Any Unreal Engine Experts Here?

[Huntn]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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

Guide to creating new Landscape terrains.

docs.unrealengine.com

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]

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.

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.

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]

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]

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]

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]

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.

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.

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]

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]

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.

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.

Turning the UE project into a .exe.

I dunno how to do that, but I believe it’s actually fairly simple to do.

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?