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Create a Photoreal Beach in Unreal Engine (in 15 minutes)

Mar 26, 2024
In the morning, my name is Clinton Jones and I love creating

photoreal

istic 3D environments. I am inspired by the places I have been around the world and the experiences I have had that shaped me as an artist. Recreating personal memories allows me to not only revisit them. memories and feelings, but most importantly they offer a unique and personal angle to

create

my art. It's almost a shortcut to developing your artistic style and voice, so in this video I'd love to show you how I'm using 3D software to bring my latest journey to life in the hopes of inspiring you to

create

your own unique experiences and since creating quickly is so important today, I want to show you how I'm creating these speed environments in one day.
create a photoreal beach in unreal engine in 15 minutes
Shout out to Aces for sponsoring this video, stick around to learn all about the Arts Studio Book Pro OLED laptop and how it can keep you creative on the go. If we are going to create this scene quickly, it is crucial. We gathered the correct reference a few months ago. We attended the third annual Mograph Camp, an annual multi-day gathering where 3D artists, educators and industry professionals get away from their computers and into nature to learn, laugh and relax together as friends and family, as the camp It took place on the

beach

this year, we gathered on the warm sand to experience a glorious sunset together every night.
create a photoreal beach in unreal engine in 15 minutes

More Interesting Facts About,

create a photoreal beach in unreal engine in 15 minutes...

The images and videos of this triple act as my creative cheat sheet and give me everything I need to fill our scene of sentimental details. I will start creating any powerful free program called Unreal Engine. 5. You can download the software in the description along with other useful tools and resources, but I will start with the game project file in a blank scene with RTX enabled for browsing. We can hold the right button and use was and D. The q and E keys to raise and lower the crane and the slider at the top right will control the sensitivity of the camera with a selected object.
create a photoreal beach in unreal engine in 15 minutes
Space bar. Cycles between position rotation and widget scale control. The inverted key will toggle between local and global orientation. F will snap its viewport to any selected object. and the G key will show or hide the viewport icons, but where do we start? First I want to lay out the main components of our scene, mainly the ocean, the pier and our sky, as well as the angle of our camera Now, if you've been watching my videos for a while, you know, what I want is to get to the overall vibrate as quickly as possible so we can spend time on the details later, so let's sketch out our scene by adding an ocean, first making sure the water connector is enabled and first create a landscape object for our ocean to live in, let's change to the landscape panel and let's create a landscape and look for the ocean in the location actors window, which is where you can create lights, cameras, volumes and various other objects like water and drag. in our scene, but for now let's fix the next most important element, the lighting.
create a photoreal beach in unreal engine in 15 minutes
Now you can use the default lighting setting to

unreal

, but I'm using a plugin called Ultra Dynamic Sky. It's incredibly versatile and extremely easy to use, so let's adjust the volumetric cloud amount, time of day slider, and fog amount to bring our lighting up to the 90 mark to add rays of light. I'll look for them in the details panel, turn the light axis slider to make sure the effect is working and then dial it back for a subtle look, we can adjust our solar radius for a more dramatic effect, modify the saturation of the sky and general intensity if necessary now let's add our main theme next to the old wooden pier, since speed is my main goal.
I am using this resource pack in epic games. Marketplace and kit hit the dock based on my reference images of the camera to make final adjustments easier. I'll select each document asset and press Ctrl G to group them and now that we have a subject, we can finally set up our camera looking for cinema. camera in place actors window by dragging it out right clicking and selecting pilot camera choose your favorite aspect ratio lock the camera focus on the dock and align your shot remember it's a waste of time working on things the camera doesn't You can see, so it is crucial to set our camera angle from the beginning to further focus our creative efforts and since I want to export an animated scene and make sure my camera stays fixed in this position, I need to create a timeline or a sequence, as Unreal Engine is called. let's drag our camera in and add keyframes to the position and rotation to make sure it's locked in place and in case we move it, it will automatically move back.
Don't forget to set your frame rate to 24 to get that nice cinematic look and set your preferred timeline length and to finally lock in our look I'll create a post processing volume from the actors window which can be used to control the overall look of your scene, just be sure to search for Unbound and check Infinite Stretch now I like to make subtle color changes gamma adjustments add vignette and film grain as well as control or render settings like changing our reflection from Lumen to Ray Trace which is crucial for a scene like this now. I'd consider it around a full 80, overall I'm happy with our lighting and composition camera and we got here in no time, so let's move on to the next most important element: the crowd at the top of Our Terrace using maximo, a character library free animations from Adobe.
I can take a handful of different characters performing different actions by dragging the characters into the sequencer and selecting their animation, you can drag their controllers for one character in infinite loop and since we are dealing with silhouettes of people from a distance you will never notice the duplicate characters that They fill this dock. Now for my favorite part, adding the custom details that will make this scene special and specific to the time we all spent together in Silver Beach, Virginia. It's the story element that makes your art meaningful, so I'll break down each added element in order of importance. to the piece that starts with this tower that was so unique to this location, so let's equip one with Bash from the assets I found on cgtrader.com and publish it.
I don't even need to texture it since it's only visible in silhouette and to connect. This Tower to the rest of our scene I will add another one in the distance and a smaller antenna connected to our dock is what turns it from a recreation to an artistic interpretation. I did the same with both pieces of Referenced Art from my travels to Newfoundland, Canada, but now the image looks empty on the right side, so I made this old fishing net in Cinema 4D by blocking the vertices of a swept slot and enabling dynamics of the rope from there.
I made this low poly seaweed piece. and cloned it through an identical slot a few meters higher with a cloning object and a random effector. I gave the seaweed a cloth tag and pressed play, the dynamic rope catches some of the seaweed on its way down, giving us the perfect look, just add some bamboo supports. from the mega scan library that comes free with Unreal 5 and we're starting to balance things out in Cinema 4D. I'll quickly model a buoy, duplicate it in our middle ground, and subtly animate it up and down in the sequencer to fake that roll. on the surface of the watery appearance, as I know, I will create a night version of this scene, which I will explain to you soon.
I'll create some string lights to attract the AI ​​to our dock in c4d. I will use the same. Dynamic spline technique on a swept spline to set up our lights, model a basic light bulb and use a cloner set to object mode to duplicate it in our scene. I'll export an fbx and return it to

unreal

, making sure to uncheck the combined meshes that way. I can only turn on the light bulbs and for the final touch during our last sunset together at Camp Mograph, we experienced this special moment. The timing was perfect and I had to add it, so I modeled a low poly kayak in the cinema, animated the paddles with grayscale.
The gorilla signal plugin that gives you full loop control over any attribute from there. I created a basic character in Das 3D. A free character generator software built it into c4d. Auto kitted him out using the Daz importer and I animated his hands to match the paddles. I baked the A single loop into an Olympic file made it unrealistic as a geometry cache and animated the loop through the Horizon with a sequencer. Now I love taking my hobbies everywhere and when it comes to 3D art and video production, the Asus Pro Art Studio Book Pro.
The OLED laptop has me covered and is packed with hardware to make it possible to create scenes like is from anywhere in the world. Firstly, it is equipped with a gorgeous 16-inch color-accurate 4K OLED display that ensures true black values ​​and the perfect precision we need when dialing. Our skin comes loaded with an Intel I9 processor, an Nvidia RTX A3000 with 12 gigabytes of vram, and a flexible memory configuration with up to 64 gigabytes of physical RAM. It also ships with a 4 terabyte SSD drive for fast file transfer and storage for all your apps now a really cool feature that I like about this Pro art laptop is the Asus dial which allows you to control things like brightness and volume on the fly, but also allows mapping custom inputs like brush size saturation or layer opacity enabled by the Pro Art Creator Hub. you customize the performance color screen calibration and dial settings Asus, the laptop has been fantastic for my 3D workflow for creativity on the go and is a wonderful pro-level laptop for any creator, so if you are interested in trying asus pro art laptop for your creativity on the go, 3d modeling video production, click that link in the description, it really helps me, thanks for your time everyone, let's get back to art , so why stop just with the sunset scene?
Let's have fun and experiment to see. how far we can actually take our scene for the night version is almost as easy as moving the time of day slider until we see the moon and can mark its position with the moon shift settings increasing the moon radius just a little mess with the moon phase to get that written look and adjust the brightness of the texture to make it a little brighter. Now it is very important that you give yourself time to explore the different settings, as you never know what you will find and where your art may go.
Let's light up our dock, since we added those string lights earlier, I'll apply this instance of basic emissive material to our light bulbs, but this isn't enough, the emissive lights don't actually illuminate our dock, so I'll create a rectangular light from our spot. The actor window adjusts its size and places it right above our string lights, but I want to see the shape of the light in the fog and the only way to get that look is to make sure our fog within the ultra dynamic sky is set in volumetric only then. Can we increase the volumetric intensity on our recording light settings to see our volumetric light axes?
Let's create a basic sphere from the actors' window spot, add a red emitting light and place them on top of each antenna for a touch of sweet detail and that completes our night. version, but how about a very foggy version? Years ago I explored Mount Wilson Observatory with my good young friend and when we reached the top we were greeted with an incredible view. Huge towers peeking out from the thick layer of fog. Now let's see if we can get the same look with the ultra dynamic sky selected, let's change the time of day, add some clouds and turn up the fog slider and definitely adjust its exposure if necessary, look for fog in the UDS details panel and if we increase the base fog.
The density and fog density contribution we are getting closer, but now our Tower is gone, but look at this, if we adjust the fog height fog drop slider, we will start to get the effect we are looking for, I will finally hide to everyone except one lone character now. I'm going to be honest with you. I almost couldn't figure out how to fix this ugly extra bright reflection in the water, so if you have the same problem, it probably has to do with the absorption settings on the water material, so I just set the absorption to black and it fixed things , I wrote much better and with that we have completed thethree versions of our scene, but exporting them and calling it a day now would be a disservice to your time and your art would be like making a song you're proud of but not taking the time to mix it properly, so we need to make a a little grading and adding some post-processing effects to really take our art to the finish line. and I will do this with a free non-linear editor called DaVinci Resolve.
I'll start with the color grading by working on the shadows, midtones and highlight values ​​first and then another layer or node in DaVinci since it's the node. based, I'll apply any color or saturation adjustments, then create a node to add another vignette for Bloom, which really helps me highlight the platform in our night scene and don't forget to blur your CG Just a Touch renders because perfectly sharp images really they don't exist and finally I'll add the film grain at the end on top of everything else. You can use DaVinci's built-in grain, but I like to use grain from a package called Gorilla Grain set to Overlay for best results.
After adding a bit of music with Paul Stretch and Ableton Live, our unique and personal environment is complete this evening. If you want to follow this tutorial step by step, that's great, it's what we all have to do to learn these programs, but I encourage you to use them too. Your travels and personal experiences as a starting point to push yourself really helped me find my style and I hope it helps you too. This is the first video in a small series of speed environment breakdowns, so feel free to subscribe so you don't miss out. Those, as well as my next big community challenge in February 2023.
My name is Clinton Jones, keep learning, keep growing and I'll see you soon.

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