Graphic Design using Unreal Engine

[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

 

[Huntn]

Can anyone tell me from a novice perspective why Unity would be better than Unreal Engine of Vice a versa?

 

[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 Bender, import, and then add leaves in UE. There is this Quixel Megascan video

MEDIA=youtube]FzoY062kY1s[/MEDIA]
​

You tubes 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.

 

[ibran]

It sounds like you are trying to render some artwork, something akin to a photograph or a painting, with 3D tools, correct? Not trying to be pedantic, but there might be a better way to phrase the question or a different forum to ask.

Capital-G "Graphic Design" is usually done with tools like Illustrator/Photoshop/Indesign and is focused on communicating a specific message, rather than a feeling or emotion as with a photograph, painting, or render. A few graphic designers might dabble in this stuff, but you'll probably have better luck asking in a 3D art or game design forum. Good luck!

 

[Pakaku]

I was looking into UE and Unity recently. Unreal looks like the stronger more robust engine, but I went with Unity because it’s based on C# instead of C++, and because Unity had a licensing program that worked better in my case if I were to ever sell my games (free to develop and sell games up to a certain amount of revenue), but that may not be a factor if all you are doing is personal private projects.

You might need to make your own assets, like models and textures, unless you use assets other people have made. Maybe sound, but you could probably just use stock sounds for free. The only real caveat to using other peoples’ assets is not having a consistent art style, but you might not care about that while you’re still learning

If you want to make your stuff, Blender is a free open-source 3D modelling program, and there are a few freebies for making textures, like Krita and GIMP. As for programming, you could use Xcode but I’d recommend Visual Studio Code instead

 

[Huntn]

It sounds like you are trying to render some artwork, something akin to a photograph or a painting, with 3D tools, correct? Not trying to be pedantic, but there might be a better way to phrase the question or a different forum to ask.

Capital-G "Graphic Design" is usually done with tools like Illustrator/Photoshop/Indesign and is focused on communicating a specific message, rather than a feeling or emotion as with a photograph, painting, or render. A few graphic designers might dabble in this stuff, but you'll probably have better luck asking in a 3D art or game design forum. Good luck!

Thanks!
I was just wondering if there was anyone here interested in talking about it. Yes, I'll seek out an Unreal Engine forum. And today until I had this thread moved into this forum I had zero replies so that might be the answer. 🙂 However I'd argue this is a form of graphic design... I think.

I just watched this video today and took some notes. It is very much along the lines of what I have in mind for the kind of project I would like to tinker with.

The author says he could have done this completely in the Unreal Engine, but that this method gives him some freedom.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.

Starting mesh made in Maya- 3 pieces, center, left and right. It is a rectangle,
then imported into Unreal Engine.​

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 three flat meshes he created in Maya, 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. Grass added later.
• 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/terrain is added (the green mesh)
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. 😉

 

[Huntn]

I was looking into UE and Unity recently. Unreal looks like the stronger more robust engine, but I went with Unity because it’s based on C# instead of C++, and because Unity had a licensing program that worked better in my case if I were to ever sell my games (free to develop and sell games up to a certain amount of revenue), but that may not be a factor if all you are doing is personal private projects.

You might need to make your own assets, like models and textures, unless you use assets other people have made. Maybe sound, but you could probably just use stock sounds for free. The only real caveat to using other peoples’ assets is not having a consistent art style, but you might not care about that while you’re still learning

If you want to make your stuff, Blender is a free open-source 3D modelling program, and there are a few freebies for making textures, like Krita and GIMP. As for programming, you could use Xcode but I’d recommend Visual Studio Code instead

I looked at the Unreal Engine's licensing, a personal license (free) if you don't plan on selling anything, and a professional license that costs 5% for anything you sell and I have no intention of getting near coding if I can avoid it, I've always been in love with the UE from a gaming perspective, I really don't plan on selling anything, and I have been impressed with the quality of the Unreal Engine, and the available free tutorials. 🙂

 

[organicCPU]

I never used those two:

XfrogPlants

XfrogPlants are realistic, highly detailed, fully textured 3D trees, shrubs, and flowers, modeled with Xfrog procedural software.

xfrog.com

Download e-on Software Products for Free | Bentley Systems

Unlock the legacy of e-on software! Enjoy free downloads of VUE, PlantFactory, and PlantCatalog.

info.e-onsoftware.com

I had a look into Vue from e-on. It was cool, a little slow at that time and my MBP went quite hot. Go for a PLE (Personal Learning Edition) to get an impression. Like @Pakaku said, you should take a look at Blender. You can make almost everything with it, that you can do with Maya, but it's free and open source. For Blender, there is another tree plug-in existing: https://www.thegrove3d.com

Yes, IMO 3D design is graphics design. Maybe graphics design is just a part of 3D design, depending on the project. Sometimes it's getting so complex, that it's often crossing the boundaries and unites programming, vector and pixel graphics design, animation, video, sculpting, audio, lightning and more. I'm always impressed, if watching the final credits of a pixar movie, how many different departments with hundreds of people are working together for a whole year or even longer on realizing an animated movie.

Edit: One more noteworthy option: https://planetside.co.uk/free-downloads/

 

[Huntn]

I never used those two:

XfrogPlants

XfrogPlants are realistic, highly detailed, fully textured 3D trees, shrubs, and flowers, modeled with Xfrog procedural software.

xfrog.com

Download e-on Software Products for Free | Bentley Systems

Unlock the legacy of e-on software! Enjoy free downloads of VUE, PlantFactory, and PlantCatalog.

info.e-onsoftware.com

I had a look into Vue from e-on. It was cool, a little slow at that time and my MBP went quite hot. Go for a PLE (Personal Learning Edition) to get an impression. Like @Pakaku said, you should take a look at Blender. You can make almost everything with it, that you can do with Maya, but it's free and open source. For Blender, there is another tree plug-in existing: https://www.thegrove3d.com

Yes, IMO 3D design is graphics design. Maybe graphics design is just a part of 3D design, depending on the project. Sometimes it's getting so complex, that it's often crossing the boundaries and unites programming, vector and pixel graphics design, animation, video, sculpting, audio, lightning and more. I'm always impressed, if watching the final credits of a pixar movie, how many different departments with hundreds of people are working together for a whole year or even longer on realizing an animated movie.

Edit: One more noteworthy option: https://planetside.co.uk/free-downloads/

Yes it's definitely graphic design. I'm working with both Blender and Unreal Engine, have worked with Photoshop in the past and these without any doubt are the same ball park. Just because three dimensional design is introduced, does not make it any less. It's surprising that anyone would argue different.

I have found people at the forum.unrealengine.com and at BlenderArtists.com who definitely want to talk about this kind of graphic design. 🙂

 

[Huntn]

Here is the latest in my UE learning project. It’s been a handful, and it’s not finished.

Before the trees

After the trees​

 

[Huntn]

Here is the final image:

​

This was a good learning project to convince myself that I could produce something that not only excited me but verified that Unreal Engine is a worthy avenue for my intentions, which is to create interactive scenes, eventually VR scenes.

My version is not as open or as good as the original I was mimicking, but I am satisfied with it:

original​

As someone who used try to paint an image like this, it is fairly amazing that a scene like this can be created without too much to trouble, especially the atmosphere, about 2 months of casual study, via a game engine where all the hard coding was performed for the user.

The only thing I created from scratch was the road mesh and the surrounding terrain, plus some artistic choices. Other than that all of the assets were available online and downloaded.

In this learning process did realize that a third party program like Blender is required for modeling. I’m using Blender and am currently working through this tutorial:

 

[Herbert123]

In this learning process did realize that a third party program like Blender or Unity is required for modeling.

Unity is not a 3D modeling program - as a matter of fact, it is Unreal's main competitor on the market, i.e. it is also a 3D game engine.

Blender, Houdini, Cinema4D, Maya, 3DSMax, Modo - those would be 3d creation applications.

Very good looking work for your first dabbling in 3d!

 

[Huntn]

Unity is not a 3D modeling program - as a matter of fact, it is Unreal's main competitor on the market, i.e. it is also a 3D game engine.

Blender, Houdini, Cinema4D, Maya, 3DSMax, Modo - those would be 3d creation applications.

Very good looking work for your first dabbling in 3d!

Sorry brain fart, will correct.

 

[Huntn]

Currently getting myself up to speed with Blender using the previously mentioned tutorial Day 1, onto Day2.

Is anyone familiar with Z Brush? I’m wondering what it can do that Blender does not. It’s not an inexpensive program.

​

 

[Herbert123]

Zbrush specializes in 3D sculpting. Unless you require a very high end 3d sculpting solution, Blender's sculpting tools are more than enough, and actually compare quite favourably with Zbrush. Blender's sculpting tools are receiving additional improvements this year.

The main difference is that ZBrush can handle much higher resolution and detailed details while sculpting, because it uses a very different screen technology to pull that off. In Blender you'd have to implement workarounds to do so.

But again, before you hit that ceiling you'd have to be a quite high level sculpting artist focusing on extreme details and realism.

Also, you require a decent graphics tablet with pen for this workflow - forget about 3d sculpting if you do not own a graphics tablet or a pen display. it's like drawing with a mouse. Good for basic deformations, though. For example, that building you modeled can be easily aged by using the sculpt tools in Blender. A sagging roof, one wall that leans... Fun to do.

 

[Huntn]

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? 🤔

 

[Herbert123]

Are materials even compatible between Blender and UE? 🤔

Sure, as long as you stick to a PBR material workflow.

 

[Huntn]

Sure, as long as you stick to a PBR material workflow.

I don’t understand how that is possible, UE materials are UE programming. Does Blender have equivalent programing? In may have, but there would not be a direct correlation without starting from scratch and rebuilding an equivalent function in the opposite program, yes?

 

[Huntn]

@Herbert123 since my last post I‘ve finally recognized that for modeling, and even for landscapes for UE projects, that the textures if you are creating them will be created somewhere outside of UE. 🤔

 

[Herbert123]

Ah, now I understand your previous question(s)!

Compare to (for example) InDesign: Photoshop (or another image editor) is used to edit photos and prepared for import into InDesign, Illustrator is used to draw illustrative elements, and a text processor (like LibreOffice Writer or Word) is used to write and edit the text.

These assets are then imported and placed in a layout in InDesign, and the finally printed.

Unreal is a game authoring and development environment. Godot and Unity are similar game dev environments. Original assets are created in external apps and NOT in Unreal, Unity, or Godot themselves:

• 3d models are built in a DCC such as Blender, Maya, Max, C4D, Houdini, and ZBrush/3DCoat, etcetera.
• textures (bitmaps) are prepared via an image editor and/or a material maker like Substance Designer and/or a DCC's built-in texture painting/baking functionality, and/or a 3d painting app like 3DCoat, Substance Painter, ArmorPaint, and other texturing apps like Quixel...
• Animations for characters and creatures are generally animated in the DCC as well.
• textures are combined in the DCC via a PBR workflow and prepared for export to the game engine
• Visual effects (Explosions) may be prepared in other 3d party software such as EmberGen or Houdini
• Sound FX and music are created in music and audio editing software

...and more. Unreal is like InDesign, but the output is not a printed product, but an interactive 3d (or 2d) game or environment that is displayed in real-time, but nowadays Unreal is also used for rendering non-interactive sequences for film.

Nowadays it is not necessary to create all assets by yourself: libraries of 3d content, both paid and free, provide access to a huge inventory of 3d content. The company behind Unreal provides a lot of content that can be imported immediately into Unreal engine.

 

[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. 😀

​

 

[Huntn]

Regarding 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 from scratch starting with an image, and then generating specific maps like base color, normal, roughness, etc. But instead of continuing this at this point, 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, possibly Mixer and put it together there. But I don’t have to learn this right now. 😀

So 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. 🙂

 

[Huntn]

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.

 

[Huntn]

Post Edited See End
I was hoping someone could give me advice regarding photo editing. In this case it would be a .jpg texture I am hoping to use in an Unreal Engine project.

I'm working on a project with a landscape material, composed of multiple textures and can be painted onto the land. There is one texture I really want to use it's a Rooty ground texture I used back when I was working my first project calledForest 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 original Albedo.jpg image it does not look as nearly as dark.

So I've tried playing with the material. This particular Unreal Engine 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.

Regarding Affinity Photo, I can buy full fledged phot editing program for $54 or I can buy a Photoshop Elements upgrade for $79. Affinity seems to be well regarded. Opinions?

Any way regarding this texture, I figured it would help to seek advice here. 😀 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. I'm thinking it might be better to isolate the elements, the greens, the dirt, and the roots, and edit them all seperately?

Please take a look and tell me what you think. These are 2k.jpg images.

original (megascans designator: tb3hfg2g_2K_Albedo.jpg )

My edits so far. 😕​

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.

Any advice would be appreaciated! 🙂

Update:
I went back and looked at the original application, and it illustrates how your memory does not always server you well.

The dirt is a medium gray with grayish roots. Grass has been painted in around the roots.
There are seperate twigs scattered in this area too.​

This is now my goal, and I'm wondering the best way to alter the texture to achieve this. Thanks!

 

[organicCPU]

Regarding Affinity Photo, I can buy full fledged phot editing program for $54 or I can buy a Photoshop Elements upgrade for $79. Affinity seems to be well regarded. Opinions?

Although I really like Affinity Photo, I still prefer Adobe Photoshop (not Elements) for image editing. I think the main cause is, that I use it for so many years and I rarely find the time to get more comfortable with Affinity Photo. I can recommend all Affinity apps, they´re the tools, I´d definitely use on a new Mac. If you´re planning to buy Affinity Photo, there will soon be a new major version on the 9th of November 2022. They´ll probably have introduction pricing and if not, wait for Black Friday at the end of the month.

I'm thinking it might be better to isolate the elements, the greens, the dirt, and the roots, and edit them all seperately?

I think that's not necessary, as image editing should be powerful enough to get the edit done on a single layer. As there is no absolut right way of doing things, it finally depends on your opinions and preferences of what is a good result. I did 3 fast edits. None is perfect but shows different directions of what could be done.

You could use Gimp or Krita for your editing. Another free option is NIK Collection 1.2.1. I´ve attached a 20 seconds edit of your image with NIK Viveza.

Here another example of a one minute edit in a software called Luminar Neo that is a bit over edited in my opinion, but it goes slightly more in the direction of what people nowadays do with Instagram filters:

Finally an example of mainly auto color, contrast, tonality and increased clarity in Affinity Photo:

I guess with compositing in Unreal, you'll make bump and diffusion maps for oversampling to get a better 3d look and feel. There is a really old Blender centric tutorial that shows how to make textures look more real. Maybe you like it too:

The Secrets of Realistic Texturing — Blender Guru

Discover the secrets to creating realistic textures in blender.

www.blenderguru.com

For the bump maps I tried to create so far, I've been using CrazyBump that unfortunately never left Beta state:

CrazyBump

crazybump.com

Besides creating the proper overlays, color management is another important thing to think about, if it comes to 3d:

The Secret Ingredient to Photorealism — Blender Guru

You may not know what it is or how it affects your render, but it's actually the reason that some renders still look distinctly fake despite having proper modelling and materials. Not only that but it's also been causing you to make lighting "cheats" to make your scene work.

www.blenderguru.com