and potatoes techniques, like edge loops, extrudes, bevels, and subdivision surfaces.

edit: I just looked at your non-rendered shot. Looks like you have a few co-planar faces in there. Bump your windows out so they're floating just a tiny, tiny bit above your wall to fix that. Plus, there on the bottom right of your building, that looks like you have an extra unneeded face in there.


----------



## Huntn

Renzatic said:


> Moving the camera is actually fairly easy. There's an option under the View tab in the N-panel (that you bring up by, appropriately enough, hitting the N key) called Camera To View.
> 
> It doesn't snap the camera to your view like you'd think (that's Align Camera To View, which you activate with Ctrl-Alt-Num0), but it allows you to move the camera about while in camera view, much like you would when navigating the viewport. Using a combination of those, and you'll be able to get any angle you want for your render in three seconds flat.
> 
> Also, I went ahead and quickly viewed the Day 2 tutorial. It's the one where it teaches you the true meat and potatoes techniques, like edge loops, extrudes, bevels, and subdivision surfaces.



How competent would I be after the Day 2 tutorial? 

For myself using Blender with the intent of bringing in assets to Unreal engine, I have to decide the best way to go about creating an interactive scene project. For example:

Would you say a typical Blender project is created on a square or rectangle base? And does the same hold true for UE?
How good is Blender at creating uneven terrain? It seems to be a choice between manipulating the vertices starting in a flat plain (like the Forest road project), using the UE terrain tool which works decently for making close, distant rolling hills, or going to a 3rd party World program designed specifically for creating jagged mountains of cliffs.

I need to play with terrain in UE some more, but my initial impression is that the UE terrain tool is like working with a can Reddi-Wip spray whip cream.  …maybe not that good for jagged terrain or even cliffs, but I just don’t know at this point.

In my brief experience with it the UE terrain tool is serviceable but does not seem to be the best because  both of the natural world project tutorials  I’ve looked involving mountains or cliffs, it seems like the authors used 3rd party terrain tools, applications, not UE.


I see a cliff in my future project, a cliff not built of stacked borders, but an uneven wall of rock, so hence many of my terrain questions.

One of the tutorials I watched, basically took a steepish incline and inserted a bunch of rock arrays (bolders) into it to make it look like a rocky outcrop and it looked decent. But that terrain was made with a program like *World Creator* or *World Machine*. If I’m not mistaken, both are expensive seem to be geared towards professional studios.

Now note, at this point I don’t envision myself creating huge terrain world projects, I just want to make a an intimate cliff , not huge, just a mostly vertical piece of rock say 50’ tall and 30’ wide thst looks like stratified rock, with features, grass, roots (maybe) , maybe crumbly in places, so I’ll have to figure that out. I’m completely open to the idea of taking a verticle plain mesh full of vertices and manipulating it and then adding a stratified rock texture.


And there might be a cave, outfitted with amenities like furniture, lighting, and water flowing through it, so I‘m thinking there is some challenge in putting this all together, making a cliff, a ledge  and a cave a stream flowing out if it and have all the look natural and real.


And something I am considering, in setting up a scene, with creating assets if I would or should start off in a blender to set up a practise scene, create the assets, and then move them over to UE? In Blender you could actually work out all of the dimensions and relationships, but the question again comes back to terrain creation. Is the latter something that should be done in Blender or UE?
Speaking of terrain programs:





						7 Best Free Terrain Generator Software For Windows
					

Use these terrain generator software to build terrain maps with different parameters and environmental properties like water, mountain, lighting, etc.




					listoffreeware.com
				












						Unreal Engine | Features
					

From design visualizations and cinematic experiences to high-quality games across PC, console, mobile, VR, and AR, Unreal Engine gives you everything you need to start, ship, grow, and stand out from the crowd.




					www.unrealengine.com
				






			Creating Landscapes | Unreal Engine 4.27 Documentation
		










						Instant Terra plugin - Terrain generator in Code Plugins - UE Marketplace
					

This plugin lets you use Instant Terra to create and edit your Unreal Engine landscape (requires a free trial, free educational or commercial Instant Terra license).




					www.unrealengine.com
				




8kmx8km $149 perpetual license with 1 year of free updates. Not sure  if I want to spend that much. It just depends on how serious I really am.




__





						Wysilab - Instant Terra pricing
					






					www.wysilab.com


----------



## Renzatic

Huntn said:


> How competent would I be after the Day 2 tutorial?




You'll have a good grasp on the basics. Though to be blunt, I'd say the real experience comes from fucking things up by accident, learning how to fix them, then understanding how to avoid said fuckups later.



Huntn said:


> Would you say a typical Blender project is created on a square or rectangle base? And does the same hold true for UE?




You mean the underlying mesh topology? To overly simplify, yeah, they're both the same in that regard. In Blender, you'll generally be working with quads, though it can handle tris and ngons. Unreal, and by extension all realtime 3d engines, will convert everything you do to tris, which are quads that have been cut in half.

For example...



That's a quad on the far left, or a polygon with 4 vertices. Next to it are two tris, a tri being a polygon with 3 vertices, which is what Unreal will turn your quads into when you import it. Next to that is an ngon, which is a polygon with x amount of vertices. And next to it is the ngon converted to tris, which once again, is what Unreal will turn it into.

Now I could go into the pros and cons of modeling with each, but topology in general is a subject that could fill at least three books. To cut it down to the bare basics, you want to stick with quads when modeling because they're predictable. You can look at them and see how they flow. You can run loop cuts through them, bevel them, slide them, and do all other kinds of adjustments to them without any concern of them going squirrely on you. Plus, they subdivide cleanly, which is something you'll get into with the Day 2 tutorials.

Now that isn't to say you shouldn't ever use tris or ngons, but understanding the best use for them, when you can use them, and when you can get away with them, is something you'll pick up on once you gain a bit more experience.



Huntn said:


> How good is Blender at creating uneven terrain? It seems to be a choice between manipulating the vertices starting in a flat plain (like the Forest road project), using the UE terrain tool which works decently for making close, distant rolling hills, or going to a 3rd party World program designed specifically for creating jagged mountains of cliffs.




You can do basically whatever you want to in Blender. See, you can make hills, mountains, and valleys in Unreal, but you're really only limited to pushing verts up and down. You can do that in Blender as well, but you can also work on the axes, moving things left and right, overlapping bits and pieces. There's no limitation on that front.

If you want to, you could even sculpt, which would cover your rock cliffs. Though you'd need to learn how to bake and retopologize, because when you're sculpting, you're working with millions of polygons, which will drag down your performance if you popped your sculpted object into Unreal as is.

...unless you're using UE5, where polycount is no longer such a big deal.






Anyway, I'd get into more, but I wanna eat my lunch.


----------



## Huntn

Renzatic said:


> You'll have a good grasp on the basics. Though to be blunt, I'd say the real experience comes from fucking things up by accident, learning how to fix them, then understanding how to avoid said fuckups later.
> 
> 
> 
> You mean the underlying mesh topology? To overly simplify, yeah, they're both the same in that regard. In Blender, you'll generally be working with quads, though it can handle tris and ngons. Unreal, and by extension all realtime 3d engines, will everything you do to tris, which are quads that have been cut in half.
> 
> For example...
> 
> View attachment 11243
> 
> That's a quad on the far left, or a polygon with 4 vertices. Next to it are two tris, a tri being a polygon with 3 vertices, which is what Unreal will turn your quads into when you import it. Next to that is an ngon, which is a polygon with x amount of vertices. And next to it is the ngon converted to tris, which once again, is what Unreal will turn it into.
> 
> Now I could go into the pros and cons of modeling with each, but topology in general is a subject that could fill at least three books. To cut it down to the bare basics, you want to stick with quads when modeling because they're predictable. You can look at them and see how they flow. You can run loop cuts through them, bevel them, slide them, and do all other kinds of adjustments to them without any concern of them going squirrely on you. Plus, they subdivide cleanly, which is something you'll get into with the Day 2 tutorials.
> 
> Now that isn't to say you shouldn't ever use tris or ngons, but understanding the best use for them, when you can use them, and when you can get away with them, is something you'll pick up on once you gain a bit more experience.
> 
> 
> 
> You can do basically whatever you want to in Blender. See, you can make hills, mountains, and valleys in Unreal, but you're really only limited to pushing verts up and down. You can do that in Blender as well, but you can also work on the axes, moving things left and right, overlapping bits and pieces. There's no limitation on that front.
> 
> If you want to, you could even sculpt, which would cover your rock cliffs. Though you'd need to learn how to bake and retopologize, because when you're sculpting, you're working with millions of polygons, which will drag down your performance if you popped your sculpted object into Unreal as is.
> 
> ...unless you're using UE5, where polycount is no longer such a big deal.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Anyway, I'd get into more, but I wanna eat my lunch.



I need all the answers!!  Anyway I did a quick search on “make a cave in ue4” and came up with a bunch of links. Now I need to do that for Blender,

The bottom line becomes how much prep work should be done in Blender vs UE. If I thought it was simple enough to set up the actually layout of a project in Blender, I might do that. Some of that depends on how easy it would be to export the project to UE vs how much reconstruction it would require.

Logically it would seem that if you are designing objects for placement in a project, it would be best to have an accurate layout in Blender that you are modeling to.


----------



## Renzatic

Huntn said:


> Logically it would seem that if you are designing objects for placement in a project, it would be best to have an accurate layout in Blender that you are modeling to.




You could do that, design your entire scene inside of Blender, then export it all out to Unreal, but it's not the most efficient way to do things. It's better to do everything piecemeal, then recombine it all into a single scene in UE.

Okay, I've used the workshop/playground analogy already, so let me try and use a better one. Say you're making a model railroad, and you're designing all the individual parts for your land and cityscapes. You could put it all together on your workbench, but wouldn't it be better to use your workbench to make the models, and place them on the railroad itself?

Blender is for making your individual parts. Unreal is where you place them together. The most you'll want to worry about inside of Blender is whether your objects look like they belong together, but otherwise you'll exporting them out one tree, one cliff face, one building at a time. 

Now, you could do the entire landscape itself, with your cliff face, river, sand banks, and all that other good stuff, but you don't want to throw your trees, bushes, grass, and buildings in there on top of it, and export it all out to Unreal. Think modularly. Can you do this in bits and pieces, or would it look better as a whole object itself?


----------



## Huntn

Renzatic said:


> You could do that, design your entire scene inside of Blender, then export it all out to Unreal, but it's not the most efficient way to do things. It's better to do everything piecemeal, then recombine it all into a single scene in UE.
> 
> Okay, I've used the workshop/playground analogy already, so let me try and use a better one. Say you're making a model railroad, and you're designing all the individual parts for your land and cityscapes. You could put it all together on your workbench, but wouldn't it be better to use your workbench to make the models, and place them on the railroad itself?
> 
> Blender is for making your individual parts. Unreal is where you place them together. The most you'll want to worry about inside of Blender is whether your objects look like they belong together, but otherwise you'll exporting them out one tree, one cliff face, one building at a time.
> 
> Now, you could do the entire landscape itself, with your cliff face, river, sand banks, and all that other good stuff, but you don't want to throw your trees, bushes, grass, and buildings in there on top of it, and export it all out to Unreal. Think modularly. Can you do this in bits and pieces, or would it look better as a whole object itself?



I agree but if I am building something like a cliff with a cave in it, and a path up to it, if there are multiple pieces that kind of fit together, it might be better to fit them where they are being built If that is blender.  That said I basically have zero experience with manipulating meshes in UE other than scaling premade  assets. Are those type tools in UE? I’ll assume so till you say no. 

And then there is a layout, basically a floor plan where you plan to visualize and place the items for your scene. You might benifit from making that floor plan even if it is a rough outline, in Blender, but maybe not.


----------



## Renzatic

Huntn said:


> I agree but if I am building something like a cliff with a cave in it, and a path up to it, if there are multiple pieces that kind of fit together, it might be better to fit them there they are being built If that is blender.




Yeah, for something like that, you'd want to build it as a single object. The cliff wall with the cave entrance can be it's own model, but the path leading up to it? Is there anything specific about it that requires you to make it singular, or can you construct the path out of dirt textures, grass and plant assets, and other bits and bobs?

Like I said, think of it like you're building a model railroad. If you're wanting to make a simple generic field, using some prepackaged rocks, grass, and trees will probably do. But if you want to make something specific, something that needs to look a certain way to fit what you have in mind, then you can make that yourself as a singular object.



Huntn said:


> That said I basically have zero experience with manipulating meshes in UE other than scaling premade assets. Are those type tools in UE? I’ll assume so till you say no.




I don't believe UE provides any way to manipulate meshes at a low level like that. You can do some things with CSG primitives, but it's limited compared to what you can do with Blender.



Huntn said:


> And then there is a layout, basically a floor plan where you plan to visualize and place the items for your scene. You might benifit from making that floor plan even if it is a rough outline, in Blender, but maybe not.




Yeah, you could do that. I contrast various assets against each other all the time to get an idea on scale and look. I just wouldn't export it out as one combined whole.

The reason for this is because UE can cull smaller objects when they're not needed to save on resources. To use a bad example, say you have a little house. If the house and all the furniture inside are all separate objects, Unreal can display the house, but not draw the furniture until you're close enough to actually see the furniture. If you have it all as one big collective object, Unreal can't sort through that. It's either drawing the house and everything in it, or it's not, because as far as UE is concerned, the rocking chair in the living room is a part of the whole house mesh.


----------



## Renzatic

By the way, this is what I'm working on, in case you're interested. This is what I mean when I say you want to construct everything as quads (with a few tris in there where I know I can get away with it.)


----------



## Huntn

Renzatic said:


> By the way, this is what I'm working on, in case you're interested. This is what I mean when I say you want to construct everything as quads (with a few tris in there where I know I can get away with it.)
> 
> View attachment 11260



How many piece is that? ;0 Is a quad a 4 sided object?


----------



## Huntn

Here is what I really need a tutorial on. Not asking you to search, but I'm looking:

Early stages how to set up a scene, a rough idea for a project.
How to keep it scaled properly: when you are laying down terrain in UE, your kind of getting into no man's land as far as scaling.
Turning the UE project into a .exe.


----------



## Renzatic

Huntn said:


> Early stages how to set up a scene, a rough idea for a project.




The first thing most people do is block out their scenes with basic objects and primitives. There are a number of videos on this. I’ll dig up a good one, and post it tomorrow.



Huntn said:


> How to keep it scaled properly: when you are laying down terrain in UE, your kind of getting into no man's land as far as scaling.




If you build everything to scale in Blender, it’ll all port over nicely enough in UE. You might have to do some adjustments to compensate for any differences between the two apps, but the nice thing is that you’ll be scaling all your objects by the same perimeters, no futzing around or guesswork involved.



Huntn said:


> Turning the UE project into a .exe.




I dunno how to do that, but I believe it’s actually fairly simple to do.



Huntn said:


> How many pices is that? ;0 Is a quad a 4 sided object?




It’s a bunch of separate pieces right now, though it’ll end up as one object when I’m done with it.

And remember, quads are faces made up of 4 vertices.


----------



## Huntn

Question about this video:





it looks like there is a tool like a brush that can gouge out a swath of the surface of the Cube? Is this a sculpting or reduction tool or mode in Blender? And it’s a standard part of Blender? I’m curious because I thought you need not just a standard cube made up of 8 vertices but a cube full of vertices, to manipulate it In such a manner as the sculpting that appears to be going on here.

What do you know about Z Brush?


----------



## Renzatic

Huntn said:


> it looks like there is a tool like a brush that can gouge out a swath of the surface of the Cube? Is this a sculpting or reduction tool or mode in Blender? And it’s a standard part of Blender? I’m curious because I thought you need not just a standard cube made up of 8 vertices but a cube full of vertices, to manipulate it In such a manner as the sculpting that appears to be going on here.




It's the sculpting mode, which allows you to manipulate your objects more like clay, but yeah, you need to have to have high mesh density to pull it off. 

There are a number of ways you can up the density of your meshes. The guy in video takes basic cubes, blocks them out, then uses voxel remesh to get more density to sculpt with. Think of it as being similar to image resolution. If you have a cube made up of a single face per side, there's not much you can do with it, but a cube made up with 6x6 faces per side gives you so much more to play with to manipulate the shape of your object.





And Zbrush? It's an amazing program. Blender is decent at sculpting, but Zbrush is built for it from the ground up, and can handle polycounts no other DCC can even come close to approaching. It's the difference between a jack of all trades, and a master of one.

The only problem with Zbrush is that it's expensive. $700 for a year license at the moment, and it's likely to become even more expensive now that Maxon, a company well known for gouging the shit out of their userbase, has bought up Pixologic. 

Oh, and this is a fairly decent video on blocking out environments.


----------



## B01L

Sculpting in Blender is supposed to get a major revamp "Soon"...?


----------



## Huntn

Renzatic said:


> It's the sculpting mode, which allows you to manipulate your objects more like clay, but yeah, you need to have to have high mesh density to pull it off.
> 
> There are a number of ways you can up the density of your meshes. The guy in video takes basic cubes, blocks them out, then uses voxel remesh to get more density to sculpt with. Think of it as being similar to image resolution. If you have a cube made up of a single face per side, there's not much you can do with it, but a cube made up with 6x6 faces per side gives you so much more to play with to manipulate the shape of your object.
> 
> View attachment 11291
> 
> And Zbrush? It's an amazing program. Blender is decent at sculpting, but Zbrush is built for it from the ground up, and can handle polycounts no other DCC can even come close to approaching. It's the difference between a jack of all trades, and a master of one.
> 
> The only problem with Zbrush is that it's expensive. $700 for a year license at the moment, and it's likely to become even more expensive now that Maxon, a company well known for gouging the shit out of their userbase, has bought up Pixologic.
> 
> Oh, and this is a fairly decent video on blocking out environments.



There is always pirating for a just cause… forget I said that. Sometime highway robbery get's an adverse reaction.  -_-


----------



## Renzatic

Huntn said:


> There is always pirating for a just cause… forget I said that. Sometime highway robbery get's an adverse reaction.  -_-




THHHIIIEEEFFFF!


----------



## Renzatic

B01L said:


> Sculpting in Blender is supposed to get a major revamp "Soon"...?




It's already seen a number of revamps, with many more in the pipeline to come.

Thing is, Zbrush is just ridiculous. I dunno how they've managed to squeeze as much performance out of their app as they have, but they managed it. It's practically voodoo magic. No one else comes close to handling the amount of polygons Zbrush does. 3DCoat is probably its closest competitor, but it's still only half as good.

Though with that said, it's rare thing to need to sculpt with that many polys. Yeah, if you're working for a big movie studio, and you need to create characters that are finely detailed down to the pores, then yeah, your only choice is Zbrush. For anything not quite so exacting, Blender is fine.

After all, the Blender Movie Foundation did this movie entirely in Blender. Unless you can look at this, and say "yeah, it's nice, but I need more," then you don't have much to worry about.


----------



## Huntn

Renzatic said:


> THHHIIIEEEFFFF!



Yeah, that Maya and Z Brush although it looks like Z Brush can be outright purchased for $800, a bargain.  
Anyway in the meantime I'm now working:
*Blender Day 2 Tutorial: *




I'm taking some serious notes and at the end of the Day 1 tutorial, tons of notes that if not in an outline format, I simply would not retain it all, _holy crap_ as they say. And then I think I have the majority of features recorded and on the Day 2 tutorial OMG  more notes, tons more note. The nice thing is that instead of hand writing this out on a legal pad, putting into outline format using NisusWriterPro, I can just fit the new stuff in like parts of a puzzle.  I started out with an Blender UI Outline, identifying where everything is, but really it is better organized as a Controls outline. Right now I have both and find for the sake of controls I'm taking pieces out of the Interface section, and moving it up into controls with keyboard shortcuts.

I don't want to sound like I'm discouraged, I'm not, just a **** ton of stuff to know, which I suppose the more you work with it, the more it gets imbedded in your head and not as hard to recall. I'm all ready seeing that to some degree.


----------



## Renzatic

Huntn said:


> Yeah, that Maya and Z Brush although it looks like Z Brush can be outright purchased for $800, a bargain.




The thing is, up to a certain level, there's really no differences between Blender and Maya for box modeling, and Blender and Zbrush for sculpting. You can argue some differences in workflow, or the way brushes feel in each program, but the fact is that unless you're working with massive data sets, and super high polycounts, you don't really need the latters. 

Here's some other videos showing off what Blender can do.













> I don't want to sound like I'm discouraged, I'm not, just a **** ton of stuff to know, which I suppose the more you work with it, the more it gets imbedded in your head and not as hard to recall. I'm all ready seeing that to some degree.




I remember what it was like when I first started modeling, and things that seemed like scary dark magic that was impossible to learn is fairly intuitive to me now. There are a lot of things you have to come to terms with, but like you said, the more you do it, the better you get at it.

But yeah, there is a shit ton of stuff you have to know. That's why I'm recommending you start with low poly work, so you can make something nice without being totally overwhelmed. It's a good way to build your foundational skills, because you're primarily working with shapes and colors, only dabbling in the higher end if you want to try something out.


----------



## Huntn

Renzatic said:


> The thing is, up to a certain level, there's really no differences between Blender and Maya for box modeling, and Blender and Zbrush for sculpting. You can argue some differences in workflow, or the way brushes feel in each program, but the fact is that unless you're working with massive data sets, and super high polycounts, you don't really need the latters.
> 
> Here's some other videos showing off what Blender can do.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> I remember what it was like when I first started modeling, and things that seemed like scary dark magic that was impossible to learn is fairly intuitive to me now. There are a lot of things you have to come to terms with, but like you said, the more you do it, the better you get at it.
> 
> But yeah, there is a shit ton of stuff you have to know. That's why I'm recommending you start with low poly work, so you can make something nice without being totally overwhelmed. It's a good way to build your foundational skills, because you're primarily working with shapes and colors, only dabbling in the higher end if you want to try something out.



So in response I’m working on both the Blender Day2 tutorial, and a UE tutorial on Environmental Art. The first part of the UE tutorial the author threw down a lot of industry terms which was very helpful like what a MIP map is (I think, I need to ref my notes. ). Anyway I’m happily forging ahead, slowly but surely.


----------



## Renzatic

Huntn said:


> So in response I’m working on both the Blender Day2 tutorial, and a UE tutorial on Environmental Art. The first part of the UE tutorial the author threw down a lot of industry terms which was very helpful like what a MIP map is (I think, I need to ref my notes. ). Anyway I’m happily forging ahead, slowly but surely.




MIPMAPS!

In short, it's another level of detail optimization. A stack of the same textures at different resolutions, like 2048x, 1024x, 512x, and 256x, with the higher resolutions being drawn the closer to the camera they are.


----------



## Huntn

@Renzatic, you know If off the top of your head if Blender uses Z or Y for it's vertical "up" dimension? Just curious, and I'm sure I can find it, somewhere in the Blender tutorial I'm doing, but tonight working on an UE tutorial. It's discussing scaling to be sure you have the proper scale when you import into UE. I think in my forest project I had a scale problem... although it was unnoticeable because there were no people running around in it.


----------



## Renzatic

Huntn said:


> @Renzatic, you know If off the top of your head if Blender uses Z or Y for it's vertical "up" dimension? Just curious, and I'm sure I can find it, somewhere in the Blender tutorial I'm doing, but tonight working on an UE tutorial. It's discussing scaling to be sure you have the proper scale when you import into UE. I think in my forest project I had a scale problem... although it was unnoticeable because there were no people running around in it.




Z is up in Blender. I think it's the same in Unreal.

And the easiest way to to test scale in UE is to drop that dummy actor into your scene.


----------



## Renzatic

I did something kinda neat today.

See, I hate UV unwrapping. It's not difficult, but it can be tedious as hell. For this reason, I spent the time when I should be unwrapping my truck model experimenting with shaders. Ended up coming up with one that looks somewhat like a pencil sketch.






So I was sitting here, looking at it, and I thought to myself "you know, I wonder what that'd look like if I just painted over it in a photo program." Sure, I could just go ahead and unwrap it, and have a texture that could work for almost every situation imaginable, but I have to UV unwrap it, and that's a good half hour worth of work I don't wanna deal with.

So I spent 3 hours painting over the truck to see what it'd look like, all to avoid something that'd take 1/6th the time to do.


----------



## Huntn

Renzatic said:


> I did something kinda neat today.
> 
> See, I hate UV unwrapping. It's not difficult, but it can be tedious as hell. For this reason, I spent the time when I should be unwrapping my truck model experimenting with shaders. Ended up coming up with one that looks somewhat like a pencil sketch.
> 
> 
> View attachment 11372
> 
> So I was sitting here, looking at it, and I thought to myself "you know, I wonder what that'd look like if I just painted over it in a photo program." Sure, I could just go ahead and unwrap it, and have a texture that could work for almost every situation imaginable, but I have to UV unwrap it, and that's a good half hour worth of work I don't wanna deal with.
> 
> So I spent 3 hours painting over the truck to see what it'd look like, all to avoid something that'd take 1/6th the time to do.
> 
> View attachment 11373



Looks atmospheric.  What photo program did you use? I am in a UE Tutorial and the guy first goes to Maya (ok no problem I'll use Blender) and now he has gone to Photoshop and I'm looking at this and wondering if I should jump on the link below or go with Photoshop Elements (I had it before but don't think it has an upgrade price)  or GIMP... thoughts?






						Adobe Photoshop CC 2022 New Full Last Version lifetime Activation For Windows – Design FST
					






					designfst.com
				




Photoshop vs Photoshop elements:





						What can Photoshop do that elements can t? - Big Photography : Leading Photography Magazine, Explore, learn & Share Knowledge
					

Some of the features of Photoshop that are not included in Photoshop Elements are actions, advanced text formatting, pen tool, advanced color management,




					big-photography.com


----------



## Renzatic

Huntn said:


> Looks atmospheric.  What photo program did you use? I am in a UE Tutorial and the guy first goes to Maya (ok no problem I'll use Blender) and now he has gone to Photoshop and I'm looking at this and wondering if I should jump on the link below or go with Photoshop Elements (I had it before but don't think it has an upgrade price)  or GIMP... thoughts?




I used Krita, which is pretty solid.

If I were to recommend anything, it’d be Affinity Photo. $50 up front (though it goes on sale quite a bit), no subscription, and free upgrades. It can can cover 99% of what PS can do, without the cost.

I’d use it, but it’s the only app I haven’t managed to get working in Linux, so I get by with Krita, which is more of a digital painting program, but covers some of PS’s workflow.

GIMP? Yeah, I’d stay away from it. It has its perks, sure, but mostly it just makes me mad.


----------



## Huntn

Renzatic said:


> I used Krita, which is pretty solid.
> 
> If I were to recommend anything, it’d be Affinity Photo. $50 up front (though it goes on sale quite a bit), no subscription, and free upgrades. It can can cover 99% of what PS can do, without the cost.
> 
> I’d use it, but it’s the only app I haven’t managed to get working in Linux, so I get by with Krita, which is more of a digital painting program, but covers some of PS’s workflow.
> 
> GIMP? Yeah, I’d stay away from it. It has its perks, sure, but mostly it just makes me mad.




I can get Photoshop Elements for about $50, or I can get something described as Photoshop CC with no subscription  for $30 something, as per the link, but I wonder about that as in, is it legit? Maybe, maybe not... Affinity Photo looks good too for about $50. 

I'm working on a tutorial called "*Becoming an Environmental Artist*" at UE.com, described as a beginner course and has good info, but inexplicably,  the author launches into Channel Packing lol. You can only access this course if you are registered on the site and logged in.

Now I did follow along for most of it, but he failed to explain what he was starting out with. I assume 5 textures, but one of these textures was already labeled RMA for Roughness, Metallic, and Ambient Occlusion, the channel packed texture and he never said anything like, here is the RMA texture I already made, and this is how I made it. 

He took 3 of the textures, Roughness, Metal, and Ambient Occlusion and combined them together, in Photoshop, and although he never said it, I think he was demoing how he made the RMA texture in the first place. And before that he was in Maya, no way Jose. I'll take Blender. Anyway this is what got me thinking about Photoshop.

And there was no discussion about as a rule, should you always be channel packing a texture or when it does not matter. Nope no talky about that. 

Tons more stuff this tutorial is talking about such as:
------------------------------------
*MIPs *mentioned, but not discussed how scaling occurs. I'm thinking this must be like LODs, maybe?
*Texture Density-* (Pixel or Texel Density) amount of pixel resolution applied to a mesh’s surface relative to the size of the asset’s surface. Basically if you don't keep texture density consistent, then items can look funky compared to each other. And it's not that simple a combination of how big the texture map is vs how big the asset is such as a wall vs a cup. There seems to be some unknowns here.

So far I've been doing all of my texture work in UE. Now I guess I'm supposed to open these textures in the photo program and check them out for consistency and or go there to channel pack them, and thirdly, figure out how to check texture density before bringing them into UE. 

TD should be kept consistent in project so assets will look the same. *How?* Maybe it will be described later.
The program used to model should have tools to check Texture Density, but what if you are doing the textures in UE?
What controls Texture Density?
How big the texture is being appiled.
How the UVs on mesh are sized and setup.* ?*
What size the mesh is, relative to real world scale.

*Questions proposed in tutorial:*
What texture resolution should I use? Relative to the type of asset and type of gameplay. *?*
First Person Shooter- higher cause you can get closer. How high?
Characters and Weapons given higher density.
Third Person or Top Down game- less. How much less?
* In project setup up in preproduction.* HOW?

Where do I setup texture density? Setup during the export operation from your 3D package externally. UVs set up in external package. Want a target density determined. *?*
Can I also control the texture density in Engine? The initial density of your UVs per your mesh are setup before being imported but you are able to tile textures more or less in your material setup to alter their density? *?*


----------



## Renzatic

Huntn said:


> *MIPs *mentioned, but not discussed how scaling occurs. I'm thinking this must be like LODs, maybe?




This does a good job of explaining what mipmaps are, and how to apply them. It's just 3 minutes, so you won't have to dedicate a ton of time to it.








Huntn said:


> *Texture Density-* (Pixel or Texel Density) amount of pixel resolution applied to a mesh’s surface relative to the size of the asset’s surface. Basically if you don't keep texture density consistent, then items can look funky compared to each other. And it's not that simple a combination of how big the texture map is vs how big the asset is such as a wall vs a cup. There seems to be some unknowns here.




Texel density fairly easy to explain when you're talking about bare surfaces, like what you've been working with. It's simply the resolution of your textures relative to each other. Say you have two equally sized walls segments next to each other, one has a 2048x texture, the other a 512x. Obviously, the 2048x texture will look so much sharper relative to the 512x, which has 8 times as many pixels applied to the same surface.

It gets a little more complicated when you're talking about UVs, because texel density is not only defined by the resolution of your texture, but also your unwrap. Here's a quick, simple example here...

I make a cube, give each face on the cube it's own UV island. I apply a 128x128 pixel texture to it. Now I take two of those faces, and make it so that they fill up a quarter of the UV space, which would be 64x64 pixels. The other 4, I make roughly a quarter of the size of that, or 32x32 pixels each.

My cube, has bad relative texel density, since I have 6 equally sized faces, but two different pixel resolutions being applied to these faces.





(Well, think of that 32px space as being 32px-ish. I whipped this up pretty quickly, but you should get the idea.)

Hopefully, I did a good enough job explaining it so that you get the just of what's going on. The good news is that it's primarily academic. When you UV unwrap your objects, Blender will scale all the individual islands to their relative appropriate sizes, so you don't have to worry about small details taking up as much space as your larger details. They all have even texel density on your UV space.

The challenge with UV mapping is maximizing the amount of space you have available, so that you're using your pixels more efficiently. You do this both through efficient unwrapping, and island packing (the latter of which you can use a nice little addon like UV Packmaster to automate for you). This is a subject I could fill paragraph upon paragraph with, and you will at some point have plenty of questions to ask when you start doing it yourself.

...but we'll get to that later.

When you're starting out, UVing is probably one of the most confusing things about modeling. It's really quiet simple, though it's something you need to have some hands on time with to really wrap your head around.

Now as to what size you should use for your models, well, that depends. How large is it? How close are you gonna get to it? How much detail needs to be seen? Does it look the same at 1024x as it does as 2048x? What can you get away with? Generally speaking, 1024x is fine for most largish objects, like a post box, and you want to use 4096x textures sparingly for things like houses and buildings with tons of unique surfaces, or character models that will spend a fair amount of time being close to the camera.

You can even use a single texture for multiple objects if you want. Why have 4 roughly equally sized objects with 4 sets of 512x material textures, when you could throw them all together onto a single 1024x material sheet?



Huntn said:


> Where do I setup texture density? Setup during the export operation from your 3D package externally. UVs set up in external package. Want a target density determined. *?*




To get down to the bare basics, texture density is a combination of your UV island sizes, and the resolution of your textures, all of which are determined by you during the design phase before you export your objects into Unreal.

Keep in mind that this isn't something you have to be absolutely scientific about. Like if you have a 40cm object, you don't need to worry about it having X amount of pixels on its surfaces relative to other objects. It's more of a general guideline thing, with the primary goal being maximizing quality with minimal amount of resources used, and the realization that you don't need a 4096x texture for a prop bowl sitting on a shelf.


----------



## Huntn

Renzatic said:


> This does a good job of explaining what mipmaps are, and how to apply them. It's just 3 minutes, so you won't have to dedicate a ton of time to it.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Texel density fairly easy to explain when you're talking about bare surfaces, like what you've been working with. It's simply the resolution of your textures relative to each other. Say you have two equally sized walls segments next to each other, one has a 2048x texture, the other a 512x. Obviously, the 2048x texture will look so much sharper relative to the 512x, which has 8 times as many pixels applied to the same surface.
> 
> It gets a little more complicated when you're talking about UVs, because texel density is not only defined by the resolution of your texture, but also your unwrap. Here's a quick, simple example here...
> 
> I make a cube, give each face on the cube it's own UV island. I apply a 128x128 pixel texture to it. Now I take two of those faces, and make it so that they fill up a quarter of the UV space, which would be 64x64 pixels. The other 4, I make roughly a quarter of the size of that, or 32x32 pixels each.
> 
> My cube, has bad relative texel density, since I have 6 equally sized faces, but two different pixel resolutions being applied to these faces.
> 
> View attachment 11390
> 
> (Well, think of that 32px space as being 32px-ish. I whipped this up pretty quickly, but you should get the idea.)
> 
> Hopefully, I did a good enough job explaining it so that you get the just of what's going on. The good news is that it's primarily academic. When you UV unwrap your objects, Blender will scale all the individual islands to their relative appropriate sizes, so you don't have to worry about small details taking up as much space as your larger details. They all have even texel density on your UV space.
> 
> The challenge with UV mapping is maximizing the amount of space you have available, so that you're using your pixels more efficiently. You do this both through efficient unwrapping, and island packing (the latter of which you can use a nice little addon like UV Packmaster to automate for you). This is a subject I could fill paragraph upon paragraph with, and you will at some point have plenty of questions to ask when you start doing it yourself.
> 
> ...but we'll get to that later.
> 
> When you're starting out, UVing is probably one of the most confusing things about modeling. It's really quiet simple, though it's something you need to have some hands on time with to really wrap your head around.
> 
> Now as to what size you should use for your models, well, that depends. How large is it? How close are you gonna get to it? How much detail needs to be seen? Does it look the same at 1024x as it does as 2048x? What can you get away with? Generally speaking, 1024x is fine for most largish objects, like a post box, and you want to use 4096x textures sparingly for things like houses and buildings with tons of unique surfaces, or character models that will spend a fair amount of time being close to the camera.
> 
> You can even use a single texture for multiple objects if you want. Why have 4 roughly equally sized objects with 4 sets of 512x material textures, when you could throw them all together onto a single 1024x material sheet?
> 
> 
> 
> To get down to the bare basics, texture density is a combination of your UV island sizes, and the resolution of your textures, all of which are determined by you during the design phase before you export your objects into Unreal.
> 
> Keep in mind that this isn't something you have to be absolutely scientific about. Like if you have a 40cm object, you don't need to worry about it having X amount of pixels on its surfaces relative to other objects. It's more of a general guideline thing, with the primary goal being maximizing quality with minimal amount of resources used, and the realization that you don't need a 4096x texture for a prop bowl sitting on a shelf.



I need to digest this, thanks! In the tutorial it seemed to be saying on a small object use less resolution cause it’s smaller and the same amount of detail won’t be visible than say a wall.

i need to figure out how UE handles mips, if you have to set it up or UE will do it for you just it handles LODs,


----------



## Renzatic

Huntn said:


> I need to digest this. In the tutorial it seemed to be saying on a small object use less resolution cause it’s smaller and the same amount of detail won’t be visible than say a wall.




That's sound advice.

Really, the best way to learn this is to experiment. Grab a couple of similar looking models off of Bridge, one at 2048x, the other at 1024x. If they both look about the same in your scene, then that extra resolution isn't paying off for you, and you can get by with the smaller texture. If it looks blurry and chunky, then go with the larger of the two.


----------



## Huntn

Renzatic said:


> That's sound advice.
> 
> Really, the best way to learn this is to experiment. Grab a couple of similar looking models off of Bridge, one at 2048x, the other at 1024x. If they both look about the same in your scene, then that extra resolution isn't paying off for you, and you can get by with the smaller texture. If it looks blurry and chunky, then go with the larger of the two.



As initially described it‘s like a somewhat vague formula to determine texture density… I think the next tutorial will get into it more. And I have to decide which photo program to get.


----------



## Renzatic

Huntn said:


> As initially described it‘s like a somewhat vague formula to determine texture density… I think the next tutorial will get into it more. And I have to decide which photo program to get.




Get Affinity Photo, you goobus! Don't even argue with me. Just get it. Now. Go!


----------



## diamond.g

Renzatic said:


> MIPMAPS!
> 
> In short, it's another level of detail optimization. A stack of the same textures at different resolutions, like 2048x, 1024x, 512x, and 256x, with the higher resolutions being drawn the closer to the camera they are.



When using Nanite are mipmaps still needed?


----------



## Renzatic

diamond.g said:


> When using Nanite are mipmaps still needed?




I'd imagine so, since distance rendering is still a factor. Though depending on the detail of the model, it probably isn't as important.


----------



## Huntn

@Renzatic, do you remember telling me where Blender is the place where individual props are made to be brought into UE and be put together there?

Of interest I am going though the *Becoming an Environmental Artist Tutorial *at UE.com and in the section referencing  Block out  meshes, the rough meshes used to initially put together a scene, there is a lot of emphasis on modularity, scaling, scaling everything in your external 3D modeling program so it all fits together there. In the example they were making the enterior of  a subway train (so everything needs to be precise) and virtually had the entire thing was constructed in (in their case) Maya before it ever saw UE. So these were just the basic shapes of the pieces and that is all, there were doorways, windows, and recesses for those areas, but nothing beyond the main basic shape. This is a case where just the size of a subway car is being modeled. I want to layout an entire scene with rough pieces and have to figure out if it would be UE or Blender for this purpose.

So I like the idea of putting together a scene with just blockout meshes, basically just the outline and few details of pieces, but I need to read more about level design in UE and find out if I want to make a specific scene with a specific layout, if I should be putting this together with rough pieces in Blender? The more advanced *Environmental Artist tutorial* at UE may shed more light on this. Yes the blockout meshes are brought into UE and placed, and the example was a small specific architectural type layout. But I don't know how much level layout info was made available to the environmental artist at that point. 

The other answer I'm looking for (not from you as this is a UE question),  is just how convenient the terrain tool is in UE for creating a natural scene like I want to make. Hell, when I'm watching a UE Tutorial and they jump to Maya to show all the modeling they did, I think I can assume that not only is UE not the place to be doing modeling, but that for scene layout where you want. some specific dimensions, from what I saw on the forest project using Blender making the initial mesh, that appears to be very precise. While the terrain tool in UE seems imprecise. Sure it's fine for sculpting in the distance hills, but for something like a close up scene in a natural environment, you might be better off laying this out in Blender, because there you can play with flat meshes, you can manipulate them so are not perfectly flat, but they are much better defined than the big marshmallows you create in UE using the terrain tool.

The building pieces I've seen in UE are standard shapes cubes, floors, ceilings, walls, etc. Besides the UE terrain tool that initially makes a flat plain, I have to figure out what is best for rough layout and if that would be in UE or in Blender. I remember from the forest scene project the author started with a flat mesh and then manipulated it in height for something that looked more natural. I need to verify if this capability is available in UE, or would it be a matter of making a flat mesh in blender, manipulating it to create a more natural looking surface, not perfectly flat, do that before importing it into UE.

Of further note I've found several tutorials on creating a cave in UE, but I won't be surprised if this does not involve the "3rd party modeling tool" in some shape or form.  You know that Blender donut shape? I could easily imagine stretching that out into a cave in Blender. In UE, I don't know yet.


----------



## Huntn

@Renzatic  I finished up the Becoming an Environmental Artist tutorial at UE.com. Good info. Then I started Blender Day 2 and quickly decided at this point, I need to make some direct steps towards at least starting the UE Project I want to make, The Secret Spot, so I temporarily set aside Blender Day 2 and started a third  party Landscape Tutorial.








Big squares seen are Components.
With default settings each component has 1 section
which is composed of 63x63 Quads.​
Do you know if Blender handles landscape grids the same way as UE?
Here are some notes I jotted down:
*UE Landscape Settings*

*Layers*
*Location-* leave at 0,0,0 so at center of level.
*Rotation-* don’t change 0,0,0
*Scale-* don’t change 100, 100, 100
*Overall Resolution-* default is 505x505.-
*Note-* Use Sections, Components, and Resolution numbers to change quality for LODs I think.
*Total Components- *Default 8x8 components.
Are the largest square defined.
Change number of components and grid size changes.

*Section Size-*Either 1x1 or 2x2 per Component.
*Sections per Component- * change the number of sections per component also changes landscape size.
Default section size. 63x63 Quads
Author suggests using smaller sections lets UE have more control over LODs, good for small worlds.
Larger World use large Sections (smaller number of sections 1x1) ) will reduce performance impact.

*Quads-*smallest square defined on the grid. These do not appear to change size
So reduce the number of quads in a section and this reduces Section size, which also reduces landscape size.



*Question- *What I’m not clear about is if the terrain map looks bigger in relation to the premade room you see in the default game display setup, does this mean that assets placed in the landscape are bigger or that the landscape is actually bigger but just less delineation for scaling? I'm thinking the latter.  The premade room you get in the engine when you select third person game, does not react to grid size.


----------



## diamond.g

Huntn said:


> @Renzatic  I finished up the Becoming an Environmental Artist tutorial at UE.com. Good info. Then I started Blender Day 2 and quickly decided at this point, I need to make some direct steps towards at least starting the UE Project I want to make, The Secret Spot, so I temporarily set aside Blender Day 2 and started a third  party Landscape Tutorial.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> View attachment 11542
> Big squares seen are Components.
> With default settings each component has 1 section
> which is composed of 63x63 Quads.​
> Do you know if Blender handles landscape grids the same way as UE?
> Here are some notes I jotted down:
> *UE Landscape Settings*
> 
> *Layers*
> *Location-* leave at 0,0,0 so at center of level.
> *Rotation-* don’t change 0,0,0
> *Scale-* don’t change 100, 100, 100
> *Overall Resolution-* default is 505x505.-
> *Note-* Use Sections, Components, and Resolution numbers to change quality for LODs I think.
> *Total Components- *Default 8x8 components.
> Are the largest square defined.
> Change number of components and grid size changes.
> 
> *Section Size-*Either 1x1 or 2x2 per Component.
> *Sections per Component- * change the number of sections per component also changes landscape size.
> Default section size. 63x63 Quads
> Author suggests using smaller sections lets UE have more control over LODs, good for small worlds.
> Larger World use large Sections (smaller number of sections 1x1) ) will reduce performance impact.
> 
> *Quads-*smallest square defined on the grid. These do not appear to change size
> So reduce the number of quads in a section and this reduces Section size, which also reduces landscape size.
> 
> 
> 
> *Question- *What I’m not clear about is if the terrain map looks bigger in relation to the premade room you see in the default game display setup, does this mean that assets placed in the landscape are bigger or that the landscape is actually bigger but just less delineation for scaling? I'm thinking the latter.  The premade room you get in the engine when you select third person game, does not react to grid size.



I wonder how much of this changes when you switch to using World Partition (I am assuming this is exclusive to UE5).


----------



## Huntn

diamond.g said:


> I wonder how much of this changes when you switch to using World Partition (I am assuming this is exclusive to UE5).



I’m not sure what you are asking. Is World Partition a new feature in UE5? So far I’ve been sticking to UE4 while learning because it was already established. I wonder how different it is from UE5?

Btw are you actively working/playing with Unreal Engine?


----------



## Renzatic

Huntn said:


> What I’m not clear about is if the terrain map looks bigger in relation to the premade room you see in the default game display setup, does this mean that assets placed in the landscape are bigger or that the landscape is actually bigger but just less delineation for scaling? I'm thinking the latter. The premade room you get in the engine when you select third person game, does not react to grid size.




Everything generated by UE should be sized accordingly.

You may be getting confused by The Grid, which is primarily a guide used to determine scale, but otherwise doesn't have anything to do with your meshes, and the grid on a landscape mesh, which is simply the underlying resolution of said mesh. The issue here MIGHT be due to UE enforcing a certain grid resolution, so you only have X amount of subdivisions per square meter, meaning that if you want more resolution, it's going to scale the mesh to maintain that density across your entire scene.

It's probably doing this because the landscape meshes in UE aren't meant to be highly detailed. They're the base you build upon. If you want to add in fine details, you do that with the objects you import in from Blender.



Huntn said:


> So far I’ve been sticking to UE4 while learning because it was already established. I wonder how different it is from UE5?




From what I understand, there aren't too many differences between UE4 and UE5. Everything you learned in one can be carried over to the other with a minimal amount of fuss.

The biggest changes are the additions of Nanite and Lumen.

Nanite is, from what I've seen, voodoo cult devil blood juju magic, allowing you do use as many polygons as you want, so long as they're applied to static, non-moving meshes. You can have a landscape made up of literally billions of polygons with almost no hit to performance. You don't have to deal with normalmaps or heightmaps, since you can just use raw geometry for the fine details, and you don't have to use LODs, because Nanite automatically tesselates your static meshes on the fly.

Lumen is realtime global illumination, which provides you all that nice lighting you get from baking without the baking.

The downside to all of this? It takes a damn powerful computer to use it. If you're not using a later gen i7 or Ryzen equivalent, a 20xx Geforce, and 32GB of RAM, I wouldn't touch it.

Also, I found this video, which shows you what you really should be doing for determining scale.


----------



## Huntn

Renzatic said:


> Everything generated by UE should be sized accordingly.
> 
> You may be getting confused by The Grid, which is primarily a guide used to determine scale, but otherwise doesn't have anything to do with your meshes, and the grid on a landscape mesh, which is simply the underlying resolution of said mesh. The issue here MIGHT be due to UE enforcing a certain grid resolution, so you only have X amount of subdivisions per square meter, meaning that if you want more resolution, it's going to scale the mesh to maintain that density across your entire scene.
> 
> It's probably doing this because the landscape meshes in UE aren't meant to be highly detailed. They're the base you build upon. If you want to add in fine details, you do that with the objects you import in from Blender.
> 
> 
> 
> From what I understand, there aren't too many differences between UE4 and UE5. Everything you learned in one can be carried over to the other with a minimal amount of fuss.
> 
> The biggest changes are the additions of Nanite and Lumen.
> 
> Nanite is, from what I've seen, voodoo cult devil blood juju magic, allowing you do use as many polygons as you want, so long as they're applied to static, non-moving meshes. You can have a landscape made up of literally billions of polygons with almost no hit to performance. You don't have to deal with normalmaps or heightmaps, since you can just use raw geometry for the fine details, and you don't have to use LODs, because Nanite automatically tesselates your static meshes on the fly.
> 
> Lumen is realtime global illumination, which provides you all that nice lighting you get from baking without the baking.
> 
> The downside to all of this? It takes a damn powerful computer to use it. If you're not using a later gen i7 or Ryzen equivalent, a 20xx Geforce, and 32GB of RAM, I wouldn't touch it.
> 
> Also, I found this video, which shows you what you really should be doing for determining scale.



My impression is that the grid dictates distance based  LOD shifts, maybe not. At least the author said something like that. 

Ok, I think I see it’s just a guide to lock to that it does not effect meshes, just gives meshes something to lock on to. However, when the landscape/plain (a mesh of it’s own?) is actually created it fills the space outlined by the grid size.
Or is the landescape not a grid? In Blender, you create a flat mesh to act as a terrain, yes? 

What confuses me regarding the grid is that it appears as you change the gradiations, but the smallest size of the grid, “quads“ stay the same, so it appears the end result is that you’ve just made the grid upon which you will create a landscape, bigger or smaller, not add more divisions as if you were adding vertices. Bottom line, because of these visual changes, I am questioning if you are actually giving yourself more divisions or expanding or contracting the size of the plain you want to create?

Regarding Nanites, that is incredible a future with the potential of photo realism visually indistinguishable from reality.

Regarding Lumen- In UE lighting is currently baked into textures via static lights to save on processing. Dynamic lights, moving objects cast live shadows, are the most expensive. I’ll assume that Lumin claims to provide dynamic lighting at a lower cost that what UE 4 does.


----------



## Renzatic

Huntn said:


> What confuses me regarding the grid is that it appears as you change the gradiations, but the smallest size of the grid, “quads“ stay the same, so it appears the end result is that you’ve just made the grid upon which you will create a landscape, bigger or smaller, not add more divisions as if you were adding vertices. Bottom line, because of these visual changes, I am questioning if you are actually giving yourself more divisions or expanding or contracting the size of the plain you want to create?




I watched this video to see exactly what you're talking about...






I can understand why it's a little confusing, because of the way things are named. A Section Size seems to be one subdivision on your mesh, which contains X by Y amount of quads. Then you get to Sections Per Component, which defaults to 1x1, so you'd think that a component is the overall landscape tile.

...but no, because Number of Components determines the amount of subdivisions. Overall resolution seems to override the settings in the Section Size, and Total Components overrides the amount of components in the scene.

It's weird, but not too difficult to wrap your head around. It seems that UE wants to enforce size by quads, rather than your quads being a separate setting that determines the resolution of your mesh, but not it's size.. It'd be easier to understand if a component was, say, 1m x 1m, but that's not the way it's doing things, so...

Check this link out.









						Calculate the Size of Unreal Engine Landscapes - Motion Forge Pictures
					

How to work out the sizes of the default Unreal Engine landscape tiles and a chart that shows the default sizes in km and miles.



					www.motionforgepictures.com


----------



## Huntn

Renzatic said:


> I watched this video to see exactly what you're talking about...
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> I can understand why it's a little confusing, because of the way things are named. A Section Size seems to be one subdivision on your mesh, which contains X by Y amount of quads. Then you get to Sections Per Component, which defaults to 1x1, so you'd think that a component is the overall landscape tile.
> 
> ...but no, because Number of Components determines the amount of subdivisions. Overall resolution seems to override the settings in the Section Size, and Total Components overrides the amount of components in the scene.
> 
> It's weird, but not too difficult to wrap your head around. It seems that UE wants to enforce size by quads, rather than your quads being a separate setting that determines the resolution of your mesh, but not it's size.. It'd be easier to understand if a component was, say, 1m x 1m, but that's not the way it's doing things, so...
> 
> Check this link out.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Calculate the Size of Unreal Engine Landscapes - Motion Forge Pictures
> 
> 
> How to work out the sizes of the default Unreal Engine landscape tiles and a chart that shows the default sizes in km and miles.
> 
> 
> 
> www.motionforgepictures.com



Have not watched this yet. My problem seems to be visually looking at the grid in the view port if you change the number of components, sections, or quads, the grid size visually changes growing  larger or smaller. That appears to be adding or subtracting territory, without changing density.

Logically if the landscape size was dictated by a defined dimension and the changes of say the number of quads, changes grid density but not change the overall dimension of the terrain stayed the same, but that does not seem to be the case.

Section size changes based on the number of quads you put in it, and components change size based on the number of sections. So I have to wonder am I changing size or density or both?


----------



## Renzatic

Huntn said:


> Have not watched this yet. My problem seems to be visually looking at the grid in the view port if you change the number of components, sections, or quads, the grid size visually changes growing  larger or smaller. That appears to be adding or subtracting territory, without changing density.
> 
> Logically if the landscape size was dictated by a defined dimension and the changes of say the number of quads, changes grid density but not change the overall dimension of the terrain stayed the same, but that does not seem to be the case.
> 
> Section size changes based on the number of quads you put in it, and components change size based on the number of sections. So I have to wonder am I changing size or density or both?




You could try to use the Override Resolution entry, see what that does. Though if that ends up making the mesh larger, then I'd say you're probably stuck with the default density.

Though really, that isn't THAT big of a deal. The resolution of the plain is pretty good, given what you're meant to use it for.


----------



## diamond.g

Huntn said:


> I’m not sure what you are asking. Is World Partition a new feature in UE5? So far I’ve been sticking to UE4 while learning because it was already established. I wonder how different it is from UE5?
> 
> Btw are you actively working/playing with Unreal Engine?



i am just an avid follower of what you guys are going. From the demos I have seen of UE5 it looks like a huge leap (when using all the new stuff) and was curious about the differences in workflow.


----------



## Huntn

diamond.g said:


> i am just an avid follower of what you guys are going. From the demos I have seen of UE5 it looks like a huge leap (when using all the new stuff) and was curious about the differences in workflow.



I am not yet the person who can answer this, just learning and I started in Oct or so. I can say that Unreal Engine is pretty incredible, and as said before the more I know the more I realize I don't know, lol.


----------



## Huntn

Renzatic said:


> You could try to use the Override Resolution entry, see what that does. Though if that ends up making the mesh larger, then I'd say you're probably stuck with the default density.
> 
> Though really, that isn't THAT big of a deal. The resolution of the plain is pretty good, given what you're meant to use it for




Thanks!

Does Blender have a terrain tool or for terrain, are you always working with flat meshes that you manipulate? I'm debating that if I want to make a cliff like structure with a cave in the face of it, I'm thinking this is not something I could easily do in UE with the terrain tool. It seems more likely that you'd want to sculpt it in Blender and import it in. Thoughts?


----------



## Renzatic

Huntn said:


> Thanks!
> 
> Does Blender have a terrain tool or are you always working with flat meshes that you manipulate? I'm debating that if I want to make a cliff like structure with a cave in the face of it, I'm thinking this is not something I could easily do in UE with the terrain tool. It seems more likely that you'd want to sculpt it in Blender and import it in. Thoughts?




Yup, you can use the sculpt tools on a low res mesh. It'll act fairly similarly to what you're already used to with Unreal's landscaper.

The grab and inflate brushes will probably work best for you here.


----------



## Huntn

Renzatic said:


> Yup, you can use the sculpt tools on a low res mesh. It'll act fairly similarly to what you're already used to with Unreal's landscaper.
> 
> The grab and inflate brushes will probably work best for you here.



Thanks. Actually I'm not yet sure what the full capabities of the terrain tool in UE is. It seems like it's a separate beast, you can sculpt it but I don't think you can go in with a manipulate tool and grab vertices and pull them around...


----------



## Renzatic

Huntn said:


> Thanks. Actually I'm not yet sure what the full capabities of the terrain tool in UE is. It seems like it's a separate beast, you can sculpt it but I don't think you can go in with a manipulate tool and grab vertices and pull them around...




As far as I know, the terrain tool can only raise and lower geometry on the Z axis. That’s fine for gulleys, creek beds, and trails, but it’s weak when it comes to anything overlapping.


----------



## Huntn

*UE Level Design- *When I look for a video on the basics of level design for UE, the pickings are slim. I see something in older tutorials called *BSP* and blocking out levels and it makes sense to block out a level with rough shapes, but in the latest UE documentation it’s offered with caveats.

Plus I tried to follow along an older tutorial (2015 I think) and the specifics the author mentioned where not in the latest version 4 of UE. At least  they were not were his version of the engine showed them to be.





__





						Geometry Brush Actors | Unreal Engine 4.27 Documentation
					





					docs.unrealengine.com
				




_*This 4.27 UE documentation says:
Warning*: Geometry Brushes are not recommended as a final method of level design. It is not required, but can be useful at the early stages of creation. 

Geometry Brushes are the most basic tool for level construction in Unreal. Conceptually, it is best to think of a Geometry Brush as filling in and carving out volumes of space in your level. *Previously, Geometry Brushes were used as the primary building block in level design. Now, however, that role has been passed on to Static Meshes, which are far more efficient.* However, Geometry Brushes can still be useful in the early stages of a product for rapid prototyping of levels and objects, as well as for level construction by those who do not have access to 3D modeling tools. This document goes over the use of Geometry Brushes and how they can utilized in your levels.

In general, you can think of Geometry Brushes as a way to create basic shapes for use in your level design process, either as permanent fixtures or as something temporary to test with while your artists finish creating final meshes._
———————

What this says to me is that geometry brushes are are a remnants of a time before static meshes, and it might just be as easy to just place rough meshes around to determine the dimensions and layout of the level I want to develop.

So for *Blender* have you ever created a scene large enough  that you’d want to lay it out in advance or is it just as easy to just start placing  meshes and adjusting them as you go?

For myself and the type of level I am imagining, which is not a large level in the spectrum of levels, but, it would be nice to be able to lay out a floor plan for it in advance. Or maybe it’s just so easy to move static meshes around, just start placing and adjusting them as needed?

UE has this nice little 3rd person game setup which provides you with a basically a room and a character all ready to walk around, and as see it I could either take down the walls of the room and build off that for a floor plan, using mesh floor sections or build a terrain space and just wing it filling it with place meshes defining a space and then walking my character around in it.

*Considerations*:

If I don’t want a perfectly flat level, this where I  might want UE terrain or build a manipulated flat mesh in Blender and import it.
And  then there is the matter of the cave, there is an exterior made of rock that I don’t want it to look like bolders stacked on each other, but slabs, a face of rock, including a shear vertical face.
There is the entrance to the cave.
And there is the interior which could have a clean architectural space as is if a building was built inside it, or have rough rock walls and ceilings as if it’s a natural space, that has been turned into a livable space.
Terrain  by itself is not hard, it’s just a matter of determining if I would  be better served by creating a UE terrain, or just use slanted meshes like the mesh I created for the Forest Road in *Blender*. So I am faced with the choice of creating a floor in Blender and importing it or a combination of UE floor meshes and terrain. Frankly I see creating the floor in Blender as more difficult from a level planning aspect.

Also from the Forest Road project, I discovered that the UE terrain is not held back by meshes, that meshes do not provide a barrier, and that the terrain can easily swallow up any mesh you’ve place in the scene. So trying to surround and interior cave space created with meshes with a UE terrain, might not be practical because the terrain represents a single manipulated plain. Yes, you can gouge out a hole in UE terrain, but I don’t think this will mesh well with my cave Idea.

I’m thinking that the entire cliff/cave area would be better as a mesh. Which means I think, that I am modeling this in *Blender*. In essence having to go back and forth between Blender and UE for level layout. Of interest, that Low Poly Forrest Project for purchase you linked to includes a cave and it is cheap $14 or so. I might just buy that to see how it is put together.  It might be easier to build the cave and the cliff in Blender and import that in as an anchor for the UE project, 

Also at this point I might be served by studying Blender rock sculpting and doing some _creating a cave in UE_ tutorials, and  I have not forgotten your suggestion of doing low poly modeling In Blender. As I said, I started up the Blender Day 2 tutorial, but I just want to advance on both fronts alternating as I go.

Thoughts?


----------



## Huntn

After watching 2 videos about making a cave in UE, it appears that modeling these space with meshes in the third party program is the way to go. Here is one of the UE tutorials:


----------



## Huntn

This is showing a lot of promise as far as fancy caves go, in Blender:





However I am not looking to create a deep long fancy cave, just  basically one or 2 connected rooms so @Renzatic, a Blender question.

I assume can you create a hollow cube in blender with the textures on the inside, add a bunch of vertices, round the edges, make it slightly irregular, possibilty sculpt the surface into a rock like stratus and make an interior  “cave room”.

This seems less complicated than what I am seeing in the above tutorial, but that above is great stuff to know like  UV unpacking I think that is the term he uses (maybe not ) to make the vertices more uniform for the purpose of making an applied texture look good as I recall.

I’d also to like an underground lake.  After creating a somewhat largish cave room (separate from the first cave room) can you deform the bottom of it into a depression and add water?

As the cave seems to be the primary challenge in this project, maybe I should get back to Blender sooner than later.


----------



## Renzatic

Huntn said:


> As the cave seems to be the primary challenge in this project, maybe I should get back to Blender sooner than later.




Okay, here's the basic way you should approach cave modeling. 

...excuse the crudeness of my example here. I did it in just 20 minutes. Also, pretend it's all in UE.

First, you'll make your little landscape. Use a visibility mask to create a hole in it, like such...






End result, will look something like this:





Now, throw some rocks into your scene to make a cliff, and the cave entrance around the hole in your landscape...





...this is just one rock copied over and over again, then scaled and rotated into various places.

That's really all there is to it.

Making the cave itself is even easier. You can start with a regular cube, flip the normals, and begin building tunnels with extrudes and loop cuts. Doctor it up with static meshes.

If you really want everything to fit well together, I believe you can export your landscape mesh out to Blender, providing you a guide to work with.


----------



## Huntn

Renzatic said:


> Okay, here's the basic way you should approach cave modeling.
> 
> ...excuse the crudeness of my example here. I did it in just 20 minutes. Also, pretend it's all in UE.
> 
> First, you'll make your little landscape. Use a visibility mask to create a hole in it, like such...
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> End result, will look something like this:
> 
> View attachment 11573
> 
> Now, throw some rocks into your scene to make a cliff, and the cave entrance around the hole in your landscape...
> 
> View attachment 11575
> 
> ...this is just one rock copied over and over again, then scaled and rotated into various places.
> 
> That's really all there is to it.
> 
> Making the cave itself is even easier. You can start with a regular cube, flip the normals, and begin building tunnels with extrudes and loop cuts. Doctor it up with static meshes.
> 
> If you really want everything to fit well together, I believe you can export your landscape mesh out to Blender, providing you a guide to work with.



But maybe you read, I don’t want the entrance to the cave  to look like piled up bolders, I want a stratified rock face. Which takes me back to Blender and meshes and the question about the cave room made with a hollow cube and the textures on the inside.

However, I understand if you are getting burned out with my questions. No problem if you are, if the situation was reversed, I might be burned out too.


----------



## Renzatic

Huntn said:


> But maybe you read, I don’t want the entrance to the cave to look like piled up bolders, I want a stratified rock face. Which takes me back to Blender and meshes and the question about the cave room made with a hollow cube and the textures on the inside.
> 
> However, I understand if you are getting burned out with my questions. No problem if you are, if the situation was reversed, I might be burned out too.




It's not that I'm getting burnt out, it's that you're like a 1st year engineering student saying you want to learn the bare basics, then ask how to build a rocket capable of achieving orbit.

You really do need to learn those bare basics first. Think of what you want to build in its most basic shapes. Like what are stratified rocks? They're basically just long, thin rectangles stacked on top of each other.

So how would you create a mesh that looks like that? Stack some rectangles on top of each other! 

Though that's a little too simple. What if you want to change the shape, make it look more pushed and eroded? You can run some loop cuts through a plane, bevel them so you get a nice little split, inset them, run some other loop cuts across them, then push the verts around to shape it.

Want to go farther than that? You can throw a multires modifier on your model, subdivide it 4-5 times, go into sculpt mode, and bang out some fine details.

Now, how are you gonna make this into a game ready object? Do you know how to bake a mesh to a texture yet? Do you know how to bake down a model?

There's so, so, SO much you have to build upon that starting at the photorealistic end of things will just overwhelm you. In a lot of ways, it's like drawing. You can try try to sketch out a portrait, but if you don't know how to break things down to their basic shapes, it's gonna be a difficult thing for you to do.

Think about what you want to make. Think about the shape. Bang out that basic shape. After that, think about the details. What are their basic shapes? How can you make those? Would it work better as a texture, or a model?

Right now, it's best to think of your project in a piecemeal manner. Make your cliff wall with a cave in it. Low poly. Nothing fancy. Like this...






Once you get that down, start adding in more details with loop cuts, bevels, and whatnot...





Now that you have the bare basics, why not try your hand at subdividing, and sculpt in some details?





Learn how to iterate, and iterate, and iterate again. Pick one thing to focus on, then try to get it into Unreal.


----------



## Huntn

Renzatic said:


> It's not that I'm getting burnt out, it's that you're like a 1st year engineering student saying you want to learn the bare basics, then ask how to build a rocket capable of achieving orbit.
> 
> You really do need to learn those bare basics first. Think of what you want to build in its most basic shapes. Like what are stratified rocks? They're basically just long, thin rectangles stacked on top of each other.
> 
> So how would you create a mesh that looks like that? Stack some rectangles on top of each other!
> 
> Though that's a little too simple. What if you want to change the shape, make it look more pushed and eroded? You can run some loop cuts through a plane, bevel them so you get a nice little split, inset them, run some other loop cuts across them, then push the verts around to shape it.
> 
> Want to go farther than that? You can throw a multires modifier on your model, subdivide it 4-5 times, go into sculpt mode, and bang out some fine details.
> 
> Now, how are you gonna make this into a game ready object? Do you know how to bake a mesh to a texture yet? Do you know how to bake down a model?
> 
> There's so, so, SO much you have to build upon that starting at the photorealistic end of things will just overwhelm you. In a lot of ways, it's like drawing. You can try try to sketch out a portrait, but if you don't know how to break things down to their basic shapes, it's gonna be a difficult thing for you to do.
> 
> Think about what you want to make. Think about the shape. Bang out that basic shape. After that, think about the details. What are their basic shapes? How can you make those? Would it work better as a texture, or a model?
> 
> Right now, it's best to think of your project in a piecemeal manner. Make your cliff wall with a cave in it. Low poly. Nothing fancy. Like this...
> 
> 
> View attachment 11578
> 
> Once you get that down, start adding in more details with loop cuts, bevels, and whatnot...
> 
> View attachment 11579
> 
> Now that you have the bare basics, why not try your hand at subdividing, and sculpt in some details?
> 
> View attachment 11580
> 
> Learn how to iterate, and iterate, and iterate again. Pick one thing to focus on, then try to get it into Unreal.



Thanks for the illustrations, I appreciate your efforts, but I did not ask you to build me some models. Now I appreciate  that you did, I really do,  actually I am thrilled, but that was not my intention, and if my questions strike you as an obligation to put out this kind of effort and it is frustrating you, please stop doing that. I don’t want you frustrated because you are too valuable of a resource to squander.

Last night I spent 4 hours on Blender Day 2 before I read your post because as I am spending the time to picture this project in my head and based on that, and my continuous research in an effort to go from point A to point P I have:

identified the basics for what I want as the primary elements of the project.
And as I want to visualize, lay these elements out, so they are just not in my head, I am very interested in layout design and want to block out a level, ie create a rough layout in UE that I can walk a character around in to determine scale.
And over the last couple of days, I have decided that UE does not offer the best means to build a cave the way I want it built It. That appears to be Blender.
And the idea of blocking out the level with Blender low poly modeling is appealing to me as both a learning exercise and as a means of laying out the level.
So I think I got it.  I am following your advice, but the first Blender tutorial bogged me down. Now I am on the second Blender basics tutorial, and it‘s going well, but due to my learning technique it is slow going because I am alternating writing Huntn’s UE Manual and Blender Manual. These reference controls, tools, UI, rules, tips, and techniques. It is the only way I can expose myself to so much info and later go back and find  it again.

I’ll assure you, there is no crisis of faith, but the key here is to keep me motivated and engaged. I am not just totally focused on Step B, Blender modeling, because I am keeping myself engaged with the entire project at least planning what my next step is and verifying that my plan is realistic and doable. Step C is basic level layout, and as I have identified it, Step D is determing  how to construct the core of the project the relationship of the cave, to a cliff, to a pool, to a waterfall, how those elements should best be constructed, where and when UE vs Blender should be relied upon and the best way to integrate them.

Btw, Step A which was a huge first step, which was really like 500 steps, was convincing myself that I could recreated the Forest Road which I did (well enough) in UE. Now I got though that, popped out on the other end, still eager to go, so there should be no worry on your part about me getting in over my head and stomping off.

That said, there are no guarantees, if the appeal wanes, yeah  I could quit, but I am not feeling that after  Step  A or now, I’m still feeling excitement to move ahead.  And when I get bogged down with Blender tutorials, I might look at the other steps of the project to keep me excited. Lately level layout is something that I see looming over me, and I don’t just want to wing it on the fly, but want to have a methodical way to approach it, which also seems to be through Blender or even using UE low poly shapes. Then there is that cliff and cave.


----------



## Renzatic

Huntn said:


> Thanks for the illustrations, I appreciate your efforts, but I did not ask you to build me some models. Now I appreciate that you did, I really do, actually I am thrilled, but that was not my intention, and if my questions strike you as an obligation to put out this kind of effort and it is frustrating you, please stop doing that. I don’t want you frustrated because you are too valuable of a resource to squander.




Well, I do think you worry too much. 

If I sound like I'm being short, it's just because I'm trying to bang out as much I can, while also trying to get you to narrow your focus. You're trying to learn everything all at once, while I think you should be taking baby step by baby step.

Yeah, it's not as exciting to do things that way, but it's a lot more manageable.

Like you want to learn level layout, but you have yet to gain the skills to create things to layout within your levels. You want to make your cave, but you're still rough on mesh modeling, and don't know how to UV unwrap, or bake yet. You need to start small, and work up. Not start big, and jump haphazardly between points of interest.

So yeah, focusing on the cliff and cave is a good starting point. Instead of an expansive environment, try to make it into a little diorama. Something like this.









						Cabin On The Edge - 3D model by Keppu
					

Stylized low-poly cabin diorama. Home of a local witch and two little creepy crawlies. See if you can find all of them. ;)  Made with Maya 2019 and Photoshop. - Cabin On The Edge - 3D model by Keppu




					sketchfab.com


----------



## Huntn

Renzatic said:


> Well, I do think you worry too much.
> 
> If I sound like I'm being short, it's just because I'm trying to bang out as much I can, while also trying to get you to narrow your focus. You're trying to learn everything all at once, while I think you should be taking baby step by baby step.
> 
> Yeah, it's not as exciting to do things that way, but it's a lot more manageable.
> 
> Like you want to learn level layout, but you have yet to gain the skills to create things to layout within your levels. You want to make your cave, but you're still rough on mesh modeling, and don't know how to UV unwrap, or bake yet. You need to start small, and work up. Not start big, and jump haphazardly between points of interest.
> 
> So yeah, focusing on the cliff and cave is a good starting point. Instead of an expansive environment, try to make it into a little diorama. Something like this.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Cabin On The Edge - 3D model by Keppu
> 
> 
> Stylized low-poly cabin diorama. Home of a local witch and two little creepy crawlies. See if you can find all of them. ;)  Made with Maya 2019 and Photoshop. - Cabin On The Edge - 3D model by Keppu
> 
> 
> 
> 
> sketchfab.com



If you are really busy, then just ignore me when it’s  inconvenient. I’m ok with that. 

I appreciate your attention but will politely disagree. I am not haphazardly jumping around and I’m not overwhelmed.  The thing is that I see a path. The most cool thing about UE is that it gives you a game environment right off the bat. Regarding level design it’s like the foundation of the house you want to build. Just cranking up UE, you have a room and a little guy who can run around in it and you can fill it full of assets rght away if you want to, but I won’t until I know enough to proceed.

I don’t want to take each step in a vacuum, I want to be sure that what I am proposing is realistic and doable hence  my cave questions. And I am not ignoring basic modeling as you strongly suggested.  In fact I may end up constructing the core of that area (cliff, pool, cave, etc) using low poly models before I do much with big picture layout.

However it’s possible I am going to reach a threshold in modeling, where the next step is the foundation of the project, the level and it’s layout and I can explore this too without getting overwhelmed.

So I’ll post stuff about what I am doing, and don’t think I‘m expecting you spend a lot of time entertaining or educating me unless you have the time to, or more impotently, want to, Btw, that  cave modeling you did was impressive to me.


----------



## Huntn

@Renzatic here is a simple (I think) question when it's convenient. 

Working on a Blender tutorial (Blender Day 2) and I'm making a pencil. It's an 8 sided octagonal cylinder that I put a couple of loop cuts in. Made one end pointy, made the other rounded. So there are 4 sections because of the loop cuts in this cylinder. I put it into wire frame, then select the faces of one of the basic cylinder sections that I want to duplicate.

The idea is that after I duplicate those faces I'll enlarge the duplication a little and then slide it down the shaft, so it looks like a band on the pencil, but what I am finding is that after I duplicate this section instead of freely moving up the shaft, when I try to move it, it drags the vertices in the rest of the pencil distorting the whole thing.

I've done this before making the road mesh in Blender, and there when I accidentally made duplicates they moved without issue away from the original mesh. but those were duplicates for the entire mesh.

Here I'm just duplicating  just a section of a mesh, and it wants to stay connected to the original mesh, instead of sliding freely.  The author of the tutorial has not said anything about it, so I'm wondering if there is a setting in Blender that determines whether a duplicate piece of a mesh stays connected to the original or allows it to move away freely?

I just noticed that If I duplicate this section and pull it completely off of the original mesh it is free, but this is not what the author is having to do, he duplicates it, he right clicks to cancel, so it is still super imposed, and then he scales it and slides it without issue. There must be a setting... or 


It's just a learning exercise. ​


----------



## Renzatic

Huntn said:


> Here I'm just duplicating just a section of a mesh, and it wants to stay connected to the original mesh, instead of sliding freely. The author of the tutorial has not said anything about it, so I'm wondering if there is a setting in Blender that determines whether a duplicate piece of a mesh stays connected to the original or allows it to move away freely?
> 
> I just noticed that If I duplicate this section and pull it completely off of the original mesh it is free, but this is not what the author is having to do, he duplicates it, he right clicks to cancel, so it is still super imposed, and then he scales it and slides it without issue. There must be a setting... or




It's not a setting or anything, but you might be dropping your duplicated section before you scale it, which makes it difficult to grab from the underlying mesh.

The way I'd do something like that would be to add my loop cut, select it, bevel it out so that I have a nice little band, select it, hit Shift-D to duplicate it, scale it out so that it's floating just above the pencil, dissolve the edges I duplicated my band from, then select the outer edge loops, and extrude it in so that it has some thickness.

This is one of those things that's easier shown than described. Gimme a second, and I'll make a video.

edit: here you go...


----------



## Huntn

Renzatic said:


> It's not a setting or anything, but you might be dropping your duplicated section before you scale it, which makes it difficult to grab from the underlying mesh.
> 
> The way I'd do something like that would be to add my loop cut, select it, bevel it out so that I have a nice little band, select it, hit Shift-D to duplicate it, scale it out so that it's floating just above the pencil, dissolve the edges I duplicated my band from, then select the outer edge loops, and extrude it in so that it has some thickness.
> 
> This is one of those things that's easier shown than described. Gimme a second, and I'll make a video.



Thanks.  He showed that exactly

Select the faces that make up the loop cut section in wire  frame  to get all of them.
Shift D to duplicate, then Right Click to cancel, and with it still selected, scale it up.
Except when I scale it up the pencil distorts because it‘s (what I just created)  still connected to the pencil. If if do this step Shift D and then immediately slide it off the pencil, then it is separate.


----------



## Renzatic

Huntn said:


> Thanks.  He showed that exactly
> 
> Select the faces that make up the loop cut section in wire  frame  to get all of them.
> Shift D to duplicate, then Right Click to cancel, and with it still selected, scale it up.
> Except when I scale it up the pencil distorts because it‘s (what I just created)  still connected to the pencil. If if do this step Shift D and then immediately slide it off the pencil, then it is separate.




You might be taking one step too many. Once my loop was selected, I hit Shift-D, then S immediately after, and just scaled it up.


----------



## Huntn

Renzatic said:


> You might be taking one step too many. Once my loop was selected, I hit Shift-D, then S immediately after, and just scaled it up.



I’ll try that, Thanks! ! He specifically said select faces, Shift D, then Right Click to cancel, then Scale.

in your video, you look like you add the loop cuts, then duplicate,, then scaling. In my example I was selecting a selection that already existed as part of a larger mesh.


----------



## Renzatic

Huntn said:


> I’ll try that, Thanks! ! He specifically said select faces, Shift D, then Right Click to cancel, then Scale.




Doing that prevents you from accidentally moving your duplicated selection, but it's not something you HAVE to do. The important thing is you don't drop your selection.

...out of curiosity, you haven't defaulted to right-click select, have you?



> in your video, you look like you add the loop cuts, then duplicate,, then scaling. In my example I was selecting a selection that already existed as part of a larger mesh.




There are multiple ways you can get that loop on your pencil. You don't even have to duplicate your faces to separate it. Making the loop cut, then using an Extrude Along Normals, or Inset to do the same thing, then separate that. Alternately, you could add in another 8 sided cylinder while in Edit Mode, and move/scale it into position.

Once you understand all the various ways you can do things, you can determine which is most efficient and/or convenient for you and your workflow.


----------



## Huntn

Just completed: *Landscape Essential Concepts:*
https://learn.unrealengine.com/course/3590620/

Tomorrow: Back to Blender Day 2...


----------



## Huntn

Just modeled a shoe in Blender starting with a cube, interesting, eyes being opened up. 

@Renzatic I realize you don’t work with UE, but I wondering when I start modeling in Blender for the intent of importing into UE should I even worry about textures while in blender? I assume the Blender system is different, do you know if it handles materials completely different?  I assume so.

Does it have materials?  If my final product is heading into UE that handles all of the textures, materials, appearance etc, just wondering if there is any advantage to learning materials in blender?

As part of my UE project, I’ll be building a horse stable in Blender and want something unique looking that I design. There maybe some unfinished logs in the construction (maybe not, just exploratory)  so I’m going to be looking at tutorials on making tree trunks Blender.

Yes, I’m still working the Blender Day 2 tutorial. The next step in Blender Day 2 is build a coffee cup.

Also I purchased that low poly UE pack for the woods/mountains you linked to. I’ll probably take a look at those trees just to see, but I’m wondering if you can import a mesh from UE to Blender with  the intent of manipulating it. I wonder what shape it would show up in Blender. Anyway, not asking you to research anything in particular for me, just blabbing.


----------



## Renzatic

Huntn said:


> I realize you don’t work with UE, but I wondering when I start modeling in Blender for the intent of importing into UE should I even worry about textures while in blender? I assume the Blender system is different, do you know if it handles materials completely different? I assume so.




It depends on what you're doing. If you're going with wholly procedural materials that don't require UV mapping, then yeah, model in Blender, then make the material in Unreal. If you're going to be working with image based texture maps, then yeah, you're going to want to do all your texturing in Blender, making sure everything looks good before sending it out to Unreal.

Unreal and Blender are both the same in that they both follow a PBR based workflow for their materials. The end node in Unreal, with the sockets for Diffuse, Metallic, Roughness, and whatnot is functionally about the same as Blender's Principled BSDF shader. For example, say you're in Blender, and you have a texture map for your diffuse, normal, and roughness, but you use the slider to put the metallic input up to 0.5. You can do the same thing in Unreal, plugging a texture map node into the Base Color, Roughness, and Normal inputs, then slapping a value node set to 0.5 to the Metallic.

It's when you get into procedurals that things start changing on you. They're still roughly the same. All you're doing is using math to make shapes when you get right down to it. But you'll have various different helper nodes that make getting from Point A to B a slightly different affair.



Huntn said:


> Also I purchased that low poly UE pack for the woods/mountains you linked to. I’ll probably take a look at those trees just to see, but I’m wondering if you can import a mesh from UE to Blender with the intent of manipulating it. I wonder what shape it would show up in UE. Anyway, not asking you to research anything in particular for me, just blabbing.




You usually can, yeah. Though some asset packs can prevent you from doing so, depending on the whims of the creators. The only way to find out whether you can or not is just to try it.


----------



## Huntn

Renzatic said:


> It depends on what you're doing. If you're going with wholly procedural materials that don't require UV mapping, then yeah, model in Blender, then make the material in Unreal. If you're going to be working with image based texture maps, then yeah, you're going to want to do all your texturing in Blender, making sure everything looks good before sending it out to Unreal.
> 
> Unreal and Blender are both the same in that they both follow a PBR based workflow for their materials. The end node in Unreal, with the sockets for Diffuse, Metallic, Roughness, and whatnot is functionally about the same as Blender's Principled BSDF shader. For example, say you're in Blender, and you have a texture map for your diffuse, normal, and roughness, but you use the slider to put the metallic input up to 0.5. You can do the same thing in Unreal, plugging a texture map node into the Base Color, Roughness, and Normal inputs, then slapping a value node set to 0.5 to the Metallic.
> 
> It's when you get into procedurals that things start changing on you. They're still roughly the same. All you're doing is using math to make shapes when you get right down to it. But you'll have various different helper nodes that make getting from Point A to B a slightly different affair.
> 
> 
> 
> You usually can, yeah. Though some asset packs can prevent you from doing so, depending on the whims of the creators. The only way to find out whether you can or not is just to try it.



I’ll look up procedural materials and UV mapping. I’ve looked up “UV” before, but it easily slips away when I’ve not expressly worked with it Nor know how it is specifically utilized.


----------



## Renzatic

Huntn said:


> I’ll look up procedural materials and UV mapping. I’ve looked up “UV” before, but it easily slips away when I’ve not expressly worked with it Nor know how it is specifically utilized.




So you've made your model, and now you want to put pretty pictures on it. To do so, you have to cut out your various surfaces, flatten them out, then arrange them on a square 2D space.

That's UV mapping in a nutshell. U and V are really just extra coordinates, basically X and Y, that are reserved for 2D surface maps of your objects. It's really not that complicated, though almost everyone stumbles about on it at first because it's just kinda weird.


----------



## Huntn

Renzatic said:


> So you've made your model, and now you want to put pretty pictures on it. To do so, you have to cut out your various surfaces, flatten them out, then arrange them on a square 2D space.
> 
> That's UV mapping in a nutshell. U and V are really just extra coordinates, basically X and Y, that are reserved for 2D surface maps of your objects. It's really not that complicated, though almost everyone stumbles about on it at first because it's just kinda weird.



I assume UE does this automatically? Blender too?
edit: I take that back. All the textures I’ve used have been made somewhere, someplace like megascans and I have brought them into UE.


----------



## Renzatic

Huntn said:


> I assume UE does this automatically? Blender too?
> edit: I take that back. All the textures I’ve used have been made somewhere, someplace like megascans and I have brought them into UE.




Yeah, all the Megascanned objects are already UV mapped. You don't have to UV unwrap any geometry generated inside of UE, like the landscapes since it's all fairly simple, and projection mapped.

UV mapping by itself isn't something that's done on the fly, though there are ways to make things simpler for you. Like Smart UV Project will automatically split the faces of your model up according to angle, with the highest settings breaking up your UV map into individual faces. This works fairly well for simple models that you're going to paint inside of Blender, but is sloppy and inefficient, as you'll see when you start doing fancier things like baking edge maps, and normals.

Really, the best thing to do is to learn how to UV the long, old fashioned way.


----------



## Renzatic

I watched some of that video, and realized it might be a little too advanced for you. You need something more foundational. Like this...


----------



## Huntn

Renzatic said:


> I watched some of that video, and realized it might be a little too advanced for you. You need something more foundational. Like this...



Thanks for the tutorial link! I'm switching back and forth. between UE and Blender. Finished the shoe, then jumped back into a UE terrain tutorial.
*Indepth Look at Enivronmental Artist based tools: * https://learn.unrealengine.com/course/3765504/

I'm feeling real mental pressure to start laying out a project in UE, just because I want to see something start happening. No I'm not in a a rush. 

I've already experimented with UE terrain and ended up with something much larger than I want for my first project, but I like what I see. However, I've posted a question at the Epic Learning forums about: for an intimate scene, that runs off into distant vistas, where the player is limited to the immediate scene, would it be better to try to work with soley UE terrain, or do like the Forest Road guy did and import an irregular plain into UE for the close up areas and then surround that with UE terrain that falls away.  Waiting to see what the UE crowd says about that. If you have an opinion I'd be interested in hearing it.

As far as UV mapping, I may very well be able to get away with not doing that at the beginning, and there is a ton of other stuff to learn first. UE Materials are a ball buster to get a complete handle on them. And I've realized that terrain is a big part of what I'm trying to build. For example I build a pond, put some water in it, a rocky outface, a cave, a waterfall, I see no need for  UV mapping there, or do I need it?  All the trees, shrubs, grasses, including some big rocks are available though megascans with textures included.

Now lets say I want to build a barn/outbuilding with standard wood/ metal pieces or a swinging bridge. UV mapping there or just slap a material onto the pieces? I figure I'll need to know about a blueprint to give a swinging bridge sway.  I'll need to learn about water, flowing water, and falling water. I also mentioned tree trunks (bark on or maybe off) as possibly part of construction in a building, and I imagine I can find a wood/bark texture already UV mapped for me that would suffice for this purpose.

Not saying I don't want to do UV mapping, just want to hit it at a logical point, when it becomes necessary.

A recent project you worked on, the beautiful pickup truck.  You design the pieces for the hood and the fenders, does that require you to UV map it or can you simply slap a material onto it?

Thoughts?


----------



## Renzatic

It all depends on what you're doing. If you're wanting to get into really fine, superbly detailed objects, then yeah, you're going to have to UV map. If you're working with low poly, flat shaded stuff, a'la the asset pack you recently downloaded, then basic materials will do you fine, since you're not really worry about anything except color.

But say you're building a low poly sign for a grocery store. You have the shapes and colors down, but you want to add a logo in there. You could try and do a triplanar projection, but it ends up look sloppy, and you have no real control over it. If you want to add your logo on there, you're going to have to UV map the part of your model that's housing it, and paste the resulting UV island over the image in your UV editor.

I'll make a video for you better illustrating this.

Also, the truck I made has different colored materials for its various parts. I've UV mapped half of it, but I've been wanting to experiment with shaders and colors, so it's really just solid colors with some fancy effects layered on top.


----------



## Huntn

Renzatic said:


> It all depends on what you're doing. If you're wanting to get into really fine, superbly detailed objects, then yeah, you're going to have to UV map. If you're working with low poly, flat shaded stuff, a'la the asset pack you recently downloaded, then basic materials will do you fine, since you're not really worry about anything except color.
> 
> But say you're building a low poly sign for a grocery store. You have the shapes and colors down, but you want to add a logo in there. You could try and do a triplanar projection, but it ends up look sloppy, and you have no real control over it. If you want to add your logo on there, you're going to have to UV map the part of your model that's housing it, and paste the resulting UV island over the image in your UV editor.
> 
> I'll make a video for you better illustrating this.
> 
> Also, the truck I made has different colored materials for its various parts. I've UV mapped half of it, but I've been wanting to experiment with shaders and colors, so it's really just solid colors with some fancy effects layered on top.



I’ve admit I’ve been working with so much stuff where the textures are already available that I’ve not been focused on UV mapping. I’ve even swapped Textures between different plants and have not noticed a real difference and you think I would have.

And in the modeling I’ve  been doing in the Blender tutorial, at most  he has slapped some colors not textures. I’m hoping he gets into UV mapping soon.

Would you say it’s a complicated, or highly technical procedure?

I know, you are taking a mesh and flattening it to paint the texture on. Maybe  I need to watch one of those link you posted. Don’t take this as me blowing your suggestions off. If I have to do UV mapping to model, I need to be interested, and I am interested. Have not got around to it yet because of other stuff. I figure the Blender tutorial at some point will breach this topic.


----------



## Renzatic

Huntn said:


> Would you say it’s a complicated, or highly technical procedure?




Once you understand where to best place your seams, know how something will look when you unwrap it, and get your head around the ebb and flow of things, it becomes mostly busywork. It's the necessary process that bridges the two fun parts of 3D modeling.

At worst, you can expect a good hour and a half of marking seams, rotating islands, and packing your UV space for a complicated model. It's not difficult at all, but it can be a drag.

...and on that note, my video just finished uploading. I'll do a quick write-up explaining what's going on, and post it your way here in a second.


----------



## Renzatic

READ THIS BEFORE WATCHING THE VIDEO!

What I'm doing is taking two parts of my little sign model, the little bulby part, and the metal ring around it, and unwrapping them.

The bulby part is easy. It's just a hemisphere, with no other connecting parts. It'll unwrap and spread itself out without having to mark any seams. I just select the faces, hit U, and unwrap it. The end result gives me two hemispheres, the front and back bulby parts, which I lay on top of each other, giving them both the same texture space, and align it (fairly badly) over the logo I downloaded.

The ring is a little more complicated. Since it has various dips and bobs in there, doing a straight unwrap might look fairly decent, but it's sloppy, with plenty of faces stretched out of proportion (I really should have used a grid texture to illustrate this, since they're good both for determining texel density, and face stretching). What I did was just add a seam along that bottom most loop, and allowed Blender to unfold it all from there, making a rectangular shape. I did a quick Follow Active Quads command to align it all out, since the unwrapping process does occasionally give you some bendy bits.

From there, I just aligned, and moved the resulting island around. I should've also scaled it up and down a bit, now that I think about it.

In the end, all you're doing when you're UV mapping is just cutting your object into little pieces, in a way so that they flatten out smoothly without any pinching or stretching, then telling that surface where to sit in UV space, which is basically a fancy way of saying "the coordinates where your surfaces sit on a 2D picture plane.

As you can tell, there are some things I wish I did in retrospect, but it's a good primer, I guess.


----------



## Huntn

@Renzatic
I'm working this tutorial. At 1 hr 5min, he is making a handle for a coffee cup. 






Everything with the cup has gone fine till now.
He selects a face where the handle will emerge from on the side of the cup.
He applies the spin tool but what I see on the face of the cup where the handle will pop out is a distinct circle superimposed on this rectangular face.
He does not mention adding a circle. I tried watching his key stokes to see why there is now a circle showing in that quad. I was thinking that maybe by virtue of smooth shading it was there, but his handle has that circle drawn on the face, but mine does not, with or without shade soothing on.  I also looked for a control associated with the Spin Tool to see if there is a setting for circles, but don't see it.

And what he extrudes is circular.  If I try to extrude this quad out with shade smooth turned on, it looks like a rectangle with the edges beveled.

Can you by chance tell what he did and describe it? I can't imagine it being the difficult.
Thanks!


----------



## Huntn

Renzatic said:


> READ THIS BEFORE WATCHING THE VIDEO!
> 
> What I'm doing is taking two parts of my little sign model, the little bulby part, and the metal ring around it, and unwrapping them.
> 
> The bulby part is easy. It's just a hemisphere, with no other connecting parts. It'll unwrap and spread itself out without having to mark any seams. I just select the faces, hit U, and unwrap it. The end result gives me two hemispheres, the front and back bulby parts, which I lay on top of each other, giving them both the same texture space, and align it (fairly badly) over the logo I downloaded.
> 
> The ring is a little more complicated. Since it has various dips and bobs in there, doing a straight unwrap might look fairly decent, but it's sloppy, with plenty of faces stretched out of proportion (I really should have used a grid texture to illustrate this, since they're good both for determining texel density, and face stretching). What I did was just add a seam along that bottom most loop, and allowed Blender to unfold it all from there, making a rectangular shape. I did a quick Follow Active Quads command to align it all out, since the unwrapping process does occasionally give you some bendy bits.
> 
> From there, I just aligned, and moved the resulting island around. I should've also scaled it up and down a bit, now that I think about it.
> 
> In the end, all you're doing when you're UV mapping is just cutting your object into little pieces, in a way so that they flatten out smoothly without any pinching or stretching, then telling that surface where to sit in UV space, which is basically a fancy way of saying "the coordinates where your surfaces sit on a 2D picture plane.
> 
> As you can tell, there are some things I wish I did in retrospect, but it's a good primer, I guess.



I'll read and watch this and then get back with you tomorrow. Thanks much!


----------



## Renzatic

Huntn said:


> Everything with the cup has gone fine till now.
> He selects a face where the handle will emerge from on the side of the cup.
> He applies the spin tool but what I see on the face of the cup where the handle will pop out is a distinct circle superimposed on this rectangular face.




He's holding down the left mouse button on one of the Spin Tool handles, which creates a tiny bit of geometry that's circularized by the Subdivision Surface modifier. If you let go of the left mouse button, it extrudes and spins the selected face 180 degrees, like you'd expect.

Though I rarely ever use the spin tool. I'd recommend doing it like this, extruding your faces, rotating them with R, then using a bridge edge loop to join the bits together. Like so...






If you want to refine the shape, just add in more geometry with loop cuts, then rotate and position it.


----------



## Huntn

Renzatic said:


> He's holding down the left mouse button on one of the Spin Tool handles, which creates a tiny bit of geometry that's circularized by the Subdivision Surface modifier. If you let go of the left mouse button, it extrudes and spins the selected face 180 degrees, like you'd expect.
> 
> Though I rarely ever use the spin tool. I'd recommend doing it like this, extruding your faces, rotating them with R, then using a bridge edge loop to join the bits together. Like so...
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> If you want to refine the shape, just add in more geometry with loop cuts, then rotate and position it.



At the beginning where you select a quad, you get a circular menu, is that holding the left mouse button Where you select “geometry“? The author does not explain that. I’ll try this.Thanks !

@Renzatic added a question to this post.


----------



## Huntn

Renzatic said:


> READ THIS BEFORE WATCHING THE VIDEO!
> 
> What I'm doing is taking two parts of my little sign model, the little bulby part, and the metal ring around it, and unwrapping them.
> 
> The bulby part is easy. It's just a hemisphere, with no other connecting parts. It'll unwrap and spread itself out without having to mark any seams. I just select the faces, hit U, and unwrap it. The end result gives me two hemispheres, the front and back bulby parts, which I lay on top of each other, giving them both the same texture space, and align it (fairly badly) over the logo I downloaded.
> 
> The ring is a little more complicated. Since it has various dips and bobs in there, doing a straight unwrap might look fairly decent, but it's sloppy, with plenty of faces stretched out of proportion (I really should have used a grid texture to illustrate this, since they're good both for determining texel density, and face stretching). What I did was just add a seam along that bottom most loop, and allowed Blender to unfold it all from there, making a rectangular shape. I did a quick Follow Active Quads command to align it all out, since the unwrapping process does occasionally give you some bendy bits.
> 
> From there, I just aligned, and moved the resulting island around. I should've also scaled it up and down a bit, now that I think about it.
> 
> In the end, all you're doing when you're UV mapping is just cutting your object into little pieces, in a way so that they flatten out smoothly without any pinching or stretching, then telling that surface where to sit in UV space, which is basically a fancy way of saying "the coordinates where your surfaces sit on a 2D picture plane.
> 
> As you can tell, there are some things I wish I did in retrospect, but it's a good primer, I guess.



Ok, holy carp…  What is that part where you are connecting nodes? Is that buried in the resulting texture?

Akso I’m hoping the Blender  tutorial guy gets around to this aspect of UV mapping.


----------



## Renzatic

Huntn said:


> And what he extrudes is circular.  If I try to extrude this quad out with shade smooth turned on, it looks like a rectangle with the edges beveled.




Gimme a quick screenshot, because there are a few things that could be your problem here.


----------



## Renzatic

Huntn said:


> Ok, holy carp…  What is that part where you are connecting nodes? Is that buried in the resulting texture?




That's your material in the shader editor. I'm attaching an image node to the Principled BSDF node.



Huntn said:


> Akso I’m hoping the Blender tutorial guy gets around to this aspect of UV mapping.




He does. It's in Day 4.


----------



## Huntn

Tonight I just finished the UE Indepth Look at Environmental Artist based tools section of Bump Offset and Parallax Occlusion Mapping:  https://learn.unrealengine.com/course/3765504

This shows how to add height maps to meshes without adding geometry. Of high interest.  I included the link but you probably just can't click on it and see it.

I'll suppose Blender has something similar based on height maps, but the real question is these things require functionality coming from materials in UE so I'm going to assume for the purpose of UE that I should maybe prepare textures in Blender such as channel packing, and creating height map textures, but as far as actual implementation, that would be via UE materials. But Blender would have to have the equivalent in whatever they use as an  alternative to materials for output in Blender.


----------



## Huntn

@Renzatic, I'm about 1:17 in the Blender Day 2 tutorial, and the guy is making an apple. One thing I'm noticing as he gets more advanced, he's not talking about his key strokes and when it comes to making organic shape I've not been able to follow along.  At one point in the previous section when he was making headphones, most of that went ok until he started extruding the wire about 1:14, he was extruding wire by clicking in space and the wired seemed to extude,  following along. Now in the apple, he is making the stem and looking at the keys I see displayed, the stem is not happening. As he extrudes it the direction and thickness of the shape changes. B

I may just have to go find a blender tutorial on organic shapes... 


​


----------



## Renzatic

Huntn said:


> I may just have to go find a blender tutorial on organic shapes...




Nah, he's just doing the basics, but he's going through it quickly. Like when he deletes the faces for what will eventually become the stem, he loop selects the resulting hole, hits E to extrude, S to scale, left-clicks to end the operation, E to extrude, Z to lock it down to that axis, and so on and so on. He's just iterating through it all quickly, which can be confusing if you're still on shaky legs with the program.

Also, he extrudes with a simple Ctrl-Right Mouse Click. You select an edge or face you want to extrude, and do that for it to instant extrude your selection out to where your mouse cursor is hovering.

Oh, and Blender doesn't have direct support for Parallax maps. There are a few plugins you can buy, but they're complicated to use.

Really though, you won't be using parallax maps on most of your models. They're better fit for surfaces with tons of small details that would just be too complex to do with raw polygons, like gravel, cobblestone walkways, or things like that. You want to use them sparingly, because they're fairly expensive to calculate.

Also, sorry for taking so long to get back to you. I meant to respond to you yesterday, but got sidetracked by a videogame.


----------



## Huntn

Renzatic said:


> Nah, he's just doing the basics, but he's going through it quickly. Like when he deletes the faces for what will eventually become the stem, he loop selects the resulting hole, hits E to extrude, S to scale, left-clicks to end the operation, E to extrude, Z to lock it down to that axis, and so on and so on. He's just iterating through it all quickly, which can be confusing if you're still on shaky legs with the program.
> 
> Also, he extrudes with a simple Ctrl-Right Mouse Click. You select an edge or face you want to extrude, and do that for it to instant extrude your selection out to where your mouse cursor is hovering.
> 
> Oh, and Blender doesn't have direct support for Parallax maps. There are a few plugins you can buy, but they're complicated to use.
> 
> Really though, you won't be using parallax maps on most of your models. They're better fit for surfaces with tons of small details that would just be too complex to do with raw polygons, like gravel, cobblestone walkways, or things like that. You want to use them sparingly, because they're fairly expensive to calculate.
> 
> Also, sorry for taking so long to get back to you. I meant to respond to you yesterday, but got sidetracked by a videogame.



No problemo, you have a life too.  I’ll go back and try what you are saying. At first he was slow and deliberate, but there are places where he zooms along so fast I try to make the keystrokes that appear on the screen, but could not make What he was doing happen.


----------



## Renzatic

Huntn said:


> No problemo, you have a life too.  I’ll go back and try what you are saying. At first he was slow and deliberate, but there are places where he zooms along so fast I try to make the keystrokes that appear on the screen, but could not make What he was doing happen.




Just remember that most everything he does is a combination of a few simple commands. Grab, rotate, scale, extrude, inset, bevel, sometimes with proportional editing on, sometimes not. At certain points, sometimes a subdivision surface modifier is applied.

Once you have a grasp on those bare basics, what you're watching for from that point on is technique.


----------



## DT

Renzatic said:


> Grab, rotate, scale, extrude, inset, bevel




That sounds like my Saturday night!


----------



## Renzatic

DT said:


> That sounds like my Saturday night!




It's everyday for me! chukka chukka chukka chukka!


----------



## Huntn

@Renzatic it’s been a while. After completing 2 of the Blender tutorials, I decided  that UE is mostly about landscape at least while in UE, and I decided I was going to hit that hard so I can lay out a setting. So I am on my forth environmental tutorial working on Landscape Materials in a UE sponsored tutorial called Advance Landscape Tools.

The last section I did, the author was talking  about taking block meshes from UE, exporting them to blender/Maya I assume to turn them into finished meshes, but then the author starts talking about applying art to these pieces, as in textures, and I’m like _what the hell!?, _UE is all about environment and fancy materials used to apply textures to meshes.

Am I going crazy?  He was talking about applying “art” to meshes while in the tutorial, in Maya it looked like he was applying textures. This just about blew my mind, sure model some nice finished meshes to replace the block meshes, but I’ll  be damned if you are going to be putting textures on these items destined for a UE project, aren’t I?  

Are materials even compatible between Blender and UE?


----------



## Renzatic

You got a link to the video? I tried looking it up, but couldn't find it.


----------



## Huntn

Renzatic said:


> You got a link to the video? I tried looking it up, but couldn't find it.



You have to be logged into Epic to access this I think:
*Advanced Skill Sets for Environmental Art*
https://learn.unrealengine.com/course/3777669
Check out the section Part 4: Pivots, Placement, and Predefined Spaces


----------



## Renzatic

Huntn said:


> You have to be logged into Epic to access this I think:
> *Advanced Skill Sets for Environmental Art*
> https://learn.unrealengine.com/course/3777669
> Check out the section Part 4: Pivots, Placement, and Predefined Spaces




Alright. I'll watch it here in a bit, and get back to you.


----------



## Renzatic

Huntn said:


> Am I going crazy?  He was talking about applying “art” to meshes while in the tutorial, in Maya it looked like he was applying textures. This just about blew my mind, sure model some nice finished meshes to replace the block meshes, but I’ll be damned if you are going to be putting textures on these items destined for a UE project, aren’t I?




I watched through about 2/3rds of the video. What he's doing is fairly simple. He's simply exporting basic geometry created in Unreal to use as a template/guideline in Maya/Blender/Whathaveyou. The advantages of doing this are that you can bang out basic shapes fairly quicklike to get an idea for proportions, size, and flow, then send it to one of the big editors for the heavy detailing.

You need to dissuade yourself of the idea that objects in Unreal are just for Unreal, and objects made elsewhere are incompatible. Geometry is geometry, UVs are UVs, no matter where you're making them. The same applies to texture based materials. If you UV unwrap an object, and texture it in Blender, it's gonna look exactly the same there as it does in UE. PBR textures are simply image files, and are universal among all 3D applications. The only thing you may have to do in the transition is reapply the image files to their appropriate material slots in UE.

I think what you need to do right now is make a basic object, and UV unwrap it. I still think you're focusing too much on the big picture, while you should be focusing on the smaller day to day things that make up 3D editing. After all, having a good grasp on the workflows for creating sweeping landscapes won't do you much good if you don't know how to make a simple rock.

Do what I did when I was first starting out with modeling, and try to copy things you like the looks of. Like the building in that video? Try to recreate it yourself, bit by bit. He gives you a good start point. Block out the overall shape with simple primitives. Once you've done that, use that as a foundation, and expand from there.


----------



## Huntn

Renzatic said:


> I watched through about 2/3rds of the video. What he's doing is fairly simple. He's simply exporting basic geometry created in Unreal to use as a template/guideline in Maya/Blender/Whathaveyou. The advantages of doing this are that you can bang out basic shapes fairly quicklike to get an idea for proportions, size, and flow, then send it to one of the big editors for the heavy detailing.
> 
> You need to dissuade yourself of the idea that objects in Unreal are just for Unreal, and objects made elsewhere are incompatible. Geometry is geometry, UVs are UVs, no matter where you're making them. The same applies to texture based materials. If you UV unwrap an object, and texture it in Blender, it's gonna look exactly the same there as it does in UE. PBR textures are simply image files, and are universal among all 3D applications. The only thing you may have to do in the transition is reapply the image files to their appropriate material slots in UE.
> 
> I think what you need to do right now is make a basic object, and UV unwrap it. I still think you're focusing too much on the big picture, while you should be focusing on the smaller day to day things that make up 3D editing. After all, having a good grasp on the workflows for creating sweeping landscapes won't do you much good if you don't know how to make a simple rock.
> 
> Do what I did when I was first starting out with modeling, and try to copy things you like the looks of. Like the building in that video? Try to recreate it yourself, bit by bit. He gives you a good start point. Block out the overall shape with simple primitives. Once you've done that, use that as a foundation, and expand from there.



Thanks I appreciate the advice. I understand the importance of modeling, I want to get though these UE environmental tutorials, I want to set up a basic scene using these UE fundamentals, and then when it comes time to model a building, I'll be back doing blender again.

The reason I am questioning what the guy is doing, is because the UE materials are basically programming that control how the inserted textures look in UE, all sorts of visual qualities controlled by material logic. Some are highly complex, and if I understand it correctly, there is no cross over of these material functions from UE to Blender or the other way around.

So if these meshes are to be placed in UE ultimately, I can see them being exported as rough meshes to Blender to finish them to look properly. But I don't see doing anything with textures in Blender, because once these come back to UE, you are going to be applying textures via materials to them, so why do that at all in Blender? I don't think the UE materials can cross to other products.


----------



## Huntn

@Renzatic Ok someone in the UE forum answered my question. This maybe what you were saying too:
_Obviously the materials in a DCC app won’t look the same, as it’s not the same renderer, but there are some things you can check by applying the textures there, such as whether if the texture wraps properly around the mesh._

Have no fear about me getting back into Blender, but environment in UE is kind of like the Big Kahuna. I'm doing these UE material/environmental tutorials and if I don't start working with them, I'll lose them in my memory. I did an entire scene based on zero modeling. And since I want to get the UE environment down pat. I'll complete this section, but more importantly work with these UE tools, and when I actually start putting a scene together that takes me beyond the UE environment where 3D modeling is required, I'll be hitting that again hard.

In this current Landscape I've learned some very important things such as

Landscape Layering.- This is how you can do a large area, and give different sections unique materials for each area.
Landscape Material- Different than the Vertex Painting (I think- currently in this section), this is for large areas likely with mountains where you want an texture appearance based on height, like green for the mountain bottoms and rock for the tops.


----------



## Renzatic

Huntn said:


> Obviously the materials in a DCC app won’t look the same, as it’s not the same renderer, but there are some things you can check by applying the textures there, such as whether if the texture wraps properly around the mesh.




It won't look EXACTLY the same, but they'll otherwise look like the same object. UVs are UVs. Image textures are image textures. A rocket ship textured in Maya will look like a rocket ship in Unreal, in Blender, or in Unity. What I'm speaking of here are basic, bog standard texture based materials on UV mapped objects, which, yeah, you'll need to build in Blender to make sure everything fits together the way it should. If you were talking about things like procedural textures, master materials, or things like that, you'll want to stick exclusively to UE for those, since similar textures in Blender won't port over.


----------



## Huntn

Renzatic said:


> It won't look EXACTLY the same, but they'll otherwise look like the same object. UVs are UVs. Image textures are image textures. A rocket ship textured in Maya will look like a rocket ship in Unreal, in Blender, or in Unity. What I'm speaking of here are basic, bog standard texture based materials on UV mapped objects, which, yeah, you'll need to build in Blender to make sure everything fits together the way it should. If you were talking about things like procedural textures, master materials, or things like that, you'll want to stick exclusively to UE for those, since similar textures in Blender won't port over.



This is why this tutorial blew my mind a little, the author does not take any time to explain why, he just says _I’m doing this in Maya _and damned if he is not applying textures and talking about modifying how things look on the side of a building, like variations in a weathered wood siding, while in Maya, while in a freaking Landscape Tools tutorial, while he subsequently  working on these big fancy materials in UE that are how the textures are applied in the project. He was talking about work flow and how layout design differs from applying the artwork, and this section of the tutorial is more suited for a big picture view how projects are put together as part of a team.

I don‘t mind that but if he is going to talk about applying textures to a building in Maya, imo he should be saying why he is doing this in Maya, however as an “advanced course” maybe he is assuming that people watched this are already up to speed in the other aspects of game production. 

Yes you can add a base color texture in UE, but then there is also typically a roughness component, a normal component, and sometimes a height component which comes into play frequently in vertex painting, and could easily be used on a texture like wood siding. My impression is that in Blender, maybe is a different manner, but to get this same appearance, a similiar amount of effort would have to be spent to insert these kinds of variation but why bother If your doing a UE project?

Regarding making sure a texture will tile properly on a mesh, created in Blender/Maya  that makes sense to me and I’ll  cross that bridge when I come to it.  

Anyway, I understand your concern about how I am spending my time, and please don’t consider this post as any kind of a rebuff of your perspective or advice. This is how I see it, this is how I am motivated,  UE offers the basis for creating an environmental world setting including terrain, water, lighting and atmosphere which is created and then it is populated with meshes for plants, natural features, buildings and other props that are made in seperste modeling programs.

It is the environment such as the Forest Road that got me going, and I want to have the confidence I know what I am doing with terrains/landscapes,  and be able to layout a scene/setting for my project. I’m also familiar with blockout meshes which can help me rough out my idea.

And then, yes, you are absolutely right, I have to hit Blender hard for modeling when I want to start populating my scene with significant natural and man made  objects that are specific to my scenes.


----------



## Renzatic

Huntn said:


> My impression is that in Blender, maybe is a different manner, but to get this same appearance, a similiar amount of effort would have to be spent to insert these kinds of variation but why bother If your doing a UE project?




Think of the majority of the texture work you'll be doing inside of UE as extra detailing. Like you have your little building, completely textured, and you want to overlay, say, some moss and dirt on top of the wood boards of your building. You already have the foundation in place. It's been built and textured in Blender already. You just want to add some random details to flesh out your object.

There are two ways you could do that. 

One would be to paint all the overlay effects in Blender, bake all the new details down to a unique PBR texture stack, then export it out to UE. That would work, and it'd look fine, but then every instance of the building you place will have all those same details in the same place. If you want more unique buildings, you'll have to create more details, export them out, and give each one it's own PBR texture stack.

Or you could make a building with more generic details, and use master materials, vertex masks, and other material tricks to give you more flexibility with your details, allowing you to create as many unique iterations on same base as you want without using as much memory.

The important thing is that you have your generic base to work from. And with something with as many bits and bobs as your average building, all needing to be aligned properly in all their right places to look good, you'll need to UV map that.

Remember, the more specific detailing you need to do, the more likely it is you'll have to UV map it. For simple objects, like your underlying landscape mesh, a planar projection will be enough to get you buy. A formless blob of a rock? A spherical projection of a simple featureless stone texture will do. Both of these UE can do. It's when you start getting detailed, when you need to be able to say "this should go here on my model," that you need to UV.


----------



## Renzatic

It would really help tremendously if you knew exactly what UVs are, and how they work. 

I'll throw up a quick shot of a simple UV layout of an old model I did awhile back. If you can look at it, and tell what's going on, you'll be pretty well set. If you can't, I'll need to explain it to you. In knowing what UVs are, and what they do, you'll understand SO much more about material work.

This is foundational stuff. If you don't understand these foundations, then everything is going to be so much more confusing for you than it needs to be.


----------



## Huntn

Renzatic said:


> Think of the majority of the texture work you'll be doing inside of UE as extra detailing. Like you have your little building, completely textured, and you want to overlay, say, some moss and dirt on top of the wood boards of your building. You already have the foundation in place. It's been built and textured in Blender already. You just want to add some random details to flesh out your object.
> 
> There are two ways you could do that.
> 
> One would be to paint all the overlay effects in Blender, bake all the new details down to a unique PBR texture stack, then export it out to UE. That would work, and it'd look fine, but then every instance of the building you place will have all those same details in the same place. If you want more unique buildings, you'll have to create more details, export them out, and give each one it's own PBR texture stack.
> 
> Or you could make a building with more generic details, and use master materials, vertex masks, and other material tricks to give you more flexibility with your details, allowing you to create as many unique iterations on same base as you want without using as much memory.
> 
> The important thing is that you have your generic base to work from. And with something with as many bits and bobs as your average building, all needing to be aligned properly in all their right places to look good, you'll need to UV map that.
> 
> Remember, the more specific detailing you need to do, the more likely it is you'll have to UV map it. For simple objects, like your underlying landscape mesh, a planar projection will be enough to get you buy. A formless blob of a rock? A spherical projection of a simple featureless stone texture will do. Both of these UE can do. It's when you start getting detailed, when you need to be able to say "this should go here on my model," that you need to UV.



Thanks! Don’t take this as me arguing or disagreeing, just thinking out loud. 
I’ve been exposed to UVs but obviously need to study them more, but so far I’ve used pre-made plant elements, which seem abundant, so I’m  thinking as I step into modeling more, I’ll get up,to speed with UVs. Those question I have was because the tutor is briefly talking about applying textures to building parts while in an advanced landscape tools tutorial which really has nothing to do with building textures as far as I can tell.

Most of my exposure is to UE landscape type materials which tend to be very complex. When I get to architectural meshes, I need to see what, if any texture work these experts are doing outside of UE, because as far as I know say a texture is created in Blender and baked, then it would need the most simple of materials once in UE to apply the texture and this just does not seem to be the case, unless as you said more effects could be heaped on them.

However, there is a lot of lighting effects based on the environment in UE and the process of putting texture elements together brings them all into UE as separate material  nodes, so at this point for landscapes, I don’t see a purpose to do anything in Blender for a UE project except check tiling  when modeling and to create the base textures elements there? Or maybe in photoshop, but I’m not sure about the latter.

I understand how height and roughness gray scale images/texture nodes work, and there is no way so far that I can see that  would equate to doing this in Blender, because these elements are effected by lighting in the setting before the baking occurs, because it has to reflect the setting and lighting conditions they are in.

Frequently one of the regular tutors in these tutorials talks about packing channels, and has briefly shown how to do this In Photoshop.  I just have to see how that equates in the program you reccommrnded (what was the name again- Affinity Photo? ) I will buy that when I find myself having to pack channels.

When I did the Forest Road project, following along, I got it done to a degree, but that in no way prepared me for general terrain layout,  but now after several more landscape/material tutorials I feel like I am getting a handle on that to actually know what my terrain options are. Landscape layering and landscape materials are big steps forward, and I look at landscape as a foundation I want to master first before expanding my modeling knowledge any further. But then I will be happily doing that.


----------



## Renzatic

Figured I'd post this here too, since I love attention.


----------



## Renzatic

I thought this was really neat.


----------



## DT

Renzatic said:


> Figured I'd post this here too, since I love attention.




BTW, I love the style of this, it's realistic while also having a sort of "game" type aesthetic (like I could totally see my character walking to the this area )


----------



## Renzatic

DT said:


> BTW, I love the style of this, it's realistic while also having a sort of "game" type aesthetic (like I could totally see my character walking to the this area )




I'm really trying for a more painterly look than a realistic one. I like being able to see all the brush strokes, which you can kinda fake with procedurals, but still never looked quite good enough for me to like it.

Right now, I'm trying this. I bought this brush set, which I'm now having to convert to Krita. I really like this style though, so it's worth the effort.


----------



## DT

Renzatic said:


> I'm really trying for a more painterly look than a realistic one. I like being able to see all the brush strokes, which you can kinda fake with procedurals, but still never looked quite good enough for me to like it.




I'll take stylized artistry over attempts at photorealism all day for game design.


----------



## Renzatic

DT said:


> I'll take stylized artistry over attempts at photorealism all day for game design.




I wish I didn't watch that video, cuz now I want to do something pixel art-ish.


----------



## Renzatic

I painted a tree!


----------



## Eric

Renzatic said:


> I painted a tree!
> 
> 
> View attachment 13374



Awesome man, looks great.


----------



## Huntn

Renzatic said:


> I painted a tree!
> 
> 
> View attachment 13374



Every leaf hand painted?  Looks great!

Regarding  me and UT, I’ve realized that I needed to review my extensive material notes. Going through the examples, once was not enough. When I look at a material I see a bunch of nodes and the picture is not clear, but when I  add labels the relationships become clearer, and it serves as learning reinforcement. Of interest, once you get a good material you really don’t need to know that much about it, other than you become more aware of the choices that are available.

The single most important thing I learned regarding landscapes is landscape layers. It really opens up variation in landscape texturing. I think I said that before.   So soon, again, I predict I’ll be out of the books and working on my UE project. It’s only been 6 months since I started this hobby and still feeling good about it.


----------



## Renzatic

Huntn said:


> Of interest, once you get a good material you really don’t need to know that much about it, other than you become more aware of the choices that are available.




Pretty much. When it comes to those texture based ones, the only thing you really need to know is where to plug the images into. Though you can do fancy stuff, like if you don't like the color of the diffuse, or you want to make the heightmap a little more shallow, you can add in some extra nodes in between the image and the output to tweak things to taste.

Even procedurals aren't all that complicated when you get right down to it. At it's most basic, you're just making noise patterns, mixing other noise patterns on top of it, coloring it in with gradients, and BAM! You've got an infinitely tweakable wood texture. All the math stuff underlying it is just telling the noise patterns how to shift, or when to appear.

Also, here's a couple of newer trees. I made a big brush stroke to show what I use to make the leaves.


----------



## Huntn

Renzatic said:


> Pretty much. When it comes to those texture based ones, the only thing you really need to know is where to plug the images into. Though you can do fancy stuff, like if you don't like the color of the diffuse, or you want to make the heightmap a little more shallow, you can add in some extra nodes in between the image and the output to tweak things to taste.
> 
> Even procedurals aren't all that complicated when you get right down to it. At it's most basic, you're just making noise patterns, mixing other noise patterns on top of it, coloring it in with gradients, and BAM! You've got an infinitely tweakable wood texture. All the math stuff underlying it is just telling the noise patterns how to shift, or when to appear.
> 
> Also, here's a couple of newer trees. I made a big brush stroke to show what I use to make the leaves.
> 
> View attachment 13887



And I’ve become very aware that if creating materials which includes texture creation you are reliant on a third party graphic program  if you plan on creating your own textures from scratch. Fortunately there seems to be huge libraries of ready made textures available so unless you are a purist, as in _I want everything in my project made from scratch_, it’s likely that you don’t have to do this.

I think that creating a texture from scratch say a rocky surface that you plan on having it tile, would be quite the challenge because just like wall paper it would have to fit together like a puzzle on all sides.

However some aspects of texture creation are not so hard if you have the starting image, like creating a height map if one is not included in a texture package. It  seem to be relatively easy to make if you have the photo-program to simply create a gray scale image which is all that is needed to create the illusion of texture height. It makes a huge appearance difference when it comes to texture blending.


----------



## Renzatic

Huntn said:


> However some aspects of texture creation are not so hard if you have the starting image, like creating a height map if one is not included in a texture package. It seem to be relatively easy to make if you have the photo-program to simply create a gray scale image which is all that is needed to create the illusion of texture height. It makes a huge appearance difference when it comes to texture blending.




There are also programs that allow you to create entire PBR stacks from a single image easily. Like Materialize.


----------



## Huntn

Renzatic said:


> There are also programs that allow you to create entire PBR stacks from a single image easily. Like Materialize.



The more I learn the more I realize I don’t know.


----------



## Renzatic

Huntn said:


> The more I learn the more I realize I don’t know.




And thus you have learned everything you ever need to know. Socrates would be proud!

Seriously, it's not an entirely automagical process. You need a properly colored image to get good results, where the highs are light, and the lows are dark. Otherwise, it ends up looking mushy and weird.


----------



## Huntn

Renzatic said:


> And thus you have learned everything you ever need to know. Socrates would be proud!
> 
> Seriously, it's not an entirely automagical process. You need a properly colored image to get good results, where the highs are light, and the lows are dark. Otherwise, it ends up looking mushy and weird.



The primary reason I see height maps used is to fill in the cracks with an alternate texture, but I’ve seen some that make the grass look taller. More learning!


----------



## Huntn

Six months later still playing with and educating myself with Unreal Engine Materials. This is on a hobby basis for me, so I'm not devoting 8-12 hrs per day, more like 1 or 2 hours 5 times a week. This is the kind of stuff I'm looking at and annotating. Those comments are mine added. Still having a good time. Look forward to soon start laying down some virtual land. 








​


----------



## Renzatic

I just now came across this. A very short and sweet explanation of what UV mapping is.


----------



## Renzatic

I make trees from magic! A swish of my hand, and BAM! SWEET TREES!


----------



## Huntn

Renzatic said:


> I make trees from magic! A swish of my hand, and BAM! SWEET TREES!



Is there a variable aspect in these drawings for the leaves?

We are traveling for 2weeks, I brought my 2016 MBP to try to run UE and it’s on the edge, slow, the fan runs, the tutorial project I was working on, did not copy over correctly to a portable hard drive, plus not having  3 screens is a real hinderance. 


At home, I  have 2 computers, one the laptop, other PC  and a total of 3 screens. One to watch the tutorial, one to manipulate UE while it’s running (PC) and one to take notes (MBR). W. For screenshots it’s much easier to grab them from my UE project that is mimicking the tutorial, than it is to grab a good shot from the tutorial.

So I guess I’m on hold till I get back…


----------



## Renzatic

Huntn said:


> Is there a variable aspect in these drawings for the leaves?




Have a look at it for yourself

It's made of multiple procedural parts, with leaves being instanced to the twigs, the twigs being instanced onto branches, the branches being instanced onto the limbs, and the limbs being instanced to the trunk of the tree. If you want to play with the lengths and sizes of each part (save the root instance), just look for the quadratic bezier node, and start messing with the numbers.

Right now, it's more or less a work in progress. I want to be able to instance everything, rather than using a few predefined parts like I am now.

Also, I just have the one computer.


----------



## Huntn

Renzatic said:


> Have a look at it for yourself
> 
> It's made of multiple procedural parts, with leaves being instanced to the twigs, the twigs being instanced onto branches, the branches being instanced onto the limbs, and the limbs being instanced to the trunk of the tree. If you want to play with the lengths and sizes of each part (save the root instance), just look for the quadratic bezier node, and start messing with the numbers.
> 
> Right now, it's more or less a work in progress. I want to be able to instance everything, rather than using a few predefined parts like I am now.
> 
> Also, I just have the one computer.



My MBP has been relegated to just note taking, which is pretty sad in the macho graphical Mac dept.  Now I do wonder if a new MBP with integrated graphics would handle UE any better? 

Does you link run via Blender, or installed as part of Blender?


----------



## DT

Huntn said:


> Now I do wonder if a new MBP with integrated graphics would handle UE any better?




An M1 Pro or M1 Max machine?  Hell yes.

(The "integrated graphics" aren't what you're thinking of in the older Intel context))


----------



## Renzatic

Huntn said:


> My MBP has been relegated to just note taking, which is pretty sad in the macho graphical Mac dept.  Now I do wonder if a new MBP with integrated graphics would handle UE any better?
> 
> Does you link run via Blender, or installed as part of Blender?




Apparently the M1 is a decent performer on the GPU front. It won't win any awards compared to some of the higher end PC laptops, but it's far superior to anything Apple's offered in the Macbooks previously.

Make sure you get a lot of RAM though. You can get by with 16GB, but I'd go with 32 just to be on the safe side.

Also, it's just a regular .blend file. Open it up like you would any model. I'm working on version .02 of it right now, which should hopefully be easier to use and customize.


----------



## Renzatic

Hey Huntn, you should consider getting this!


----------



## Huntn

Renzatic said:


> Hey Huntn, you should consider getting this!



I’ll check it out. Thanks! 

I’m back home now. I found that without being able to play with UE while composing notes, was a handicap. I made a copy of a particular tutorial project on an external drive, but it dissapeared on me somehow on the trip.. I’ll finish up my pesky notes then start actually creating an environment. I need to play with landscape layers to see how the textures actually lay down. I’m not  clear how much of a boundary there is between layers without more experimentation.


----------



## Renzatic

Huntn said:


> I’ll check it out. Thanks!




Hey, Huntn. I want you to help me out with something here in the next few. I'm making a tree generator in Blender, which you've already seen a preview of, but I'm trying to make it more intuitive, and easy to use.

Since you're a relative newb to the 3D scene, I figured you'd make an excellent test bed. Your feedback can help me clean some stuff up, and show me where to focus the most when I'm writing a tutorial.

What you're gonna get will look something like this. I'm almost done with it now, but I've still got a couple more nodes to clean up, and add input features to.





Are you up for it?


----------



## Huntn

Renzatic said:


> Hey, Huntn. I want you to help me out with something here in the next few. I'm making a tree generator in Blender, which you've already seen a preview of, but I'm trying to make it more intuitive, and easy to use.
> 
> Since you're a relative newb to the 3D scene, I figured you'd make an excellent test bed. Your feedback can help me clean some stuff up, and show me where to focus the most when I'm writing a tutorial.
> 
> What you're gonna get will look something like this. I'm almost done with it now, but I've still got a couple more nodes to clean up, and add input features to.
> 
> View attachment 14960
> 
> Are you up for it?



Sure as long as it is not time critical for a response and it does not take  a lot of time to figure out. Remember, I am barely a Blender novice. Plus I need setup instructions.


----------



## Renzatic

Huntn said:


> Sure as long as it is not time critical for a response and it does not take  a lot of time to figure out. Remember, I am barely a Blender novice. Plus I need setup instructions.




Here you go. GeoTrees 0.3. There's no setup required, just open the file in Blender as usual, and start playing with the nodes. 

What I want you to do is look at it for a second, and see if you can figure it out. Play with the sliders, change numbers, do whatever you want to do. I'll give you more detailed instructions if you ask.






						GeoTree_v0.3.zip
					






					drive.google.com


----------



## Huntn

Renzatic said:


> Here you go. GeoTrees 0.3. There's no setup required, just open the file in Blender as usual, and start playing with the nodes.
> 
> What I want you to do is look at it for a second, and see if you can figure it out. Play with the sliders, change numbers, do whatever you want to do. I'll give you more detailed instructions if you ask.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> GeoTree_v0.3.zip
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> drive.google.com



This is what I see:

​There are nodes I can change values on. What I don't see is a way to initiate drawing and get something on the screen. There is a line which maybe the guide for trunk in the middle upper area. Need more hints.


----------



## Renzatic

Huntn said:


> This is what I see:
> 
> View attachment 15029​There are nodes I can change values on. What I don't see is a way to initiate drawing and get something on the screen. There is a line which maybe the guide for trunk in the middle upper area. Need more hints.




It looks like you're in Blender 2.92. I've set it up to work with Blender 3.2.


----------



## Huntn

Renzatic said:


> It looks like you're in Blender 2.92. I've set it up to work with Blender 3.2.



Ok, I’ll update Blender and look at it again.


----------



## Huntn

Renzatic said:


> It looks like you're in Blender 2.92. I've set it up to work with Blender 3.2.



OK, got Blender 3.2 updated and this looks pretty amazing. Tip: don't install Blender into an existing copy of blender unless you want a mess. 


The movement and sway of trees/limbs is always cool. Easy to adjust parameters of the tree parts and such. I'll assume that to make multiple trees, that you'd just duplicate the existing tree and change parameters?

One thing that UE has is the ability to paint meshes onto a landscape so instead of individually placing the trees (which you could do if you wanted) would be to paint them onto the landscape using the paint tool and based on settings would determine random placement, and how much rotation to make the same tree look different. There may even be a size variation where the entire tree is scaled from one tree to the next, but I'm not sure about that. 

Does Blender do that?


----------



## Renzatic

Yeah, you can do that in Blender. You use Geometry Nodes mixed with weight painting, much like everything in Blender these days. You can set it up to distribute any number of trees and shrubs you want, set their scale min and max values, and how close or far away you want the individual instances to set from each other.

Also, I've managed to solve the one problem I've been plugging away at for 3 days now. Behold! A proper upward bias! Coming in the next version of GeoTrees!


----------



## Renzatic

Huntn said:


> OK, got Blender 3.2 updated and this looks pretty amazing. Tip: don't install Blender into an existing copy of blender unless you want a mess.




Here's the output of the latest version of the tree generator.

The one thing I want to add is a way to produce lower poly, game ready trees. That way, you could use the generator to produce a quick tree, freeze the procedural geometry, then export it into Unreal.


----------



## Huntn

Renzatic said:


> Here's the output of the latest version of the tree generator.
> 
> The one thing I want to add is a way to produce lower poly, game ready trees. That way, you could use the generator to produce a quick tree, freeze the procedural geometry, then export it into Unreal.
> 
> View attachment 15193



That looks great. Does it have wind movement?

These days my memory is on the shaky side. I did import trees from megascans into UE, but off hand , without me reviewing it, I forget if it is texture mapping, or how to assign  textures to the bark vs the leafy area, I know these are meshes, and there are textures assigned to materials assigned to these meshes.  Rhetorical, not expecting a lengthy explanation.


----------



## Huntn

@Renzatic, from a layout standpoint do you think it would make sense,    be easier , to layout a scene like I want to make in UE using low poly elements first to get a sense of scale, or is it just as easy to do layout in UE with the high poly count elements wyou ent for the end product? I guess I’m asking would you learn something by going through a 2 step process or no?


----------



## Renzatic

Huntn said:


> @Renzatic, from a layout standpoint do you think it would make sense,    be easier , to layout a scene like I want to make in UE using low poly elements first to get a sense of scale, or is it just as easy to do layout in UE with the high poly count elements wyou ent for the end product? I guess I’m asking would you learn something by going through a 2 step process or no?




For environments, I'd start with a grid plane, get the general layout of what you want to build out, then start laying down rough textures for where you want everything to be. Like dirt for your roads, grass for your plains, rocks for your cliffs. It doesn't have to look pretty. It just needs to show you where you intend everything to eventually go. Then I'd start populating it with your foliage and rock meshes. Painting in your trees, grass, bushes, cliff faces, and whatnot. From there, it's all about refining. Bringing out the details, tweaking things to taste.

Think of it like building a model railroad.

For architectural work, I'd do a blockout with basic primitives to get the shape and scales down, and then start adding in the textures and details once that's done.


----------



## Renzatic

That video for the paid tutorial I posted earlier might be of interest to you. It's not the style you want, but the basics are the same.


----------



## Huntn

Renzatic said:


> For environments, I'd start with a grid plane, get the general layout of what you want to build out, then start laying down rough textures for where you want everything to be. Like dirt for your roads, grass for your plains, rocks for your cliffs. It doesn't have to look pretty. It just needs to show you where you intend everything to eventually go. Then I'd start populating it with your foliage and rock meshes. Painting in your trees, grass, bushes, cliff faces, and whatnot. From there, it's all about refining. Bringing out the details, tweaking things to taste.
> 
> Think of it like building a model railroad.
> 
> For architectural work, I'd do a blockout with basic primitives to get the shape and scales down, and then start adding in the textures and details once that's done.



I am finishing a tutorial on UE Landscape Application with a complex  Landscape material. It’s similar to, but different from Vertex Painting in UE. With this landscape material you can paint in 5 textures, but it is designed for an expansive landscap.  I think for my purposes I might get away with a smaller vertex painting landscape material, but having 5 textures to choose from might be excellent even with a smaller scene.

So I‘ll be starting a layout soon. (Yes, I’ve said this before ) Another good thing about UE is that you can create a landscape grid and after make it smaller if it is too much and possibly add to it if it  turns out too small. I need to review distances.

What I like about other 3D, 2D drawing programs is that rulers are built in. But not sure that is the case for UE. If I layout a scene I want to know a distance, not just eye ball it. I especially need some mannequins  in there to give it human scale.

The reason I asked is because a while back I purchased a low cost collection of low poly meshes of landscape components including cave, trees, bushes, bridge, simple buildings, river thinking there was something that might be learned examining  them. And
possibly a rough special layout might be faster with low poly shapes, but I’ve not tried it.

My impression is that for low poly, materials will be minimal if any  basically just applying a solid color. Something I should play with or rule out.


----------



## Renzatic

Huntn said:


> What I like about other 3D, 2D drawing programs is that rulers are built in. But not sure that is the case for UE. If I layout a scene I want to know a distance, not just eye ball it. I especially need some mannequins in there to give it human scale.




The nicest thing about outdoor environments is that they don't have to be 110% exact. As long as a tree that's supposed to be around 10 foot tall is roughly 300 Unreal Units + or - (or 3 Blender Units), then you're good to go. No one's gonna look at your trees, and go "THOSE ARE SUPPOSED TO BE TWO FOOT HIGHER!"

Of course this is entirely different with architectural details, where you need to be pretty well exact to real world measurements to keep things realistic.



Huntn said:


> And possibly a rough special layout might be faster with low poly shapes, but I’ve not tried it.




Going low poly for scale would have the advantage of being less taxing on your computer during the planning stages. But considering it'll require extra time to build those low poly assets for importing into Unreal, and you have a pretty stout machine to work with, I wouldn't worry about it too much.


----------



## Renzatic

Hey, Huntn! Here's the newest GeoTrees if you want to play around with it.






						GeoTree_v0.55.zip
					






					drive.google.com


----------



## Huntn

Renzatic said:


> That video for the paid tutorial I posted earlier might be of interest to you. It's not the style you want, but the basics are the same.



Are you talking about the 2 Stylized Station video tutorials mentioned here?
Post in thread 'Any Unreal Engine Experts Here?'
https://talkedabout.com/threads/any-unreal-engine-experts-here.2007/post-105481 
I watched the video, but glossed over the part about there being tutorials for purchase. I’ll take a another look. 

I realize that Blender is very different from UE but related.
That correct me if I am wrong, UE creates dynamic 3D environments, while Blender creates more static graphic depictions. I posted this off over at the Unreal Forums and wondered what your impression is? 

Lamdscape  size and resolution
When laying out a landscape grid I understand the idea of project load based on resolution, but my question is, does the size and resolution of the landscape framework if out camera sight, represent a burden or is it only the areas that can be seen that present the load placed on rendering?

The purpose of LODs are to reduce load, but these are distant objects that can be seen. What about parts of a scene that can’t be seen at all, do they represent a continuous load on the project?
Thanks!


----------



## Renzatic

Huntn said:


> That correct me if I am wrong, UE creates dynamic 3D environments, while Blender creates more static graphic depictions. I posted this off over at the Unreal Forums and wondered what your impression is?




It's simply that UE is primarily for games, and has loads of game logic attached to it for you to tinker with, while Blender is for rendering, and tends itself more towards design and cinematics. You can make a scene as dynamic as you can in Unreal, but you can't drop a character into it to play with, and any animation you have in the scene, like trees swaying in the wind, will be tied to the timeline on a per frame basis.



Huntn said:


> When laying out a landscape grid I understand the idea of project load based on resolution, but my question is, does the size and resolution of the landscape framework if out camera sight, represent a burden or is it only the areas that can be seen that present the load placed on rendering?
> 
> The purpose of LODs are to reduce load, but these are distant objects that can be seen. What about parts of a scene that can’t be seen at all, do they represent a continuous load on the project?




Beyond LODs, UE can assign blocking cells to specific portions of your map, where scenes that are X amount of cells away from your character won't be drawn, or will be replaced with a lower resolution LOD.

This might help you out.


----------



## Renzatic

Here's my latest work for the upcoming scene. It's been an absolute TOTAL FREAKING WHORE to do.


----------



## Huntn

Renzatic said:


> It's simply that UE is primarily for games, and has loads of game logic attached to it for you to tinker with, while Blender is for rendering, and tends itself more towards design and cinematics. You can make a scene as dynamic as you can in Unreal, but you can't drop a character into it to play with, and any animation you have in the scene, like trees swaying in the wind, will be tied to the timeline on a per frame basis.
> 
> 
> 
> Beyond LODs, UE can assign blocking cells to specific portions of your map, where scenes that are X amount of cells away from your character won't be drawn, or will be replaced with a lower resolution LOD.
> 
> This might help you out.



Got an answer at the UE forums, the engine automatically culls everything out of sight of the camera, along with distance settings. This culling video is of high interest to me. Thanks!

I am starting to put together a scene while reviewing the basics of what I studied befire as a refresher. There is a lot one, I can forget.


----------



## Huntn

Renzatic said:


> Here's my latest work for the upcoming scene. It's been an absolute TOTAL FREAKING WHORE to do.
> 
> View attachment 15500



It’s a complex shape to reproduce/render, bravo!


----------



## Renzatic

Huntn said:


> It’s a complex shape to reproduce/render, bravo!




I finished up the texturing, and paired it alongside my other truck. Think I might've gotten the scale a little wrong, but oh well. That's what I get for eyeballing things, and it's supposed to look sorta crafted/modelish anyway.


----------



## DT

Holy shit, that's awesome!


----------



## Renzatic

DT said:


> Holy shit, that's awesome!




I've poured so much of my blood, sweat, and tears into this.

...it was mostly blood. Don't ask.


----------



## Huntn

Renzatic said:


> I finished up the texturing, and paired it alongside my other truck. Think I might've gotten the scale a little wrong, but oh well. That's what I get for eyeballing things, and it's supposed to look sorta crafted/modelish anyway.
> 
> View attachment 15542



What  kind of project is this? Apologies if you already said.  So is this a hobby or are you being paid, and how many hours do you estimate it took to make these?


----------



## Renzatic

Huntn said:


> What  kind of project is this? Apologies if you already said.  So is this a hobby or are you being paid, and how many hours do you estimate it took to make these?




It's a hobby. I've had this idea bouncing in my head for awhile, and I've been slowly trying to realize it.

I'd say that, overall, I probably have about 9-10 hours in both of them.


----------



## Huntn

Well another UE tutorial is needed befire I seriously get to work with my target project. I decided that UEv5 is the way to go, and as soon as I started a UEv5 Basics tutorial, I was pleased at the interface changes made. I like that when you start a new project, you are given choices of first person, third person, open world, where basic mechanics, physics, and lighting are included, or you can choose empty, If you want a dark, blank slate to start with.


----------



## Renzatic

Hey, Huntn. I'm aping some of your style!


----------



## Huntn

Renzatic said:


> Hey, Huntn. I'm aping some of your style!
> 
> View attachment 15711



I want to know by virtue of making something like this, that you could walk around in, and experience via virtual reality, have you been temped to make the UE plunge?


----------



## Renzatic

Huntn said:


> I want to know by virtue of making something like this, that you could walk around in, and experience via virtual reality, have you been temped to make the UE plunge?




I'm always tempted, but hey, I've got enough to learn on my plate as is.


----------



## Renzatic

And another shot!


----------



## Huntn

Renzatic said:


> And another shot!
> 
> View attachment 15758



Very dark on my iPad, too dark to appreciate.


----------



## Renzatic

Huntn said:


> Very dark on my iPad, too dark to appreciate.




How about now?


----------



## Huntn

Renzatic said:


> How about now?



Much better, greatly atmospheric! but I admit I'm looking at it on my MBP. I need to go back and check the iPad again.


----------



## Huntn

Yes, better on the iPad too!


----------



## Renzatic

I love mist.


----------



## Huntn

Renzatic said:


> I love mist.
> 
> View attachment 15942



This looks great but is a tad dark on my iPad, if I faced this in a game. Unless it was dark on purpose, I’d be looking to turn the gamma up a bit, but to be fair, I’d have to be in the game looking at a full screen rendition, not a 2x3” image on my tablet to accurately judge.  

I assume Bender  has similar atmospheric and lighting controls as UE? Of interest is how UE and I assume Belder and other DCC handle light, static objects the illumination of the surface from a texture standpoint is baked, permanent versus how a movable object is handled using dynamic lighting  which takes more processing power to compute. Push a button and you have editable fog. 

For anyone not familiar, after you have “baked“ a scene, if you go in and edit, say move a boulder, what will be left behind will be a blank or black spot where the boulder used to be. The scene lighting would require baking (again)  so that the ground texture would appear in that formerly blank spot.

Regarding Unreal5 I purchased several courses at:








						Online Courses - Learn Anything, On Your Schedule | Udemy
					

Udemy is an online learning and teaching marketplace with over 213,000 courses and 57 million students. Learn programming, marketing, data science and more.




					www.udemy.com
				




As a new student, I got significant discounts. The Complete UE5 Beginner's course is most excellent, it’s normally $100+ but I paid $15 and frankly this is possibly the best course I’ve taken regarding UE from the standpoint, of being thorough, clear, and not rushed as most of the free UE courses offered at Epic seem to be. I’m on my 18th lecture, which most are relatively short (5-15 minutes) focused on some part of the UE interface, and some parts of the interface will have multiple parts. Of course I duplicate what is being taught in my UE5 install. and document with my outline format notes, so they take longer than the run time to complete.

I decided to take this course, even though it is a beginners course, and much of this is repeat info, because switching to UE5 I wanted to sure I understood what changes there are from UE4, I don’t want to be faced with not knowing about some new feature, and I’ve studied such a mountain of info, a repeat of the basics is good for me.


----------



## Renzatic

Huntn said:


> I assume Bender has similar atmospheric and lighting controls as UE? Of interest is how UE and I assume Belder and other DCC handle light, static objects the illumination of the surface from a texture standpoint is baked, permanent versus how a movable object is handled using dynamic lighting which takes more processing power to compute. Push a button and you have editable fog.




You don't really bake all that much in Blender. It's more like UE5 in that everything is realtime, though the effects it uses are much more intensive, being built more for image quality rather than performance. Instead of baking, you turn on screen space global illumination (which is currently only available in a special build, but will be standard once Eevee next shows up, whenever that will be), and it does pretty much the same thing.









						EEVEE’s Future — Blender Developers Blog
					

Lead developer Clément Foucault shares his big plans for the future of EEVEE in the upcoming Blender releases.




					code.blender.org
				




Fog and whatnot is handled more like a volume than an camera effect in Blender. My scene is encompassed in a giant cube that pretty much acts like a big, square cloud.

Though for the shot above, I used Cycles, which is a path tracer. You don't have to worry about baking out anything, since it's physically accurate lighting. You just set up your scene, click a button, and wait 10 or so minutes.



> I decided to take this course, even though it is a beginners course...




Don't feel bad. I still do beginners courses myself. You can never learn so much that you can't learn anything more.

...though it can get a little tedious when they go over the BARE BASICS again, and again and again.


----------



## Huntn

Renzatic said:


> You don't really bake all that much in Blender. It's more like UE5 in that everything is realtime, though the effects it uses are much more intensive, being built more for image quality rather than performance. Instead of baking, you turn on screen space global illumination (which is currently only available in a special build, but will be standard once Eevee next shows up, whenever that will be), and it does pretty much the same thing.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> EEVEE’s Future — Blender Developers Blog
> 
> 
> Lead developer Clément Foucault shares his big plans for the future of EEVEE in the upcoming Blender releases.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> code.blender.org
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Fog and whatnot is handled more like a volume than an camera effect in Blender. My scene is encompassed in a giant cube that pretty much acts like a big, square cloud.
> 
> Though for the shot above, I used Cycles, which is a path tracer. You don't have to worry about baking out anything, since it's physically accurate lighting. You just set up your scene, click a button, and wait 10 or so minutes.
> 
> 
> 
> Don't feel bad. I still do beginners courses myself. You can never learn so much that you can't learn anything more.
> 
> ...though it can get a little tedious when they go over the BARE BASICS again, and again and again.



Yes, Blender is in my future, it’s inevitable. 

If I was to guess baking is not as big a thing in blender because it’s not intended as game engine, where a lot of dynamic events take place? Is it intended as a video production platform? Even that would be static If my assumption is correct.  In other words there is just one recorded version of a video. It‘s the game engine which is real time constantly changing. Not intending to make this sound jugemental in any way.

What  this beginners UE tutorial reveals is that there is bunches I still don’t know!


----------



## Renzatic

Huntn said:


> If I was to guess baking is not as big a thing in blender because it’s not intended as game engine, where a lot of dynamic events take place? Is it intended as a video production platform? Even that would be static If my assumption is correct.




It's actually the opposite. Lighting is a computationally expensive process, and can drag down performance considerably if you push it hard enough. This is especially true of bounced lighting, aka global illumination, which, until recently, could only be faked in realtime engines.

Baking takes this lighting information, and bakes it down to a image spashed with various hues, saturations, and values that's overlaid on your scene. The calculations are already done long before anyone loads up your scene. The downside to it is that it's entirely static. If you were to move, say, a crate in your scene after building your lighting, you'd be left with a big black splotch where it once stood. The upside is that with a bit of careful planning, and good use of dynamic lights, you can end up with a scene that looks just as good as something that looks and behaves realistically, but renders out 1000x faster.

To kinda put things in perspective for you, think of the difference between Blender and Unreal as being the difference between one engine that's major concern is producing one pretty picture within a long timeframe, and one that can produce of a series of them in a very, very short amount of time. With Blender, you don't have to worry about maintaining smooth gamplay. It's all about the end result. So rendering an image, aka a frame, in 30 seconds to 10 minutes isn't a concern. All you care about is how it looks. Unreal, on the other hand, is expected to render out a frame every 16 milliseconds, or 60 frames per second, to make it seem like you're moving about and interacting in a real environment. Cheats and shortcuts have to be made to get those render times down, while still producing something that looks realistic.


----------



## Huntn

Renzatic said:


> It's actually the opposite. Lighting is a computationally expensive process, and can drag down performance considerably if you push it hard enough. This is especially true of bounced lighting, aka global illumination, which, until recently, could only be faked in realtime engines.
> 
> Baking takes this lighting information, and bakes it down to a image spashed with various hues, saturations, and values that's overlaid on your scene. The calculations are already done long before anyone loads up your scene. The downside to it is that it's entirely static. If you were to move, say, a crate in your scene after building your lighting, you'd be left with a big black splotch where it once stood. The upside is that with a bit of careful planning, and good use of dynamic lights, you can end up with a scene that looks just as good as something that looks and behaves realistically, but renders out 1000x faster.
> 
> To kinda put things in perspective for you, think of the difference between Blender and Unreal as being the difference between one engine that's major concern is producing one pretty picture within a long timeframe, and one that can produce of a series of them in a very, very short amount of time. With Blender, you don't have to worry about maintaining smooth gamplay. It's all about the end result. So rendering an image, aka a frame, in 30 seconds to 10 minutes isn't a concern. All you care about is how it looks. Unreal, on the other hand, is expected to render out a frame every 16 milliseconds, or 60 frames per second, to make it seem like you're moving about and interacting in a real environment. Cheats and shortcuts have to be made to get those render times down, while still producing something that looks realistic.



But in your reference to light, if it was a still image there would be no concern, yes? And for a video a ten minute scene would be recorded like a movie, but you are saying there is dynamic lighting running the entire time?


----------



## Renzatic

Huntn said:


> But in your reference to light, if it was a still image there would be no concern, yes? And for a video a ten minute scene would be recorded like a movie, but you are saying there is dynamic lighting running the entire time?




Yup. It's a dynamic light as far as the renderer is concerned.

This video might help you out a bit. You can see Cycles is rendering in much the same way as Eevee, it just takes longer to resolve the image you see onscreen because it's having to do so many more calcuations behind the scenes. 

...it's also good at illustrating how the differences between path tracing and rasterizers aren't all that great anymore.


----------



## Huntn

*Brushes in UE-* They look like simple mesh shapes, (cube, cylinder, staircase) but are not. They can be used with additive or subtractive qualities to rough out geometry in a level. Holy crap, I had no clue until this course. 



			Geometry Brush Actors in Unreal Engine | Unreal Engine 5.0 Documentation


----------



## Renzatic

Huntn said:


> *Brushes in UE-* They look like simple mesh shapes, (cube, cylinder, staircase) but are not. They can be used with additive or subtractive qualities to rough out geometry in a level. Holy crap, I had no clue until this course.
> 
> 
> 
> Geometry Brush Actors in Unreal Engine | Unreal Engine 5.0 Documentation




I thought you knew about those. Brushes (aka mesh primitives in everything-else) have been around since the Unreal 1 days. It's how they used to build whole levels back in the long ago.


----------



## Huntn

Renzatic said:


> I thought you knew about those. Brushes (aka mesh primitives in everything-else) have been around since the Unreal 1 days. It's how they used to build whole levels back in the long ago.



It‘s one of those things that the variety of mostly environmental focused tutorials did not bother with. I had seen some brief talk in an advanced environmental artist tutorial about blocking-in levels but brushes  were not demoed  but may have been mentioned, but at first exposure, I would not have guessed they were geometric shapes based on the name “brush“.

This UE5 beginner course as just a part, describes them and how to use them, and why they are good for roughing in a level because they are fast. Even textures can be applied to them. In the UE editor in the “place actor” section there is one part  categorized as meshes (static meshes- basic shapes, cube, cylinder, cone) and another category called geometry where these brushes can be found (basic shapes- cube, cylinder, cone, stairs, curved stairs).

I need more exposure to them, working with them, and I think this would pop up in one of the architectural layout courses.

Now maybe there is more to come in this course,  but what I’m not seeing so far (which might not be covered)  is that after a level is laid out using brushes, just how crude does it stay, how complex would an artist try to make and represent, a structure using brushes and later just how hard is it to change them over to meshes of the same size, the exact same size, or are they used just as approximations? Rhetorical.

The author shows how a simple shape like a cube, can be hollowed out, doors and windows placed (cut out) using negative brushes.  My question is this just a rough approximation of a layout, or would the intent to replicate the exact sizes of these cubes as the outer perimeter of a more complex structure? Would a complex building be represented as just be a cube, or a combination of cubes, or using the positive and negative qualities of brushes, would complex structures be crafted using brushes. And then how much  of that info would be used to model a complex building In the third party modeling program. Answers to be found.


----------



## Renzatic

Huntn said:


> UE5




Hey, Huntn. Guess what?


----------



## Huntn

Renzatic said:


> Hey, Huntn. Guess what?
> 
> View attachment 16011



The complete UE5 beginner’s course at Udemy.com  I found to be well worth the $14 I paid for it, clear, precise, efficient, seems to be covering all, not just some of the basics and takes you though creating a basic game. For myself my intent is not a tradional game, but many of these game mechanics seem to be good to know for what I intend on creating.

What is missng and I acknowledge is 3D modeling…which you seem to have a handle on. 









						Unreal Engine 5 (UE5): Complete Beginners Course
					

The Fastest Way to Get Started With Unreal Engine 5




					www.udemy.com


----------



## Huntn

There are two other courses I am considering the price seems right if on sale at abiut $15. If their normal retail price, around $100,  I’d be more hesitant.  And while I’m  not sure, it seems that constant sales seem to be a matter of routine there:









						Unreal Engine Blueprints - The Ultimate Developer Course
					

Create three complete video games including a mobile game without a single line of code!




					www.udemy.com
				












						Unreal Engine 5 Blueprints - First Person Shooter (FPS)
					

Learn how to make an FPS using Unreal Blueprints. The entire course uses Unreal Engine 5.




					www.udemy.com


----------



## Renzatic

Huntn said:


> There are two other courses I am considering the price seems right if on sale at abiut $15. If their normal retail price, around $100, I’d be more hesitant. And while I’m not sure, it seems that constant sales seem to be a matter of routine there:




Yup. I've bought a few courses off Udemy before. Unless you're really anxious to get learning, I'd suggest just waiting a week for the price to go down.

Alternately, you can learn quite a bit off free Youtube tutorials, though that does come with the assumption that you already know what you're looking for.



> What is missng and I acknowledge is 3D modeling…




The best way to learn is to start!

Though if you have a good iPhone, you could consider photogrammetry. Apple has built in apps for just that these days, and since you're using UE5 now, you can just enable them as nanite objects, and not worry about the polycount.


----------



## Huntn

Renzatic said:


> Yup. I've bought a few courses off Udemy before. Unless you're really anxious to get learning, I'd suggest just waiting a week for the price to go down.
> 
> Alternately, you can learn quite a bit off free Youtube tutorials, though that does come with the assumption that you already know what you're looking for.
> 
> 
> 
> The best way to learn is to start!
> 
> Though if you have a good iPhone, you could consider photogrammetry. Apple has built in apps for just that these days, and since you're using UE5 now, you can just enable them as nanite objects, and not worry about the polycount.



The courses I have purchased are marked down substantially less than $15 each. I’ve not heard the term, nanite objects. Are these meshes?


----------



## Renzatic

Huntn said:


> I’ve not heard the term, nanite objects. Are these meshes?




It and Lumen are the two biggest new features of UE5. To explain it as simply as possible, you don't have to worry about poly counts and LODs with Nanite. You just make a mesh, and toss it in. The engine will cull it down automatically.

It does have some limitations, but it's still pretty damn incredible.


----------



## Huntn

Renzatic said:


> It and Lumen are the two biggest new features of UE5. To explain it as simply as possible, you don't have to worry about poly counts and LODs with Nanite. You just make a mesh, and toss it in. The engine will cull it down automatically.
> 
> It does have some limitations, but it's still pretty damn incredible.



Holy crap! I knew there were reasons to be in UE5. I did know about Lumen.


----------



## Huntn

I’m not sure but I think that Niagara (maybe new) and water system  has been updated In UE5.

I’m still trying to get an adequate handle on materials. One of the problem with the Epic courses, is that they are not complete, especially the part about channel packing. The author shows images of rock textures and how he needs two of them to blend the textures on rock surfaces (I get and see that) but then the actual textures in the project download, look different than what the course shows. He says he made the textures in Quixel Mixer, but does not show that, nore is there a course on that, although I suppose  I might find a tutorial on that.

The advanced course maybe over kill as in I could probably use a simpler example of a landscape layer blending material that includes displacement. I actually need to play with the material that came with the course and see how it functions (if it functions) and make sure I understand to use its settings. 

And then there is vertex painting vs landscape layering, both feature displacement but no one has said why one is better than the  other, other than a landscape lmaterial is better for large landscapes, but I’m not sure why it’s better. . A landscape material might have 6 textures, but I see no reason why a vertex painting material could not have 6 textures too.

I’m just talking, not expecting answers from you.  I’ll post this last part in the Epic forums.


----------



## Renzatic

Huntn said:


> I’m still trying to get an adequate handle on materials. One of the problem with the Epic courses, is that they are not complete, especially the part about channel packing. The author shows images of rock textures and how he needs two of them to blend the textures on rock surfaces (I get and see that) but then the actual textures in the project download, look different than what the course shows. He says he made the textures in Quixel Mixer, but does not show that, nore is there a course on that, although I suppose I might find a tutorial on that.




Channel packing isn't really that difficult. All you're doing putting three separate greyscale images into their own specific RGB channels, which themselves are separate greyscale images that produce color when combined together. It's something you could do in any halfway decent photo editor (even GIMP can do it, which I consider only halfway decent). The only thing you need to be mindful of is which map you're putting in which channel, and to keep it consistent across all your textures for the sake of your own sanity.

Once you do it, the only thing you need to do is to run your image through the UE equivalent of a Separate RGB node, then run each channel to their appropriate slots on the output node.

Though keep in mind that channel packing isn't something you absolutely HAVE to do. It's a simplifying/space saving feature primarily. Your project probably won't be so large that channel packing becomes an outright requirement.



> And then there is vertex painting vs landscape layering, both feature displacement but no one has said why one is better than the  other, other than a landscape lmaterial is better for large landscapes, but I’m not sure why it’s better. . A landscape material might have 6 textures, but I see no reason why a vertex painting material could not have 6 textures too.




I'm not exactly sure what landscape painting is in UE, but I'm assuming it's probably image mask based. The problem with vertex painting is that it can be hard to bang out really tiny details if your underlying mesh isn't a high enough resolution to paint them in. Vertex painting, per it's name, shades from each vertex point outwards, while an image mask is only limited by the resolution of the image itself.

My only question is how they're getting 6 textures in there. The most I could think you could get out of a mask would be 5, for the black default, the textures assigned to the R, G, and B, channels, and maybe an alpha with some finagling.


----------



## Huntn

Renzatic said:


> Channel packing isn't really that difficult. All you're doing putting three separate greyscale images into their own specific RGB channels, which themselves are separate greyscale images that produce color when combined together. It's something you could do in any halfway decent photo editor (even GIMP can do it, which I consider only halfway decent). The only thing you need to be mindful of is which map you're putting in which channel, and to keep it consistent across all your textures for the sake of your own sanity.
> 
> Once you do it, the only thing you need to do is to run your image through the UE equivalent of a Separate RGB node, then run each channel to their appropriate slots on the output node.
> 
> Though keep in mind that channel packing isn't something you absolutely HAVE to do. It's a simplifying/space saving feature primarily. Your project probably won't be so large that channel packing becomes an outright requirement.
> 
> 
> 
> I'm not exactly sure what landscape painting is in UE, but I'm assuming it's probably image mask based. The problem with vertex painting is that it can be hard to bang out really tiny details if your underlying mesh isn't a high enough resolution to paint them in. Vertex painting, per it's name, shades from each vertex point outwards, while an image mask is only limited by the resolution of the image itself.
> 
> My only question is how they're getting 6 textures in there. The most I could think you could get out of a mask would be 5, for the black default, the textures assigned to the R, G, and B, channels, and maybe an alpha with some finagling.



It has to do with saving VRAM, and if I remember correctly there is or was some hard limit under UE4. I’m not sure about  UE5.  I think it is textures nodes (samplers) that are memory hungry, so if you fit roughness, metallic, and AO into one texture sampler you just save 2 or 3 extra texture nodes for each texture you use. As you know some textures don’t use metallic, but you are still saving 3 in 1 for  each texture. But as far as the hard limit,  I’d have to go back and find it in my mountain of notes.








						Texture channel packing. Why is it more efficient?
					

Some people like to pack their AO, roughness and metallic map into the RGB channels of a texture. It seems most people do it to save texture memory/bandwidth.  I was considering using non-channel packed textures, however I just realised this results in using two extra texture samplers in the...




					forums.unrealengine.com
				








__





						Using Texture Masks in Unreal Engine | Unreal Engine 5.0 Documentation
					





					docs.unrealengine.com
				












						Texture channel packing. Why is it more efficient?
					

Some people like to pack their AO, roughness and metallic map into the RGB channels of a texture. It seems most people do it to save texture memory/bandwidth.  I was considering using non-channel packed textures, however I just realised this results in using two extra texture samplers in the...




					forums.unrealengine.com
				




*Vertex Paint vs Landsape material-* They use different material nodes (ie code) to Vertex paint versus a landscape material built to use what are called layers (layer blending node). During the process of building the material, you add  layers to that node by hitting a plus sign, and then you feed each texture into the layer blend node from their individual collection of texture sampler nodes.

In a UE project Tutorial, using a landscape material, there were 6 layers with labels like dirt, pebbles, rock, sand, grass. However I can’t get it to work very well. It was designed for a  desert setting and everything look bleached out, although I suppose I could change out the textures, but I’d need to figure out channel packing. I think you are right in that it’s not that hard to do. It just pisses me off when an instructor says _I made this texture_ but does not show you how they made it, I need to find a tutorial on channel packing for UE. 

So right now in my UE evolution, I‘m trying to nail down if as a matter of routine, should I be using a vertex painting material or a landscape material, or there are situations for each one.? And I need to get my hands on an example of the appropriate material for this project I’ve started. I have a vertex painting material from one of my Epic tutorials. Currently looking for a landscape material.

The first step is to start small with a small outdoor setting and see how it goes. Actually I should probably try the Vertex painting material and then do it with a landscape material. The landscape material works just like vertex painting as far as texture application, pick a texture and start applying it to the terrain.

One thing way back in the Forest Road project I like using the mesh from blender to define the road because you could make small adjustments easily by grabbing vertexes and moving/manipulating  them around. Where as in UE landscape brushes are, at least they don’t seem to be as precise. Fir creating a large outdoor environment it seems to me that most artists use a third party terrain generator.

And note that the water system in UE as it currently exist requires a UE landscape with layers to be used for the water to work. Yes, you can create the landscape in UE and then import a height map in.


----------



## Huntn

Well I just figured out that you can no longer Vertex paint on a landscape in UE5. Or I'm losing my mind, because of the projects I played with, such as the Forest Road, I vertex painted the landscape... I think. Well I know I did not use a landscape layer on it.  

Ok I'm am starting to put together a scene. I have several free tree packs and the one I purchased for $30 a while back. I need to take a close look at that one, but I've decided for this first scene I want a large specimen tree, like the big oak, with  large branches all over, not the kind of tree with a very tall trunk, before you see the first limb.

Anyway I was wondering if your Blender tree automater could be set up to create something like, something beyond a generic tree? I wonder how hard it would be to create in blender? No asking you to make me a tree... 



​One other question, the the Forest Road project, the guy I was following, he basically said to take any tree mesh and make it as big as you want. Could there be an issue with ending up with leave larger than they should be? Or would the leaves stay the same size? Or would it be the idea that probably no-one would notice?


----------



## Huntn

The fun never stops. 
I'm a little frustrated right now. I purchased a Landscape material pack for $15 from Epic. I thought it would solve the problem of getting some textures for UE Landscape layering. Well the Landscape material is nothing short of amazing, but it does not have all of the textures I want,  and all  of these textures  have one  channel packed texture sampling.

So what I'll be doing is going to my original Forest Road project, pluck the 3 textures out of there, but then I have be be sure they are configured properly to be used with the Landscape Material. I've downloaded Quizel Mixer, and I'll find a tutorial on how to use that, and hopefully I'll be able to reconfigure the Forest Road textures so they fit into the Landscape material.


----------



## Renzatic

Hey, I've been overly busy this weekend, but rest assured, I will answer your questions eventually.


----------



## Huntn

As far as creating Textures from scratch, Quixel Mixer looks like it's designed to create new textures by blending other existing textures. I did not get that far into the tutorial manual before it became evident this is what mixing is. But I was hoping that it would also have the ability to create texture maps like base color, normal, roughness, etc. But  instead of continuing this, I posted a question over at Epic.
My impression now is that if you want to create textures from scratch you'd do it in Photoshop or Affinity and put it together there. However my guess is that Megascans has all the variety I'd need for putting together a texture, so I'm going to look at what my landscape material uses, then see if Megascan has the ones I need to use these previously used materials I had from the Forest Road project, and then if it does, I'll get Affinity photo and look for a tutorial on channel packing...


----------



## Huntn

After visiting Megascans, I came away with the impression that for the Nanite System, you have to find Nanite enabled textures.  

So regarding textures, I thought I was going to have to jump into channel packing to get textures I wanted that were compatible  with an excellent landscape material I purchased. At my stage of development it was worth the $15 I spent (at the Epic Marketplace). I’ve been doing tutorials learning Material design and there seems to be many ways to skin that cat.

Each texture characteristic, approx 5 of them, The author of this material used channel packing and devoted one texture sample to placing 3 texture maps- roughness, displacement (height), and ambient occlusion into it.  These maps are each represented by a gray scale image, so in the name of saving memory, 3 of these can be put in one image on the RGB channels, one per channel. Apparantly it is now the standard. 

Material = code in GUI format that relies on nodes, each with a purpose, strung together that creates a finished textures.  The thing is texture maps tend to plug into the material in a certain manner, and you don’t want to be adding more texture samples from a project overhead perspective, so there might be a need to learn how to channel pack if you have a texture from another source that did not rely on channel packing And you don’t want to add more bulk to the material by way of more texture samples.

One question I need clarification on, is does the complication/bulk of the material add bloat to the finished project, or is it just the  textures applied to the surfaces in a scene that impact how well it runs?

Anyway for the  landscape material I purchased, I like the included textures, but needed/wanted different textures for the project I am working on. The author labeled his channel packed texture RHAO- roughness, height, ambient occlusion, so I was exploring tutorials on channel packing thinking this is what I’d have to do when importing a new texture, to conviently use this landscape material. 

But then when I went to Megascans to download some  textures, I almost panicked when I discovered they had adopted a new format that includes channel packing as a standard. Now, don’t ask me why I panicked, channel packed materials is what I needed. It was just something new in the avalanche of new info to digest. 

During downloads, I was no longer getting the Roughness, Ambient Occlusion or Height (displacement) maps I expected. The new texture is called ORD. Apparantly this is the channel packed texture standard they have adopted.  It is slightly jumbled as to which quality occupies which channel, for example the R Channel always was roughness, but no longer the case and once I found some documentation, it was easy to adjust the landscape material and plug this texture in properly to the associated nodes. So what this means is I don’t have to learn how to channel pack, at least not now.


----------



## Renzatic

Huntn said:


> After visiting Megascans, I came away with the impression that for the Nanite System, you have to find Nanite enabled textures.




It's not textures, but the meshes themselves. For a Nanite object, you don't need heightmaps or normalmaps. The tiny details are already there on the object itself, so there's no need to fake any of it through the textures. All you need is a diffuse/albedo, roughness, and metallic map to determine surface reflectivity.



Huntn said:


> Material = code in GUI format that relies on nodes, each with a purpose, strung together that creates a finished textures. The thing is texture maps tend to plug into the material in a certain manner, and you don’t want to be adding more texture samples from a project overhead perspective, so there might be a need to learn how to channel pack if you have a texture from another source that did not rely on channel packing And you don’t want to add more bulk to the material by way of more texture samples.




From what I understand, each node will add x amount of scant miliseconds to process and load, but once they're resident in video memory, they're not adding any extra draw calls or doing much of anything beyond taking up space in RAM.

To put things in perspective, UE5 has support for Substance materials, which are fully procedural, comprised of dozens of nodes that can be changed on the fly. Compared to your basic imaged based texture stack, they're far, FAR more process intensive, yet you can still have a fair share in your scene.

So while you should try to aim for efficiency, don't let yourself be too constrained by it.

Also, I should add that I don't have much experience in game design. I kinda know the song and dance, but that's about it.



Huntn said:


> But then when I went to Megascans to download some textures, I almost panicked when I discovered they had adopted a new format that includes channel packing as a standard. Now, don’t ask me why I panicked, channel packed materials is what I needed. It was just something new in the avalanche of new info to digest.




Well, it's a pain in the ass having to redo all the textures you've already downloaded, but it's hardly an insurmountable situation. You can channel pack an image, save it out, then reapply it in UE in about a couple of minutes once you get some practice in. It's just tedious.

Okay, now for the rest of your posts.


----------



## Renzatic

Huntn said:


> As far as creating Textures from scratch, Quixel Mixer looks like it's designed to create new textures by blending other existing textures. I did not get that far into the tutorial manual before it became evident this is what mixing is. But I was hoping that it would also have the ability to create texture maps like base color, normal, roughness, etc.




At it's most basic Mixer, well, mixes. It's allows you to combine multiple megascan assets, or any texture stack you happen to have on hand into something new, but it doesn't have any functionality to create textures from scratch. 

If you wanna do that, you'll need to get into something like Substance Designer, which not only allows you to create something from scratch, but also process photogrammetry data. That's another rabbit hole for you to get lost down if you're so inclined.

Mixer can also be used to texture your models, a'la Substance Painter. It's not quite as feature rich in comparison, but it's still pretty good, and also not nearly as obtuse about it.



Huntn said:


> Anyway I was wondering if your Blender tree automater could be set up to create something like, something beyond a generic tree? I wonder how hard it would be to create in blender?




I wish. My tree generator is good for making younger or smaller trees, but won't work for anything gnarly and old like the trees in your shot.

You could make one of your own in Blender using some variations on this, though...








Huntn said:


> One other question, the the Forest Road project, the guy I was following, he basically said to take any tree mesh and make it as big as you want. Could there be an issue with ending up with leave larger than they should be? Or would the leaves stay the same size? Or would it be the idea that probably no-one would notice?




There's a lot of room to play with here. You can scale a tree up a good deal larger than it's default, and still have it look natural. Most people won't pay attention to the fact that your tree leaves are x% larger than they should be relative to something else in your scene. Not unless you go way off the reservation, and scale a tree up to the point the leaves are as large as a car or something.


----------



## Huntn

Renzatic said:


> At it's most basic Mixer, well, mixes. It's allows you to combine multiple megascan assets, or any texture stack you happen to have on hand into something new, but it doesn't have any functionality to create textures from scratch.
> 
> If you wanna do that, you'll need to get into something like Substance Designer, which not only allows you to create something from scratch, but also process photogrammetry data. That's another rabbit hole for you to get lost down if you're so inclined.
> 
> Mixer can also be used to texture your models, a'la Substance Painter. It's not quite as feature rich in comparison, but it's still pretty good, and also not nearly as obtuse about it.
> 
> 
> 
> I wish. My tree generator is good for making younger or smaller trees, but won't work for anything gnarly and old like the trees in your shot.
> 
> You could make one of your own in Blender using some variations on this, though...
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> There's a lot of room to play with here. You can scale a tree up a good deal larger than it's default, and still have it look natural. Most people won't pay attention to the fact that your tree leaves are x% larger than they should be relative to something else in your scene. Not unless you go way off the reservation, and scale a tree up to the point the leaves are as large as a car or something.



That guy said big trees, bigger than they should be in the background was good.


----------



## Huntn

Renzatic said:


> At it's most basic Mixer, well, mixes. It's allows you to combine multiple megascan assets, or any texture stack you happen to have on hand into something new, but it doesn't have any functionality to create textures from scratch.
> 
> If you wanna do that, you'll need to get into something like Substance Designer, which not only allows you to create something from scratch, but also process photogrammetry data. That's another rabbit hole for you to get lost down if you're so inclined.
> 
> Mixer can also be used to texture your models, a'la Substance Painter. It's not quite as feature rich in comparison, but it's still pretty good, and also not nearly as obtuse about it.
> 
> 
> 
> I wish. My tree generator is good for making younger or smaller trees, but won't work for anything gnarly and old like the trees in your shot.
> 
> You could make one of your own in Blender using some variations on this, though...
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> There's a lot of room to play with here. You can scale a tree up a good deal larger than it's default, and still have it look natural. Most people won't pay attention to the fact that your tree leaves are x% larger than they should be relative to something else in your scene. Not unless you go way off the reservation, and scale a tree up to the point the leaves are as large as a car or something.



 Yeah, modeling a big specimen tree may be in my future, with you help,  

In the last few days I’ve discovered I don’t have to learn channel packing right now. That what Megascans now puts out as a matter of routine, is channel packed for me, and just some minor adjustment to the $15 landscape material I bought makes it compatible with their downloaded texture packs. The landscape materials as is holds 5 distinct textures, and they can be painted onto the landscape just like vertex painting.

The author put out a video on how to add a 6th, but warned it is possible with too many textures allowed, it could bog down a running project.

My next question for the UE Forum:
Does it matter how many textures are built into a material, or does it only matter how many textures are applied to the landscape in a scene? In other words if you wanted to make a master master material, but you are careful and only utilize say only  4 in a quadrant are you goid to go?

So now I am picking suitable textures, and testing them and one I used before on the FirestvRoad is bugging me. It’s a dirt texture with roots showing. In the Forest Road project it was a nice dark brown, but in this landscape material it is very light, I’m not sure what is causing this difference. However the landscape material has a built in tint color and I’ll probably use that to darken it up Although there  are setting in the material regarding ambient occlusion and diffusion which I can play with and see what king of effect that has.

The alternative would be to get into Mi er and learn how to alter the texture color there.


----------



## Renzatic

Huntn said:


> Yeah, modeling a big specimen tree may be in my future, with you help,




Ask away when you're ready! 



Huntn said:


> Does it matter how many textures are built into a material, or does it only matter how many textures are applied to the landscape in a scene? In other words if you wanted to make a master master material, but you are careful and only utilize say only 4 in a quadrant are you goid to go?




General rule of thumb is to use as few textures as possible to achieve what you want. For example, your forest road scene only needs a dirt texture for the road, grass for the open parts, and a forest floor texture for where the trees are the most dense. Most of your ground textures are gonna be covered by foliage anyway, so just put in what you need to make it look natural.

Anything extra is extraneous detail (this is what the cool kids call a tautology). Things you'll need to transition from one biome to another. Like if your forest runs into an old gas station, you can throw an extra texture or two for the transition from grass to concrete.

Now the big question is how many of these landscape textures can you have in a scene? Can you slap two landscape meshes together, each with their own landscape texture with a shared texture or two between them to help with the transition? Would that be more efficient than just having one mega-landscape texture with everything you need on it? That, I can't answer. You'd need to hit up the UE forum for that.



Huntn said:


> So now I am picking suitable textures, and testing them and one I used before on the FirestvRoad is bugging me. It’s a dirt texture with roots showing. In the Forest Road project it was a nice dark brown, but in this landscape material it is very light, I’m not sure what is causing this difference. However the landscape material has a built in tint color and I’ll probably use that to darken it up Although there are setting in the material regarding ambient occlusion and diffusion which I can play with and see what king of effect that has.




That's just the nature of colors for you. It looks one way when you're staring at it on a webpage, but another way entirely when you have it in your scene, up against other textures, under certain lighting conditions.

It's easy to fix. Just play with your hue, saturation, and values on your diffuse textures until they all mix together. Fortunately, that's easy to do. Don't even have to use Mixer for it.






...it doesn't help that UE gives everything a goofy name for their nodes. Instead of RGB, which is what every other program out there uses, they call it Vector 3 DERP DERP DERP!

The only downside to this is that I think it might be destructive (IE, it changes the base texture permanently.) You can edit HSV at the material node level, though it's slightly more complicated.



			Image Adjustment | Unreal Engine 4.27 Documentation


----------



## Renzatic

Hey @Huntn! Did my first Channel pack today. I have to admit, it's nice only having to deal with three textures.


----------



## Huntn

Renzatic said:


> Hey @Huntn! Did my first Channel pack today. I have to admit, it's nice only having to deal with three textures.



How did you do it? I think I mentioned that Megascans is now channel packing roughness, height, and ambient occlusion as a matter of routine In their ‘“ORD” designated texture sample.

At this point in time, I am cycling between 2 tutorials, and in my project I have sorted out which textures I want to use for my landscape material, 2 dirt, 2 grass, 1 rock. I’m still stumped what makes all of the textures I’m picking look extremely light in this project. What seems to be saving me is a color tint node included for each texture, where if I want a darker brown for dirt, I pick a dark brown in the color picker. But somewhere I’m thinking buried in this material‘s complexity is a reason why, that I am oblivious to, or not understanding.  

I’ll watch the video you posted on this soon. Yes, I would  think that a texture where these qualities can be easily adjusted for the environment would be a convenient thing, increasing their usability. In one of the tutorials the teacher said that the color tint node is to keep all similiar items looking like they belong together, and not,out of place say the hue of rock in a landscape.


----------



## Renzatic

Huntn said:


> How did you do it? I think I mentioned that Megascans is now channel packing roughness, height, and ambient occlusion as a matter of routine In their ‘“ORD” designated texture sample.




I called it ARM, for Ambient occlusion, Roughness, Metallic. All you need to do is paste the textures into their respective color channels. You end up with this weird puke green and red image that you save out, then plug into your material like so...







Huntn said:


> I’m still stumped what makes all of the textures I’m picking look extremely light in this project.




I'm facing the same problem myself. Everything I pop into Unreal seems to be lighter and more washed out than it is in Blender. 

I think it might be due to the way it handles roughness. Either that, or the default lighting is washed out by default.

This is the way my truck looks in Blender, vs. it how it looks in UE5. It's a lot smoother and more saturated in the former.


----------



## Huntn

Renzatic said:


> I called it ARM, for Ambient occlusion, Roughness, Metallic. All you need to do is paste the textures into their respective color channels. You end up with this weird puke green and red image that you save out, then plug into your material like so...
> 
> View attachment 16579
> 
> 
> 
> I'm facing the same problem myself. Everything I pop into Unreal seems to be lighter and more washed out than it is in Blender.
> 
> I think it might be due to the way it handles roughness. Either that, or the default lighting is washed out by default.
> 
> This is the way my truck looks in Blender, vs. it how it looks in UE5. It's a lot smoother and more saturated in the former.
> 
> View attachment 16582
> 
> View attachment 16583



The Forest Road project when I was vertex painting and you could vertex painting landscapes (UE4) did not have this issue, so I’m thinking there is something to do with the material.

Now as far as these channel packed textures you made, what did you start with, something you got from Megascans or make yourself? And where exactly, what program did you place these textures in their respective channels?

Regarding channel packed textures I thought they were called RMA, roughness, metallic, and Ambient Occlusion. I think the Megascan‘s ORD, is Ambient Occlusion, Roughness, and Displacement (height). But I liked having roughness equate to Red because it was easy to remember.


----------



## Renzatic

Huntn said:


> Now as far as these channel packed textures you made, what did you start with, something you got from Megascans or make yourself? And where exactly, what program did you place these textures in their respective channels?




I made it myself for the truck, though I've recently learned that Substance Painter can channel pack for you automatically. What I did was use Krita, but GIMP is actually a little more straightforward about it, allowing you to copy images directly into their channels, rather than doing this weird layer based version of it.

It's not at all difficult. Like I said before, it's about 2 minutes worth of work. At most.








> Regarding channel packed textures I thought they were called RMA, roughness, metallic, and Ambient Occlusion.




It's all just the order the textures are placed in per the RGB sequence. It seems RMA and ARM are the two most common layouts, but you could do MAR or AMR if you wanted to, so long as you remember which texture is in which channel.

Though for simplicity sake, I'd pick one standard, and stick with it.


----------



## Huntn

Renzatic said:


> I made it myself for the truck, though I've recently learned that Substance Painter can channel pack for you automatically. What I did was use Krita, but GIMP is actually a little more straightforward about it, allowing you to copy images directly into their channels, rather than doing this weird layer based version of it.
> 
> It's not at all difficult. Like I said before, it's about 2 minutes worth of work. At most.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> It's all just the order the textures are placed in per the RGB sequence. It seems RMA and ARM are the two most common layouts, but you could do MAR or AMR if you wanted to, so long as you remember which texture is in which channel.
> 
> Though for simplicity sake, I'd pick one standard, and stick with it.



And  Megascans apparantly made up their own standard?

I need to study this, what I think I need to do is pull out one of these images and see what there specs are, resolution, size. I know there are 2k, 4k, and 8k textures. What I don‘t know is what that equates to exactly.


----------



## Huntn

Renzatic said:


> Ask away when you're ready!
> 
> 
> 
> General rule of thumb is to use as few textures as possible to achieve what you want. For example, your forest road scene only needs a dirt texture for the road, grass for the open parts, and a forest floor texture for where the trees are the most dense. Most of your ground textures are gonna be covered by foliage anyway, so just put in what you need to make it look natural.
> 
> Anything extra is extraneous detail (this is what the cool kids call a tautology). Things you'll need to transition from one biome to another. Like if your forest runs into an old gas station, you can throw an extra texture or two for the transition from grass to concrete.
> 
> Now the big question is how many of these landscape textures can you have in a scene? Can you slap two landscape meshes together, each with their own landscape texture with a shared texture or two between them to help with the transition? Would that be more efficient than just having one mega-landscape texture with everything you need on it? That, I can't answer. You'd need to hit up the UE forum for that.
> 
> 
> 
> That's just the nature of colors for you. It looks one way when you're staring at it on a webpage, but another way entirely when you have it in your scene, up against other textures, under certain lighting conditions.
> 
> It's easy to fix. Just play with your hue, saturation, and values on your diffuse textures until they all mix together. Fortunately, that's easy to do. Don't even have to use Mixer for it.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> ...it doesn't help that UE gives everything a goofy name for their nodes. Instead of RGB, which is what every other program out there uses, they call it Vector 3 DERP DERP DERP!
> 
> The only downside to this is that I think it might be destructive (IE, it changes the base texture permanently.) You can edit HSV at the material node level, though it's slightly more complicated.
> 
> 
> 
> Image Adjustment | Unreal Engine 4.27 Documentation



I watched the watched the video on changing color texture, brightness, and saturation and thank you! I’m wondering if I should be embarrassed I did not know this.   None of the tutorials I’ve looked at focused on, or even mentioned this aspect of texture manipulation, and I have not spent much time looking at textures in UE  at that level.

So for myself, the question becomes how is the best way to change brightness on a texture. When I was getting all of these light materials, I’m still suspecting there is a setting somewhere in my material. What  I’ve been doing is using the color tint node that is included for each texture, so if my brown is too light, I slap on something like a chocolate brown color to darken it up, but then what I’m doing is trying to override the color‘s inherent color by mixing in this new color. The good thing about the color node is it’s easy to change the appearance of the texture  while looking at the scene.

In contrast, changing the brightness of the texture itself, is not so hard, and it might be better because you are not mixing in a new color to tint it, just changing it‘s basic quality.

The issue as I imagine it,  is  where you have a texture that is composed of both brown dirt and green leaves (like I do, it’s called a Forest floor texture) and if you color tint all of it a dark brown, this has a negative impact on the green leaves. So I’m  excited to try the brightness adjustment.

My tendency  would be to leave the original texture alone, duplicate it and modify the copy, and make some notes about the brightness, and saturation specs of the original texture.

What I really need to figure out  (at some point) is how such a texture is composed using brown dirt and green leaves, I suppose  these two items are mixed, but how does it keep the definition of the leaves, and know where to apply green, how  the leaves are defined and like wall paper and tiling , how does it not get funky looking edges where the edges of the  texture meet (thinking of landscape)? Obviously with these questions it’s currently above my head and I don’t need to know this at this moment.


----------



## Renzatic

Huntn said:


> Accept Megascans apparantly made up their own standard?




Yeah, ORD would be better for landscapes, which is Megascan's bread and butter. You don't really need metallic maps for grass, dirt, and bark, so they probably just give it a black procedural, and replace it in the channel pack with a displacement map, which are very handy to have for landscapes.



Huntn said:


> I need to study this, what I think I need to do is pull out one of these images and see what there specs are, resolution, size. I know there are 2k, 4k, and 8k textures. What I don‘t know is what that equates to exactly.




All the textures in the channel pack are going to be the same size, and they'll likely be 8-bit greyscale. 

As for size, 2k will serve you in 99.9% of all situations. 1k can even get you by, if it's fairly small, and people won't be smashing their face up against it. 4k and 8k textures should be saved for situations where you either need one texture for a large amount of space, or are cramming a lot of details onto a single texture.

It's all about the details that higher resolutions provide you, but also an understanding that there's a point of diminishing returns. General rule of thumb is that if it looks blurry and rough, you could probably use more resolution. If it doesn't really look any different with a 4k texture than it does with a 2k one, then use the smaller texture.

This is definitely one of those things that you might struggle with, but will pick up on naturally when you start practicing it.


----------



## Huntn

Today I think I am done screwing around with this UE landscape material. It's got 6 textures, although I'm not exactly sure I'll be able to use all of them. Under Viewport Lit>Optimization Viewmodes>Shader Complexity, you can see a color representation of your scene. In a relatively small, practice landscape, when I had one  texture painted over the entire scene, I got a green (good) image. Then as an experiment I dabbed in 5 additional textures, in a small space and it turned red.

I think the key here are shaders that are applied in close proximity to one another in the same quad. My guess at this point is that if 6 textures are used, they must be spread out so as not to place too many in a quad, and the quads can be quite large.  More experimentation if forth coming. I'm working on relative small scenes so it's possible  can get away with more shader complexity (more competing textures). More to come...


----------



## Huntn

Huntn said:


> Well I just figured out that you can no longer Vertex paint on a landscape in UE5. Or I'm losing my mind, because of the projects I played with, such as the Forest Road, I vertex painted the landscape... I think. Well I know I did not use a landscape layer on it.
> 
> Ok I'm am starting to put together a scene. I have several free tree packs and the one I purchased for $30 a while back. I need to take a close look at that one, but I've decided for this first scene I want a large specimen tree, like the big oak, with  large branches all over, not the kind of tree with a very tall trunk, before you see the first limb.
> 
> Anyway I was wondering if your Blender tree automater could be set up to create something like, something beyond a generic tree? I wonder how hard it would be to create in blender? No asking you to make me a tree...
> 
> View attachment 16293
> 
> View attachment 16294​One other question, the the Forest Road project, the guy I was following, he basically said to take any tree mesh and make it as big as you want. Could there be an issue with ending up with leave larger than they should be? Or would the leaves stay the same size? Or would it be the idea that probably no-one would notice?



@Renzatic I mentioned trees a while ago. For this UE setting I'm working on, I feel the need for a big fancy tree with low hanging branches. The options are to buy one or try to make one, and based on the latter, I wonder if you would recommend any of these as "novice doable".

*Make Artistic Trees in Blender: *




*Stylized Fantasy Tree in Blender: * 




*Make a Photo Realistic Forest in Blender: *





I looked at the _ make a tree_ video link you posted that seems similar to one of the above, while I realize this maybe over my head for Blender, because I also think some animation would be needed, and then there is the issue of exporting it into UE. I've got some tree materials from other downloaded trees, that I maybe able to adapt, but this is all a pretty big challenge at this point.

Regarding the last video, does blender have ready made saplings in the program?

No this is not my sneaky way to talk you into making me a big tree, just advice.


----------



## Renzatic

Huntn said:


> @Renzatic I mentioned trees a while ago. For this UE setting I'm working on, I feel the need for a big fancy tree with low hanging branches. The options are to buy one or try to make one, and based on the latter, I wonder if you would recommend any of these as "novice doable".
> 
> *Make Artistic Trees in Blender: *
> 
> 
> 
> 
> *Stylized Fantasy Tree in Blender: *
> 
> 
> 
> 
> *Make a Photo Realistic Forest in Blender: *
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> I looked at the _ make a tree_ video link you posted that seems similar to one of the above, while I realize this maybe over my head for Blender, because I also think some animation would be needed, and then there is the issue of exporting it into UE. I've got some tree materials from other downloaded trees, that I maybe able to adapt, but this is all a pretty big challenge at this point.
> 
> Regarding the last video, does blender have ready made saplings in the program?
> 
> No this is not my sneaky way to talk you into making me a big tree, just advice.




I'll talk you into making trees tomorrow, when I have more time.


----------



## Renzatic

Huntn said:


> Regarding the last video, does blender have ready made saplings in the program?




Yup. The Sapling addon comes with Blender by default, you just have to activate it. You do so by going to Edit, Preferences, then hit the Addons tab, and in the search bar along the top right of the window, type Sapling. When it pops up, just click the check box to enable it. Then, just hit Ctrl-A, go to curves, and you'll see the new Sapling trees.

It's okay. I think it's better for distant trees, but fails a bit on close ups. If you really want something that looks good in Unreal, but won't cost you an arm and a leg, I'd use the Megascan Trees. Since Quixel Bridge is built right into UE5, I think the only thing you'll have to do is search for them from within it, and they'll be ready to go.

Though you can build your own, which I'd recommend to some extent, since it'll teach you A LOT about shading, normal transfers, and whatnot, but it is a very, very broad topic that'll require a lot of concentration on your part, especially if you're trying to build realistic trees without having too high a poly count.


----------



## Huntn

Renzatic said:


> Yup. The Sapling addon comes with Blender by default, you just have to activate it. You do so by going to Edit, Preferences, then hit the Addons tab, and in the search bar along the top right of the window, type Sapling. When it pops up, just click the check box to enable it. Then, just hit Ctrl-A, go to curves, and you'll see the new Sapling trees.
> 
> It's okay. I think it's better for distant trees, but fails a bit on close ups. If you really want something that looks good in Unreal, but won't cost you an arm and a leg, I'd use the Megascan Trees. Since Quixel Bridge is built right into UE5, I think the only thing you'll have to do is search for them from within it, and they'll be ready to go.
> 
> Though you can build your own, which I'd recommend to some extent, since it'll teach you A LOT about shading, normal transfers, and whatnot, but it is a very, very broad topic that'll require a lot of concentration on your part, especially if you're trying to build realistic trees without having too high a poly count.



Thanks. The other day, I looked for trees at Megascans and just found tree stumps. I’ll look again.


----------



## Renzatic

Huntn said:


> Thanks. The other day, I looked for trees at Megascans and just found tree stumps. I’ll look again.




Also, I just came across this. It's basically a streamlined, simplified form of my trees, which use geometry nodes. Great for showing you how to grow fractal based objects like trees and plants.


----------



## Huntn

Renzatic said:


> Also, I just came across this. It's basically a streamlined, simplified form of my trees, which use geometry nodes. Great for showing you how to grow fractal based objects like trees and plants.



I found the Megascans tree pack, it‘s over in the Epic Marketplace. I’ve downloaded it, but don’t think it will suffice with the trophy (is there a better term?) tree I’m looking for. I’ll check out this video. Thanks!


----------



## Renzatic

Huntn said:


> I found the Megascans tree pack, it‘s over in the Epic Marketplace. I’ve downloaded it, but don’t think it will suffice with the trophy (is there a better term?) tree I’m looking for. I’ll check out this video. Thanks!




Hero tree, maybe? Your hero object is usually the focus of your scene, the center piece that will be calling for the most attention.

And geo nodes are fun because you don't necessarily have to have top level modeling skills to produce something that looks great. You just need to know the nodes.

Look at what this guy did with them. Near infinite complexity from just a scant few assets.


----------



## Huntn

Renzatic said:


> Hero tree, maybe? Your hero object is usually the focus of your scene, the center piece that will be calling for the most attention.
> 
> And geo nodes are fun because you don't necessarily have to have top level modeling skills to produce something that looks great. You just need to know the nodes.
> 
> Look at what this guy did with them. Near infinite complexity from just a scant few assets.



Center-piece tree!


----------



## Renzatic

Huntn said:


> Center-piece tree!




The tree what which you look at most!


----------



## Huntn

Renzatic said:


> The tree what which you look at most!



I’m willing to throw in a large substitute tree for now. I saw one for sale at the Epic Market Place for almost $300. No thanks.


----------



## Renzatic

Huntn said:


> I’m willing to throw in a large substitute tree for now. I saw one for sale at the Epic Market Place for almost $300. No thanks.




Can't make money without spending it first, broseph. BUY THAT TREE!


----------



## Huntn

Hmm, $27 on sale. This is in Blender, I have no clue how hard it would be to bring into UE and to add animation to it or if the blender textures work coming straight into UE. Is something like this editable, like if I want to heighten the trunk? Thoughts?









						Oak summer 5 tree 3D model - TurboSquid 1378925
					

Royalty free 3D model Oak Summer 5 for download as max, obj, c4d, fbx, and blend on TurboSquid: 3D models for games, architecture, videos. (1378925)




					www.turbosquid.com


----------



## Renzatic

Huntn said:


> Hmm, $27 on sale. This is in Blender, I have no clue how hard it would be to bring into UE and to add animation to it or if the blender textures work coming straight into UE. Thoughts?
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Oak summer 5 tree 3D model - TurboSquid 1378925
> 
> 
> Royalty free 3D model Oak Summer 5 for download as max, obj, c4d, fbx, and blend on TurboSquid: 3D models for games, architecture, videos. (1378925)
> 
> 
> 
> 
> www.turbosquid.com




It could be done,  but I'd check for trees on the Unreal Marketplace before hitting up Turbosquid. That way,  you'd know it'd already be set up and animated.


----------



## Renzatic

Huntn said:


> Oak summer 5 tree 3D model - TurboSquid 1378925
> 
> 
> Royalty free 3D model Oak Summer 5 for download as max, obj, c4d, fbx, and blend on TurboSquid: 3D models for games, architecture, videos. (1378925)
> 
> 
> 
> 
> www.turbosquid.com




This looks pretty good. It's more expensive, but you also get a lot more trees.









						Trees: Oak Forest - Vol. 1 (Extreme Realistic Wind) in Environments - UE Marketplace
					

A big variety of realistic oak trees with dynamic wind system




					www.unrealengine.com


----------



## Huntn

Renzatic said:


> This looks pretty good. It's more expensive, but you also get a lot more trees.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Trees: Oak Forest - Vol. 1 (Extreme Realistic Wind) in Environments - UE Marketplace
> 
> 
> A big variety of realistic oak trees with dynamic wind system
> 
> 
> 
> 
> www.unrealengine.com



I have noticed trees are categorized as  woods and field. The field trees are the big impressive trees with large low hanging branches. This is my target. This tree pack looks interesting though.


----------



## Renzatic

Huntn said:


> I have noticed trees are categorized as  woods and field. The field trees are the big impressive trees with large low hanging branches. This is my target. This tree pack looks interesting though.




That pack does include a couple of the larger field trees. Look at one of the last images on that link, it shows every item in the pack.

...though for $125, it might be best to look elsewhere. it's a great pack, but rather expensive for a hobbyist project. But then again, think about how much model railroad people spend.


----------



## Huntn

Renzatic said:


> That pack does include a couple of the larger field trees. Look at one of the last images on that link, it shows every item in the pack.
> 
> ...though for $125, it might be best to look elsewhere. it's a great pack, but rather expensive for a hobbyist project. But then again, think about how much model railroad people spend.



Think how much I spend buying tanks in World of Tanks, $125 is not that outrageous.   However I predict I’ll be looking into blender tree design, but this seems to be like a large edition to the work load. I may buy a tree for now.


----------



## Renzatic

Huntn said:


> Think how much I spend buying tanks in World of Tanks, $125 is not that outrageous.




Hell, I spent half that on a character sculpting tutorial last week. 

Check and see what their return policy is over at the marketplace, and if it's pretty flexible, then I'd say go for it.


----------



## Huntn

One thing I’m  learning is that regarding Unreal Editor materials there are seemingly dozens of ways to skin the cat. Converting hard core coding into GUI nodes impresses the hell out of me.

I have a material that seems to handle the tiling issue well enough, but now  I‘m seeing  in the default materials that either Epic or Megascans are putting out for surfaces include  variable randomization nodes based on what equates to noise textures to mitigate tiling.

And in the current tutorial I’m following, the author is blending 2 different surface textures with noise to reduce the tiling appearance. This guy is an amateur, I think he is researching or talking to people with more knowledge, but that is just a feeling and  I’ve learned some things from his series.

I’m currently working though his episode 7 on materials. He’s using a landscape material height nodes to auto fill in a river bed, but since the rest of the landscape relies on landscape layer painting, I can see it saves effort, but I would probably just manually paint this with one of the landscape layers,  But it is good as a demo on how you would start to set up a height based landscape material.


----------



## Renzatic

Huntn said:


> I have a material that seems to handle the tiling issue well enough, but then I seeing in the default materials that either Epic or Megascans are putting out for surfaces includes variable randomization nodes based on what equates to noise textures to mitigate tiling. And in the current texture I’m following, the author is blending textures with noise to reduce the tiling appearance




Yeah, that's not too terribly difficult to set up. It's basically scattering and rotating the UVs across the mesh using a voronoi pattern, and blending the edges together using blurs and/or noise.


----------



## Huntn

Just when I thought I was getting a handle on how a UE material should be constructed, there are other ways that I see coming out of Megascans. Megascans puts some of the following components in a “Presets“ folder.

Textures used to be placed in the material. Now I am seeing texture place holders used, Several material functions that can be reference by multiple materials, and the textures themselves are being placed in the material instances. The MI is what makes changing material setting convenient.

This tutorial series I am following, I said the guy is an ametuer, but he is certainly talking to experts in the know, as he is constructing a material which blends 2 textures togethe, say 2 variations of dirt then introducing noise to break up tiling.

And episode 8, he just covered the basics of virtual texture streaming. I’m not mind boggled, but impressed. This is where you have a landscape of one material, you introduce a rock mesh with a  base where the base looks different than the landscape, and in the rock mesh material you can link that to landscape material texture, based on the exact position on the landscape the rock is located, so the landscape material is transferred onto the bottom of the rock mesh and blends with it up to a threshold you set.


----------



## Huntn

Contrary to popular opinion, I am starting to make digital progress on my project. Today I finished figuring out and executed the creation of a pawn with the ability to toggle walk-run, and zoom from 3rd person to 1st, and then I migrated it from the tutorial project to the actual project. Migration can be a real pain...






*Yes, there is an actual project in work. *​


----------



## Renzatic

Nice! 

The only thing I’d suggest is that you desaturate and maybe lighten your dirt texture a bit. Earth is usually (though not always) that bold only when it’s wet.

Edit: though to be fair, this might be more about me pushing my personal taste of things, rather than giving any advice. You do what you like here.


----------



## Huntn

Renzatic said:


> Nice!
> 
> The only thing I’d suggest is that you desaturate and maybe lighten your dirt texture a bit. Earth is usually (though not always) that bold only when it’s wet.
> 
> Edit: though to be fair, this might be more about me pushing my personal taste of things, rather than giving any advice. You do what you like here.



I always appreciate your advice. What you see is far from anything finished. Right now it’s just slapped down to provide a starting point.


----------



## Renzatic

Huntn said:


> I always appreciate your advice. What you see is far from anything finished. Right now it’s just slapped down to provide a starting point.




Post up a shot when you start laying out some foliage. I wanna see it.


----------



## Huntn

*Post has been edited See end*
@Renzatic, good ole buddy. 
For the last month, maybe 2, I have been arguing with myself over which landscape material I should be using in my project. I thought I had one picked out but then ran into another that I really liked the guys textures.  However it only has 3 textures, and while I could get by, I think a landscape should have 4-5 textures for variety in the landscape part. I've been playing with adding 1 or 2 more textures to material, which is not that hard, but it's possible I've overlooked something.

Anyway that's not the reason for the post, but it could be related to the issue, me editing materials.

There  is one texture I really want to use it's a Rooty ground texture I used back when I did the Forest Road. When I insert this into the material and then apply it, it looks bleached out. And honestly when I used it in the original Forest Road project it looked like a nice chocolate brown, but if you look at the Albedo.jpg image it does not look as nearly as dark.

So I've tried playing with the material. This particular material does not have settings to add colors from a palette, but it does have darken settings. Yes they do darken but they also tend to make the image look more like night and monotone, instead of a richer darker brown. The other issue is that there is green weeds growing on it, and when I apply a color like dark brown to the entire image, this adversely effects the green in the weeds.

So I suspect there is a way to do this via a photo editing program. I almost started an Affinity Photo trial, but first I played with Graphic Converter a Mac program I usually use to change the type of photo such as .jpg to .gif, but it also has brightness and contrast setting, and so far my results are not that great.

I figured it would help I picked your brain first.  I watched a video on
*Dodge, Burn, and Sponge:* https://affinity.serif.com/en-gb/tutorials/photo/desktop/video/301196403/. This might be what I need to do, but would like to get your opinion.


Please take a look and tell me what you think. These are 2k.jpg images.




original (megascans designator: tb3hfg2g_2K_Albedo)




My edits so far- not impressed...​What I'd really like is dirt and maybe roots with less red in them and I'm happy with the green plants, I'd just like to make the dirt and roots look more like a rich, chocolate brown. And see the roots look like they are on the dark side, this is because I have been applying bright and contrast to the entire image, not isolating just the say the roots or just the dirt and working on that alone.

Your advice would be appreaciated! 

*Update:*
I went back and looked at the original material and damn, It is not chocolate brown, and the roots are gray.
This is not my goal.




The Rooty ground is where the roots are. There is grass painted around the roots.
There are seperate twigs scattered in this area too.​


----------



## DT

Thought the people in this thread would appreciate this, a friend-of-a-friend's work ...



			https://www.artstation.com/artwork/zDv3gd


----------



## Huntn

DT said:


> Thought the people in this thread would appreciate this, a friend-of-a-friend's work ...
> 
> 
> 
> https://www.artstation.com/artwork/zDv3gd



This is from Silicon Valley/Hollywood/Graphics Central while I'm up in the backwoods hollar trying to figure out how to draw a tree- a trunk, some sticks and scatter some leaves all over it.. 

So this: https://www.artstation.com/artwork/zDv3gd is pretty amazing. We are approaching, if not already there the   photo realistic animation of human beings. I know that they spent a pretty penny, turning old farts into youthful versions of themselves, and this may still be somewhat of a challenge because you are not creating just something that might pass for human, but something that emulates a specific human, but you can be assured they will get there.

Unreal Engne/Metascans now has meta humans, and maybe this is related to your link:








						Unreal Engine | MetaHuman
					

Create photorealistic digital humans, fully rigged and complete with hair and clothing, in minutes.




					www.unrealengine.com
				




You can see the image, but it does not hit you until you see the animation of the eyes.

​


----------



## Renzatic

Huntn said:


> Your advice would be appreaciated!




Instead of dodging and burning the hell out of the entire image by hand, I'd suggest using a Levels adjustment layer over it, tweak the sliders until they're capturing only the points that are showing any spikes on the histogram, then slap a Hue/Saturation/Value adjustment underneath the levels filter, and tweak the colors to taste. You'll end up with something like this...






Making levels adjustments boil away the dead color space in your image, giving you more saturated, balanced results. It's something you should do with every albedo texture you have in your scene (with some tweaks to taste, of course.)


----------



## Renzatic

And speaking of trees, I've done a TON of work on my GeoTrees recently, and have reached a point where they're fairly realistic, and can be exported out to an external engine like UE without any problems. The only downside is that they don't animate yet, but hopefully soon, that won't be a problem anymore.

You can find them here. Version 0.675 is the latest version.









						GeoTree: Procedural Trees in Geometry Nodes
					

It’s a little problem I’ve had to deal with since day one, and it’s either rereared it’s head with the addition of Stick Power, or I’ve just noticed again.  I’m once again facing down the usual overgrown offshoots at the extremities of the trees, and I can’t seem to fix it without overly...




					blenderartists.org
				




If you have any questions about it, feel free to ask either here or over at BA.


----------



## DT

I don't really have time at the moment, but this thread has been so interesting, and now I have a machine with a pretty stout GPU setup (and lots of free space), I figured I'd at the very least install it


----------



## Renzatic

DT said:


> I don't really have time at the moment, but this thread has been so interesting, and now I have a machine with a pretty stout GPU setup (and lots of free space), I figured I'd at the very least install it




WELCOME TO A WORLD OF HAPPY FUN TIMES!

Since you're kinda new to the scene, I might ask you to try out my tree generator. I want to know how relatively intuitive it is. This is how it looks these days, with my stylized leaves on it.


----------



## DT

Renzatic said:


> WELCOME TO A WORLD OF HAPPY FUN TIMES!
> 
> Since you're kinda new to the scene, I might ask you to try out my tree generator. I want to know how relatively intuitive it is. This is how it looks these days, with my stylized leaves on it.
> 
> View attachment 18751




Yeah, that's awesome I will, it looks awesome, and I at least have a little foundation in 3D stuff.

The next week / the coming week is a bit of a clusterf***, hahaha, tomorrow is a "skip day" for our movie thing, and I've got major work to finish, plus a big thing on Wednesday morning, anyway, yeah, send me anything you want and I'll try to check it out as time permits (and as you can give me some guidance).


----------



## Huntn

Renzatic said:


> Instead of dodging and burning the hell out of the entire image by hand, I'd suggest using a Levels adjustment layer over it, tweak the sliders until they're capturing only the points that are showing any spikes on the histogram, then slap a Hue/Saturation/Value adjustment underneath the levels filter, and tweak the colors to taste. You'll end up with something like this...
> 
> 
> View attachment 18744
> 
> Making levels adjustments boil away the dead color space in your image, giving you more saturated, balanced results. It's something you should do with every albedo texture you have in your scene (with some tweaks to taste, of course.)




I’ve discovered that just darkening the texture is not making a substantial difference in the scene, which means to me there is something going on in the material I don’t understand. I’m working on it. Some of these materials are mind bogglingly complex.



Renzatic said:


> And speaking of trees, I've done a TON of work on my GeoTrees recently, and have reached a point where they're fairly realistic, and can be exported out to an external engine like UE without any problems. The only downside is that they don't animate yet, but hopefully soon, that won't be a problem anymore.
> 
> You can find them here. Version 0.675 is the latest version.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> GeoTree: Procedural Trees in Geometry Nodes
> 
> 
> It’s a little problem I’ve had to deal with since day one, and it’s either rereared it’s head with the addition of Stick Power, or I’ve just noticed again.  I’m once again facing down the usual overgrown offshoots at the extremities of the trees, and I can’t seem to fix it without overly...
> 
> 
> 
> 
> blenderartists.org
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> If you have any questions about it, feel free to ask either here or over at BA.
> 
> View attachment 18746



I found a spline tree in conjunction with a Procedural Forest pack that is animated and you can create a large gnarly tree, with substantial horizontal branches at the low end,  that reach out. I’ll post an image. Once you get get animation working, I’ll be interested in migrating it to UE.


----------



## Renzatic

Huntn said:


> I’ve discovered that just darkening the texture is not making a substantial difference in the scene, which means to me there is something going on in the material I don’t understand. I’m working on it. Some of these materials are mind bogglingly complex.




Your roughness map can wash out your textures, depending on the lighting. Try removing it from the material graph, and see how it looks.


----------



## Huntn

Renzatic said:


> Your roughness map can wash out your textures, depending on the lighting. Try removing it from the material graph, and see how it looks.



I’ll try that.

The issue is the texture I’m trying to use looks like it’s bleached out and  almost white. There is a possibilities that with the altered material I made adding a texture slot, I have overlooked some element the material needs.

I need to experiment with the original material and see if I get the same effect when I replace one of the original textures with my desired texture. It will be interesting to see if the same bleached out effect happens in the original material. If I verify I can use the texture in the original material, it means I have overlooked something when I altered it, and I may just stick with the 3 texture landscape material, but this imo is not ideal, using 3 textures for a landscape.

Also I have other materials I can use. It’s just that this one looks so nice.


----------



## Huntn

Been working on a big tree:




Rough image​
I mentioned a Nature Procedural Pack, that includes a tree toot spline and a tree branch spline. It's pretty incredible. The main trunks of the tree are actually highly flexible tree roots. The flexible branches are attached to these.


----------



## Renzatic

Huntn said:


> Been working on a big tree...




Looking damn good!


----------



## DT

Huntn said:


> Been working on a big tree:
> 
> View attachment 19317
> Rough image​
> I mentioned a Nature Procedural Pack, that includes a tree toot spline and a tree branch spline. It's pretty incredible. The main trunks of the tree are actually highly flexible tree roots. The very flexible branches are attached to these.




Wound you mind asking that android to move out of the way so I can I see your tree better?


----------



## Huntn

Renzatic said:


> Looking damn good!



The key here will be the appearance of the finished tree around  the crown.When I look at real trees of this size they have a lot of branches at the top, so I’m trying to keep it relatively simple but still look good.



​


----------



## Renzatic

Huntn said:


> The key here will be the appearance of the finished tree around the crown.When I look at real trees of this size they have a lot of branches at the top, so I’m trying to keep it relatively simple but still look good.




Yeah, trees are kind of a bitch to do well. There's a reason why SpeedTree can charge $20 a month for just a program that makes trees, and people happily pay it.


----------



## Huntn

Hmm, This single tree is putting a hit on my fps. The leaves are waving, the scene is showing 70-50fps depending on whether I'm looking at that tree or not.  . Far side of the map with nothing in it, I'm at 70 fps, turn and look at the tree it drops to 58 fps. Probably about 30 splines in this tree. I'm going to post a question at Epic about maybe better ways to do this.

No, tree is not finished, I'm working on making the leave less dense in the dark areas. I suspect that fewer waving leaves will have a significant effect on FPS.


----------



## Renzatic

Just by looking at it, I can tell that the mesh being generated by the splines probably has a sky high poly count. 

And you're probably getting a lot of transparency overdraw in the thickest bunch of the leaves.


----------



## Huntn

Renzatic said:


> Just by looking at it, I can tell that the mesh being generated by the splines probably has a sky high poly count.
> 
> And you're probably getting a lot of transparency overdraw in the thickest bunch of the leaves.



My goal is to thin those leaves out, because I don’t want the darkness and it probably will help fps. And yes the bark looks nice,  prol a high poly count…in the project I pulled this from, the authors trees were not nearly as conplex as this.

I realize you may not know the answer, but basically I have assembled it, and I can group the pieces, which allows me to select one and they are all selected allowing me to drag them as a group. I can duplicate the map and preserve the structure, but what would be nice, would be able to transfer this tree and it’s present structure to another project and not have to reassemble it at the destination, which reassembly would be a major pain, if even doable with the complexity.


----------



## Renzatic

Huntn said:


> And yes the bark looks nice, prol a high poly count…in the project I pulled this from, the authors trees were not nearly as conplex as this.




That's resolution. You can get an idea of the poly count by looking at how smoothly curved all your limbs are.

Post up a shot of your wireframe. That'll tell me if it's due to that.


----------



## Huntn

Renzatic said:


> That's resolution. You can get an idea of the poly count by looking at how smoothly curved all your limbs are.
> 
> Post up a shot of your wireframe. That'll tell me if it's due to that.



I've decided that although this tree has a nice fat trunk, the leaves seem kind of cartoonish and I don't think it will fit in with with the rest of the foliage I'm using. Besides, the limbs tend to spawn in haphazard ways, and although  I've substantially lowered the spline count, it still takes a big chunk out of my fps.

I do own some foliage collections with "Field Trees", but I don't think they'll be fancy enough for my purposes, but I need to actually look at them.

On an exciting note, I had a procedural foliage generator project from the Market Place and saw another that looked amazing, yet I know squat about procedural forest, but then I started in on this tutorial to catch up.
https://docs.unrealengine.com/5.0/en-US/procedural-foliage-tool-in-unreal-engine/




Created following along with the tutorial
Note: 2 types of trees both on the same Foliage generator volume, but they actually clump in their own predominant groups, instead of mixing with each other evenly and equally...​
This is simply amazing for several reasons:

You can slap down a realistic forest with minimal effort.
Not only that, it looks realistic- it mimics growth of trees as far as how trees would naturally spread, with settings for everything.
And for the stuff that is in the wrong spot for whatever the reason, those items can be erased.
I'm still futzing with landscapes. Once I nail down just how good the landscapes with these commercial products are, I'll leap.
And I've looked at water. The new UE Water System has huge potential for presenting beautiful water, but no official water falls yet. What has existed before looks a bit anemic, but it's what I have to work with.

More to come! 

What have you been working on lately?


----------



## dada_dave

I just want to say as someone who doesn’t do 3D modeling himself and checks in to read this thread every once in awhile, it is both an informative, interesting thread and really cool to see the progress of your projects!


----------



## Huntn

dada_dave said:


> I just want to say as someone who doesn’t do 3D modeling himself and checks in to read this thread every once in awhile, it is both an informative, interesting thread and really cool to see the progress of your projects!



Thanks!
What UE provides is the environment and the mechanics for a variety of games and visual projects, including the backgrounds of shows like the Mandalorian.

Maybe shocking but I have done minimal technical modeling at this point, although I am "modeling" or maybe better said, composing /constructing a scene using the tools the Engine provides.

@Renzatic is the expert modeler here and if I understand it correctly, most actual modeling of things like buildings, objects, or characters are modeled in separate 3D programs like Blender then imported into Unreal Engine Editor.

For the last year I have been doing Unreal Engine tutorials, which the majority of it is providing an environment to put projects together. Now that "environment" in itself is a huge undertaking to understand it. I could learn to model trees, but at this point, there is no reason. A site called Megascans has huge numbers of modeled natural  items free to access if you are using Unreal Engine. And those items, say for example a single boulder, can be manipulated in the engine to make it look different, and used multiple times across a scene.

Procedural Landscapes are huge because items there are repeated multiple, maybe hundreds of times, but for processing the engine counts them a 1 item. This ability makes authoring a game doable for a small team or even 1 person to accomplish. The biggest advantage I see is that not having to place every tree, the procedural settings adds a natural look  to start with, and it can be edited to suit your specific needs.


----------



## Renzatic

Huntn said:


> More to come!




You really should consider renting Speedtree for a month or two, or at least buying one of their trees off their site. It isn't terribly difficult to use, and can make just about any tree imaginable. A couple of tutorials, and you'll be running.






						Search Results for “oak” – SpeedTree
					






					store.speedtree.com
				






Huntn said:


> What have you been working on lately?




I've been playing around with shaders, trying to get a stark graphic novel look, a'la Mike Mignola. I'd say I've come close to succeeding.


----------



## Huntn

Renzatic said:


> You really should consider renting Speedtree for a month or two, or at least buying one of their trees off their site. It isn't terribly difficult to use, and can make just about any tree imaginable. A couple of tutorials, and you'll be running.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Search Results for “oak” – SpeedTree
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> store.speedtree.com
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> I've been playing around with shaders, trying to get a stark graphic novel look, a'la Mike Mignola. I'd say I've come close to succeeding.
> 
> View attachment 20250



This looks like it has potential:





						Coastal Live Oak: Forest – SpeedTree
					






					store.speedtree.com
				




I wonder how easy it is to import into UE? Should  I assume it has all the meshes, textures, and material that would be needed? I’ll assume yes but research is warranted. I signed in at Speed Tree and asked there too.


----------



## Renzatic

Huntn said:


> I wonder how easy it is to import into UE? Should  I assume it has all the meshes, textures, and material that would be needed? I’ll assume yes but research is warranted. I signed in at Speed Tree and asked there too.




It's fairly simple.


----------



## Huntn

Huntn said:


> This looks like it has potential:
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Coastal Live Oak: Forest – SpeedTree
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> store.speedtree.com
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> I wonder how easy it is to import into UE? Should  I assume it has all the meshes, textures, and material that would be needed? I’ll assume yes but research is warranted. I signed in at Speed Tree and asked there too.



Actually no, I did not understand what VFX means, which is unsuitable for games, according to Speed Tree 3m pixels vs 30k for a game. Not only that but their customer support ade it sould like to use this tree you’d not only have to buy it, but subscribe to Speedtree for gsnes, if I understood them correctly.


----------

