Tag: VFX Fundamentals

Env. Light Mixer – Create lighting from scratch:

Other elements to add to create realistic sky/world/lighting:

• Volumetric Cloud: Uses a material-driven method to create lifelike clouds, offering versatility in cloud types and enhancing the sky’s realism.
• Exponential Height Fog: Adds atmospheric fog that varies in density with altitude, providing a smooth transition and allowing for two different fog colors for environmental tuning.
• HDRI Map: Uses an environmental texture to provide accurate background scenery, natural reflections, and contributes to the overall illumination of the scene.

Things to keep in mind when dealing with indirect lighting:

• Base/albedo color: the material or color of your objects matter as they reflect light bouncing off them. If lighting in your scene seems too dark/light, considering tweaking color of your material.
• In real world nothing is 100% black or white. Most black: 0.04, most white: 0.9, middle ground: 0.18
• Use chrome ball to visualize lighting & reflection

To turn off Auto Exposure:

• Add PostProcessVolume to scene
• Infinite Extent (Unbound) ✅
• Metering Mode: Manual
• Apply Physical Camera Exposure ✅
• Exposure Compensation: USE THIS to control light (without having to manipulate light in your scene)

After several attempts in creating beautiful skies and environment lighting in UE5, I started to get a hang of how to work with Lumen. There are still a lot of settings which confuses me sometimes, yet I believe lighting is such an essential aspect responsible in deciding the quality and mood of your scene.

This week, I tackle on Landscape and material in Unreal Engine 5. In terms of 3D I have always been focusing more on character design, yet creating real-time landscape with great details has been something that I always wanted to implemented in my work as I believe it would be a great storytelling enhancement.

Resources:
Unreal Engine 5 Beginner Tutorial for Film: Landscape and Materials
How I Quickly Create 3D Environments in Unreal Engine 5 | FULL WORKFLOW
Landscape Basics Tutorial for Beginners in Unreal Engine 5.2

Creating landscape
1. Stablishing Scale: this is to make sure your landscape is scaled correctly by adding a mannequin
– Content browser → add → add feature or content pack → third person
– Mannequin → Character → Mesh → SK_Mannequin

2. Landscape mode: Here you can create landscape by manually paint/sculpt on the plane OR use height maps
– Settings: Section per component = to subdivide square/section for higher res landscape
– Drag downloaded surface material into Landscape material

After trying out different surface textures from Quixel Bridge, the landscape still doesn’t look exactly realistic to me if I just use 1 texture for the whole landscape. I have eventually learned how to create different material layers in order for me to paint onto my own landscape, using these tutorials.

How to create different landscape material layers:

• In Content browser, create a material folder. Right click > New Material, name it as Landscape
• Open up the material, add LandscapeLayerBlend node (This will tell UE5 that this is a landscape material)
• On left panel, click + to add new landscape layers. Name them accordingly
• Import Textures into UE5
• Add MakeMaterialAttribute node, connect Base color (RGB), Normal (RGB) and Roughness (G) to it.
• Add Texture Coordinate, Multiply and ScalarParameter (for tile), connect to textures’ UVs
• Right click on material > Make Material Instance, drag this into Landscape Material. If you open this up now you can modify the tile that has been added beforehand.
• Repeat accordingly to create more material layers.