Any Unreal Engine Experts Here?

[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]

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]

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]

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.

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]

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]

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]

Been working on a big tree...

Looking damn good!

 

[DT]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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

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]

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.