Graphic Design using Unreal Engine

[Huntn]

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 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.
View attachment 2108656

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:
View attachment 2108685

Finally an example of mainly auto color, contrast, tonality and increased clarity in Affinity Photo:
View attachment 2108688

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

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

Thanks for this helpful post about editing.

Since making the post, I've discovered that the issue with this particular texture seems to lay in the Unreal Engine Material I'm using, so darkening the base color map, did not resolve the issue in play mode in Unreal Engine. It's still extremely light, bleached out looking, and there is a good chance, there is something I've overlooked or missed that is causing the issue for this particular texture.

If your not familiar with UE, (likely you are, but I'll mention it for anyone who is not) the materials in UE are GUI interface coding, that usually starts with the texture and manipulates it, putting different effects upon it, and usually for 1 texture, there are multiple texture maps that supply data to the material so it knows how to create different effects such as a grayscale height map, that would make a walkway with flagstone and mortar, have the visual effect that the mortar not only looks lower, but allows an additional effect to be painted in the cracks like moss.

 

[organicCPU]

Since making the post, I've discovered that the issue with this particular texture seems to lay in the Unreal Engine Material I'm using, so darkening the base color map, did not resolve the issue in play mode in Unreal Engine. It's still extremely light, bleached out looking, and there is a good chance, there is something I've overlooked or missed that is causing the issue for this particular texture.

There can be many pitfalls with textures. Although I'm not familiar with UE, I know the similar and also node based design setup in Blender a bit. Maybe the particular texture had wrong setting in Texture Asset Editor during import. I'm not sure if your posted texture was decreased in pixel size by the MR forum, but it should have had 2048 x 2048 px not 2000 x 2000 px.
As you can read in the UE manual:

Power of two values can be mipmapped and streamed. Non-power of two sizes are never streamed and do not generate mipmaps.

 

[lina146]

Recently, I researched UE and Unity. Unreal appears to be the more powerful and reliable engine, but I chose Unity because it is based on C# rather than C++ and because its licencing programme worked better for me if I ever wanted to sell my games (free to develop and sell games up to a certain amount of revenue). However, this may not matter if all you are doing is working on personal or private projects.

Unless you use assets created by others, you might need to create your own assets, such as models and textures. Sound, perhaps, although you could probably just utilise free stock noises. Using other people's assets has only one significant drawback: inconsistent use.

 

[Huntn]

Been working on a big tree:

Rough image​

A Nature Procedural Pack, found in the Epic Market Place 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.

 

[Huntn]

I've decided that although the tree in the previous post 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 forests, 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!

 

[mjawadjoiya]

Unreal Engine is a powerful game engine that can be used for creating interactive 3D content, including graphics, animations, and visual effects. It is often used in the development of video games, but it can also be used for creating non-game applications such as architectural visualizations and product demonstrations.

To use Unreal Engine for graphic design, you will need to have some experience with 3D modeling and animation, as well as a good understanding of the engine's workflow and user interface. You will also need a computer with a powerful processor and graphics card to handle the demands of working with 3D graphics.

There are many tutorials and online resources available to help you get started with using Unreal Engine for graphic design. Some things you might want to learn about include creating and texturing 3D models, animating objects and characters, and using the engine's visual effects tools to create special effects such as particle systems and lighting.

Overall, Unreal Engine can be a powerful tool for creating high-quality 3D graphics and visual effects, but it requires a certain level of technical expertise and a willingness to learn. If you're interested in using the engine for graphic design, it's a good idea to start by familiarizing yourself with the basics and then building up your skills over time.

 

[Huntn]

Unreal Engine is a powerful game engine that can be used for creating interactive 3D content, including graphics, animations, and visual effects. It is often used in the development of video games, but it can also be used for creating non-game applications such as architectural visualizations and product demonstrations.

To use Unreal Engine for graphic design, you will need to have some experience with 3D modeling and animation, as well as a good understanding of the engine's workflow and user interface. You will also need a computer with a powerful processor and graphics card to handle the demands of working with 3D graphics.

There are many tutorials and online resources available to help you get started with using Unreal Engine for graphic design. Some things you might want to learn about include creating and texturing 3D models, animating objects and characters, and using the engine's visual effects tools to create special effects such as particle systems and lighting.

Overall, Unreal Engine can be a powerful tool for creating high-quality 3D graphics and visual effects, but it requires a certain level of technical expertise and a willingness to learn. If you're interested in using the engine for graphic design, it's a good idea to start by familiarizing yourself with the basics and then building up your skills over time.

When I created my first Unreal Project, more or less a tech demo I followed the Create this Forest Scene in 1 hour in one of the first posts in this thread, I remember thinking this is not so hard. But what I soon realized it was a case of the more you know, the more you realize you don’t know.

What a journey, I’ve finally settled on an auto material because it does a great job of blending textures on the sides of mountains, and I finally figured out how this is accomplished in the material. And even when using the auto material, you have the ability to manually edit the textures so this is a win win for me.

And for awhile I was convinced I was going to go with procedural foliage, but after playing with and thinking about it, I’ve decided that my scene is small enough, I’d be better served by manual painting foliage with the Foliage Tool. Wether it’s procedural or painted, when turned into instances, it makes less computational work for the engine.

After a year messing with landscape materials, I’ve actually started placing assets in my project. Keep in mind regarding the length of time, this has been my casual project, not treating it like a job.

 

[Huntn]

This is what excites me regarding UE5 landscapes. These are the Megascan Trees that are in beta. Here is a tutorial that does not need to be watched, unless you want to see how the controls work.

I don't want my landscapes to look cartoony but like this:

 

[lostPod]

I love the posts! Please keep them coming!!

 

[Huntn]

I love the posts! Please keep them coming!!

Here ya go:
OK, I seem to have gotten though my Runtime Virtual Texture crisis, tomorrow I'll configure another rock and some trees, then I'll be convinced I'm beyond the issue . I found my big Oak trophy tree in a project at Epic that was inexpensive. Playing around with a practice run of applying some instanced Aspen Trees. In game, all the leaves are waving.

This is just one tree, rotated and scaled to different sizes. When I start applying them for real there will probably7-10 different trees, but you can see what rotation and scaling does to make it look a bit different.

 

[Huntn]

I'm getting to a point in my landscape project where I want to work on a stream going through my woods, so I found this UE4 tutorial, it starts basic and although it is somewhat of a repeat at the beginning, but he will move into water and it seems I'm always learning something new.
Ben Cloward- Building Worlds Series: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL78XDi0TS4lHwqv_PmXAdedT2SH1qeRqK

Now this was done in UE4 and UE5 handles LODs (how detail is removed from models as camera distance from an asset becomes greater, but I increased the density of the landscape close up and I'm seeing more smoother detail, and virtually no drop in FPS when looking at it in runtime.