Hello everyone
Unreal Engine Third Party Solution
Introduction and use's lecturer
Sangmyeong University Professor Cho Ok-hee
This time
A library concept containing a wide variety of sources
in Unreal
I will introduce Quixel Megascans
And talk about its use
Now, say that you want to make an asset
of that plant on screen right now
You could use it for a video game
or a simulation program
In those situations, you might need to insert a paused cut
In that situation, do you really have to model
every single plant yourself?
I want you to think about that for a moment
before starting this lesson
Making a realistic-looking leaf
or a few bamboo leaves
is no problem at all using modeling
But think about when you need
ultra-realistic assets like that plant,
how you could render something like that
whether there is a way to gain access such assets
without modeling them yourself
or spending too much money
That is what I want you to think about
So there are multiple websites
that have a large library of assets
If you have ever used assets
that you took from such online libraries
comparing those with Megascans may also be a good thing to try
Websites like those
usually have a lot of 3D-modeled characters
objects, or furniture
rather than assets created from scanning
And they are usually not free
So if you wanted to make a nice forest or flowerbed
or a garden, or anything else using these kinds of assets
Think about how you could make that happen
And now we will start the lesson
What we will learn today
can be put largely into four parts
First, what is Quixel Megascans?
I will give you a brief introduction about that
Next, how to install Quixel Bridge
and how to use it
How you can connect it to Unreal Engine
I will give you an introduction about those
Then we will learn about the concept of LOD
LOD is very important when developing games
and it is also important when using detailed assets
Of course it is also important in VR
And if you have played a lot of video games
or studied game development
you will have heard a lot about it
The quality of models in a 3D environment
is a core concept of modeling
The more detail a model has
The number of polygons will of course increase
When modeling something with a curve, like this
In order to make this curved line
There have to be a large number of smaller straight lines that make it up
But if you don't need it to be detailed
It could just go like this
So when an object is close up to the camera
it should be shown in high-polygon
with a huge number of faces and lines making it up
I think a good example to help you understand
would be a zombie
Zombies have complicated designs for their clothes and faces
They have wounds on their faces and their hair is all tangled up
If a character with a complex design like that is right in front of the camera
It could be a first person game, or virtual reality
When the zombie is right in front of the camera
it should be shown in very high polygons
But when it is not in front of the camera
and it's part of a horde of hundreds or thousands of zombies
coming from afar
You don't pay attention to individual zombies
So they don't really need to be in high polygons
You can set the quality to automatically change
depending on the distance the object is at
From the camera to up to here, it should be in high polygons
If it's slightly farther away from the camera, it should have a moderate number of polygons
If it's even farther away
Then it can be shown in way less polygons
This is what we call LOD(Level Of Detail)
So many programs for game development
use level of detail
to up the performance of games
So LOD we will also take a look at
and we will also learn about
optimizing the Material itself
And also, even if you don't do the modeling yourself
and even if you don't own many assets
you can use these Megascans resources
to create and complete various level designs
You will also learn about that
What's important is that when I say level
I think you will all think of
different meanings of the word level
Leveling up your character in a video game
You might have thought of that
Or you could say
"This is a difficult map, for high-level players!"
But 'level' in Unreal means a single scene
So 'New Level' in Unreal means 'New Scene'
and levels are units for
separate operating files
What is Quixel Megascans?
So, first let's take a more detailed look
at Quixel Megascans
What you are looking at now
is the screen for Quixel Megascans, or Quixel Bridge
Sometimes it's simply called Bridge
Some people prefer to call it Quixel Bridge
or just Megascans
But the exact name of this software
is Quixel Megascans
The 'scans' in Megascans is the same meaning as
the word you are thinking of, as in scanning objects
And 'mega-' means that something is very large
If you go into Megascans
and look at the available assets
you will see that they are very high-polygon
In fact, many of the assets
look beyond high-polygon
and just look as if they were 3D-scanned objects
A large portion of them are in fact
assets created by 3D scanning
I would say most of the high-quality assets are scans
And you can get surface Textures as well as models
if you go to the Surfaces menu
These are not the quality
of Materials we normally talk about in Unreal
There are very, very high-quality Materials here as well
In the early versions, around 4.XX
You had to go through some complicated steps
like installing Quixel and connecting a folder
to get the Bridge icon onto Unreal
and make the process of using it smooth
But sometimes it would just not connect
and the folder would not read
But as Unreal went through more updates
Now when you install Unreal
you can see the Quixel Bridge icon
automatically pop up
even if you don't set it up in the options
Furthermore, you do not even need to click on the menu icon
Just click right and there is an option to import assets from Quixel Bridge
in the right-click menu that pops up
So nowadays it's extremely easy to import assets
Of course, you can make good games and content
even without using Quixel Bridge
Because there is such an abundance of
free and paid assets on the marketplace
If you are someone who work in 3D graphics
then of course you would have a huge source of assets
You should think of Quixel Megascans as its name implies
It is literally a library for
extremely realistic, high-quality assets
such as ones that are difficult to make, like plants or food items
Old pillars or rotten tree roots
that you could see in ancient ruins
Things like those are harder to model than even cars
It is a library for that has
even those kinds of assets
And it is especially widely used in media with a lot of 3D content
such as game & movie development, or visualizations for construction
Of course it varies by genre, but
in games where there are battles or adventures taking place
some things that are almost always there
are plants, old rocks or vines
tree roots, old trees, very large trees, things like that
And they are very hard to model
Quixel Megascans has all of those
hard to create assets
Everything can be found there, really
There is also a lot of stuff like modern furniture
Now, the word Quixel
If you are someone interested in Unreal
you will have at least heard of it
even if you haven't tried importing from it
As you can see on the screen right now
it has many modern-style objects as well
Because Quixel is so often used
as a source for plants, trees, and rocks
you might think it doesn't have much else
But there are plain wooden boxes
bombs, pillars, structures, marble pedestals
leather gloves, these are all in Quixel
And there are many food assets as well
Objects that can be used for more modern settings
are also in Quixel
If you are not a Unreal user right now
and you do not have it installed
you can take a look by simply going to the homepage
Go to quixel.com/megascans
and you can see all the assets available
Quixel has its headquarters in Sweden
And as you might know, Epic Games owns Unreal
You turn on the Epic Games launcher and start Unreal from there
Like how Unreal Engines is owned by Epic Games,
Epic Games has also bought Quixel
So now, when you turn on Unreal and click on an icon
you can access Quixel just like that
Now, the next page has objects from nature
Beforehand I showed you more modern objects
such as wooden boxes, on purpose
What I am showing you on screen right now is
very natural objects, they're rocks
But they are not just rocks
These are very difficult to create by modeling
Characters you can create more easily
But the rocks are actually harder to make
Many of the assets like these are made from scanning
And more importantly, these mossy rocks
are basically impossible to model
Quixel has so many of those assets
And this is how I use assets from Quixel
I flatten one of those mossy rocks a bit
And enlarge them to a huge scale
To be as tall as a 10-story building, compared to the characters
If you make them that large
they look like mountains or cliffs
Of course you can use them as they are, but natural assets like those
One of the greatest advantages of Quixel is that
it is so high resolution
When you download assets, there is an option to change the resolution
from low to high, or even 2K or 4K
such that even if you enlarge a rock to the size of a building
it won't end up looking all murky, and you can use them as cliffs
That is how high quality the assets are
So when you are downloading
if the asset is just going to be a rock on the ground
you can download it as low resolution
If you want to enlarge it
and use it as a structure
like a mountain or cliff
then it would be a good idea to download in higher resolution
because that way the rock will have all the details like the moss growing on it
Obviously, when you get an asset from Quixel
it has all the Materials as well
All the information about its color and texture
Because these are high quality assets
If you take a look at the structure graph
it looks very complex
You can often see tens of nodes connected
in the graphs
Now, I told you the library has thousands of
high-quality Textures, Materials, and 3D objects, including food
all shot and scanned from the environment by people
You can see how the food looks like
just by going to the website
without importing the assets
And if you go to the Food category and look at the assets
they look so high quality
that you can really feel at a glance
that they were 3D scanned
The objects in this library reflect
the environments and materials around us in the real world
And using them we can render more realistic
and immersive 3D environments
For example, when creating a background for a game
A lot of adventure games
have ancient ruins as a background
For example, Tomb Raider
So there are a lot of adventure games like that
Environments like ancient ruins
will vary greatly in their immersiveness
depending on how realistic they are
But if you put a few assets from Quixel there
you can make it really feel like it's hundreds of years old
And you can modify the asset to
make it look more mossy
or put some mold on it
It's easy to make those kinds of changes as well
When creating ruins or natural spaces
of course there is the marketplace
but to that type of work Megascans is nowadays truly essential
So, as soon as you turn on Quixel
The interface will pop up like this
Because people usually work with two monitors
some people keep the interface on one monitor
And work while browsing all the categories
Or you can bring it up and take a look
then go back to working on Unreal
and take a look at Quixel again
Some people prefer to work that way
These are the major categories
First there is Home, then Collections, then MetaHumans
MetaHumans we will take a look at later
Then Favorites, which is the assets you Favorited
Local is what you have downloaded right now
So the Home has five categories
Let's take a look at them
The ones you will use often
Those four categories
are the ones you should pay close attention to
The first is 3D Assets
There are a large variety of things here
There are desks, walls,
so many assets that
you could never scroll all the way to the bottom
The difference between the assets here
and the ones you get on the marketplace
is that the ones here are more suited for modern settings
But video games nowadays
are mostly made to look realistic
so if you need realistic assets for a modern setting
you will find everything you need here
In contrast, the marketplace has a more cartoonish feeling
I would say the assets are more 'game-like'
And there are graphic assets in various styles
But Quixel has the realistic assets
You should remember that difference
And 3D Plants has things like wildflowers, flowers, bushes
rotten tree roots, logs,
All of the plants that you can think of
are here in this category
And so what is so nice about the 3D Plants category
is that for example, if you look at a set of flowers
there would not be just a single nice flower
there would be a set of pretty flowers
and another would have ones with more leaves, another would have less
Ones with multiple blossoms, ones with one blossom
There are so many options
that you can just use multiple sets
and you will get a real-looking garden or flowerbed
that you would see in real life
You don't get a single asset
you get a set of assets
that are similar and go together
That is the prime feature of 3D Plants
And next is Surfaces
This category is about Materials
There are metal Textures, or soil Textures
Sand Textures, a large variety of them
The one that I personally used the most
Creating terrain itself is very simple
You go into Landscape mode in Unreal
and just use some brushes, then
you get a terrain with a natural curve shape
One of the surfaces here is
a Texture that looks like the beach on Boracay island
It's a sandy floor with footprints in it
so it looks like tourists passed by and stepped on it
And if you just apply that texture
to a piece of normal, flat land
in a flash it turns into a realistic
Southeast-Asian beach
And because it becomes a Normal Map
depending on where the lighting is place
all of the shading on the ground changes
So there are high quality surface Materials
in Megascans as well
Next, Decals are a kind of
very fun concept in Unreal
Say that you've finished setting up a building
but you want to make just a part of it look rusty
you just have to spray on there
a paint with a rusty feeling
That is kind of how Decals works
So Decals is a very unique concept
You could call it a projector
that you point on a specific area
So if you want some smears of blood
over this area, and nowhere else
If you search for 'blood' in the Decals category
there are a variety of blood decals
Most of them are for games
where there is combat or shooting
If you're developing something like that
you don't have to get expensive assets
Just search 'blood' in Decals in Quixel
and find the kind of asset you are looking for
then just put it on the wall or floor in the right angle
and the effects will appear there
as if the frames are synced
So Decals is also a very smooth system
that is convenient to use
And next, MetaHumans
is something Unreal put a lot of effort into promoting
when digital humans, or digital celebrities
were making headlines
they had tried to push it a lot
You may have misunderstood MetaHumans
as something Unreal made themselves
but before importing MetaHumans itself
you have to work on it on Quixel, so on the web
Managing MetaHumans you have made before
is also done all through Quixel
So Quixel has the MetaHumans menu
and it isn't exactly true that Unreal has MetaHumans
It is a system that you access through Quixel
and you can also use it in Unreal
You can just modify one of the presets
or you can make one yourself
So then, what is the most important thing when working on MetaHumans?
Because it is a very high-quality asset
Before you import, there should be no problem
But while you are importing a MetaHuman
you should be on a very fast internet connection
You should keep that in mind
Some assets take over 10 minutes
just to download
Now let's take a closer look at the Quixel website
On the left is the list I explained earlier
On this screen right now
I have selected a specific asset
Below that one you can see
bundles of 2~3 assets
and the one I have selected right now
is a bundle of 7~8 assets
They are all similar-looking shrubs
that look kind of like vines that might grow on the ground
They are all slightly different
and they make up a set of assets
So this is how you view the assets
You don't have to download them to take a look
becuase there is a large preview screen on the right
so that you can get a feeling of how it looks
And below the preview screen
is a small box that says "Low Quality"
and next to it is a light green button
that says "Download"
So here are the buttons
If you click on the box that says "Low Quality"
there are a lot of options
There's high quality
and the options you get do vary by the type of asset
Some don't have medium quality
and just go straight to high quality
Some assets have 2K and 4K, some don't
They are all different, but what's important is
that if you are going to use the asset in a small size
then Low Quality - which is actually not even that low quality
because assets in Quixel Bridge are so high resolution
even in Low Quality - should be enough
But if you are going to enlarge this asset
then you should probably download the High Quality version
You'll know if you try downloading in Low Quality
that this is high quality enough
because a lot of the assets are 3D scanned
And when the download is finished
the light green circle will look like this
And then the Add button can be clicked
If you click on the Add button
Into the folder of the Unreal project
that you right-clicked and opened Quixel in
the asset will be imported
But anyway, the Quixel assets are high-quality
So are the ones
that you can find on the marketplace
some have a file size of 10GB or many times more than that
but because the assets here are just as high quality
you need a pretty fast internet connection to download
I need to remind you again about that
So, you click Add
And when you do, even if you didn't
make a separate Megascans folder
If you import after clicking Add
a Megascans folder will be created automatically
And it will also organize the assets for you
according to their categories
So a 3D Plants folder automatically forms
and inside it will be a file
with the name of the file you added and imported
So if you open this folder
all of the assets will show up in a list
Whatever it is you imported, even MetaHumans,
All of the assets you got from Quixel
will stack automatically
by category in the Megascans folder
That will be helpful to remember
And you don't usually have just one project on your computer
Usually you would have multiple projects at once
and there would be Megascans files
that you used in a specific project
but then your internet went down while you were working on a new project
In that case, all of the Megascans files that you used in other projects
still all exist as files
so you can copy the entire folder
and import it any time
This is a very important concept
Especially assets that you got from the web
that took a long time to download
if you already have them in another project's folder
then obviously just copying files from there
would save a lot of hassle
But because Unreal is kind of finicky
When bringing files from another folder
you should just turn off Unreal and in your computer
copy the files from
the project folder
Because if you move the assets from folder to folder
while Unreal is still on
sometimes an import error might occur
So please keep that in mind
So now, the moment you click Add
all of the assets in Quixel Bridge
will be brought to Unreal
Also keep in mind
that this will take some time
Like I said earlier,
some larger files will be 10GB or bigger
So you have to check if there is space your hard drive first
Unless if you set it up to do otherwise
these Unreal projects will build up files
in the Unreal project folders in your documents
In my case
I usually have a separate, large hard drive
and form my projects in there
and the assets for those projects
will also be saved in the drive
And as well as checking
for space in your hard drive
your computer itself
if you are using Unreal,
you should make sure your computer
also has a bit more free space
before you start working
You can see that there are neatly organized folders on the left
And if I open one of the lower ones
Beforehand, on Quixel Bridge
you could only see the single large preview
But after importing onto Unreal
you can see the individual assets like so
those round-shaped assets are Materials
Of course, Materials also will be made of
jpg type assets
So down here are the asset files
and Texture files
and you can click on individual ones
drag them onto the scene
and use them immediately
So if you don't need any bushes
or grass fields, or forests
and you just want to take a bit of grass
to use them as interior decorations
Just click and drag them
into the scene
Because they are assets
of course you can also Ctrl D to copy them into the scene as well
But what is important here
is when we talk about default size in Unreal
If you take out the preset cube object
and a preset player character
and compare the assets with those
assets imported from Quixel
Are really smaller compared to the presets
Some are so small
that when you drag them right onto the scene
you just can't see them
If you zoom in by clicking F
you'll notice that it was imported successfully
but it's just very small
You can adjust their size
with the W, E, and R keys
and rotate them as well
so you should resize them
so that you can see the assets
and then start working on them
Some of the assets
are tufts of grass that are great for copying hundreds of
to make grass fields
and on the other hand, some look prettier
so much so that
you could enlarge it
to the size of a person or bigger
and use it like a tree
So with even a single asset
you can rotate it around and adjust the size
to use it in various places
so you should look for different ways to use a single asset
I will also give an explanation on foliage next
but on the screen are the assets
then the associated Textures
above them are the Materials
and on the top left, you can see a folder
called Foliage
So what is Foliage?
You *can* put down plants one by one
put some grass down here
copy it and enlarge it to use as a tree
of course you can do that, but
when working on outdoors terrain
usually in an adventure game
fields, forests, part of a mountain, ravines
You don't have enough time
to plant each blade of grass yourself, right?
In that situation, it would be better
if you could just drag the mouse where you want the plants
and they would be just planted automatically in the tens or hundreds
But they can't be copies of just one asset
All natural objects are formed randomly, that's how they are in real life
So if you see a pattern in the grass
you would then recognize it as man-made
So when using Foliage
you can of course use a single grass asset
but depending on the situation
you could also use a set of them
For example, choosing asset number 1, 5, and 8 from a set
put them in a brush, then click & drag
And they will be planted in a random fashion
And you can adjust the size as well
You can make the size uniform
or set it so that
there would be a little variance in their sizes
This kind of feature
is why we use this game engine
Because it's such a powerful feature
And you don't even have to use the assets
you can use the Textures or Materials that come with them
as if they are assets
Because high-quality assets
have to be made with high-quality Materials and Textures
those themselves can be used as assets
So, Foliage
one of Unreal Engine's most powerful features
I just gave you a short introduction of it
What I am showing you right now
is inside the Foliage folder
It looks about the same, but it's a bit different
What it does is
when using Foliage
you are telling it to use
which grass assets
so you have to put the ones you want in sort of a drawer
And here are the assets
you can use for Foliage
So Foliage assets are put in a separate folder
Of course, you can use assets other than the ones in there
but when you download from Quixel
it will organize Foliage assets neatly into a folder
so you can access them with a single click
There are many other assets as well
And you don't have to exclusively use plants
The computer or Unreal doesn't know how to tell if something is a plant
From Unreal's perspective, they're all just objects
So you could set Foliage to use something like coins
and in the corner of an island setting
put a treasure chest
and sprinkle some coins around it
by using Foliage
Just take two or three nice coin assets
and use Foliage to spread them on the floor
and in an instant
you would have a mountain of coins
Keep these kinds of tips in mind
and you will be able to create
amazing spaces using Unity
in a short time, even without a lot of learning
So, this is a scene
and I have put a plant asset on it
and it's really big
So the Gizmo
the object here, which changes shape
every time you press W, E, or R
compared to the Gizmo
you can see how enlarged that plant is
If you look closely, plants like these
are placed like an A4 piece of paper
and each of the small leaves have barely any opacity
You should think of it as
using transparency
Sometimes there are very detailed assets
that have every single leaf modeled out
But most of the more complicated and detailed plants
use transparency mapping
to make anywhere on the plant
that isn't the main bulk of the leaf
to automatically look transparent
So right now I have one of the viewports
really enlarged
depending on how I set it up
it could shake as if there were wind blowing
or I could use it as foliage
I could the same asset in Foliage
then enlarge one of the assets
adjust the size of the foliage
and use some as trees
But what is important
is that if you use a low-quality asset
and enlarge it too much
It would not look very good
But the assets on Quixel
are so high-quality
they obviously look nice as Foliage
and you will no problem
even if you enlarge them
and use them as trees
So remember that about Quixel
And obviously, I have used Unreal for years
but I couldn't possibly have used all of Quixel's assets
since there are so many of them
So try to leverage them your way
Just by importing assets from Quixel
and practicing setting them up
will really level up your Unreal skills
Usually their default sizes are tiny
And if you can't see them
you can adjust their size
And I am telling you
they are surprisingly small
especially flowers or grass
Most of the interior-related assets
like statues or walls are not that tiny
So some assets will be hard to see on the screen
when you first put them on the scene
if you want to check if the asset was actually deployed
there is a list of imports on the right of the Unreal interface
If the asset is there, it was imported, it's just to small to see
Then you just have to press F
it's a shortcut to zoom in onto the selected object
so that it fills up the entire screen
Then it will be easier
to adjust the size
that was my tip for size adjustment
Optimization through LOD and Material Parameters
Next we will take a look
at LOD settings
Now, LOD is
as I told you at the start of the lesson
an acronym for Level of Detail
When an asset
is close in front of the camera
it will automatically look extra high quality
when it is far away from the camera
it will be low polygon, low quality
LOD automatically does that
Why is this necessary?
Strictly speaking, it's not required
but it's for optimization
So as you are playing a game, you move around a lot
A monster that looks very complicated
will be in front of you as you fight it
but when it's coming toward you from far away
it looks very small
If the computer has keep doing the calculations for a high-quality model
that's a lot of wasted operating power
Instead, if you could tell the computer
to automatically change far away objects
to have lower polygons
it would be able to compute faster
So this feature is also used for animation as well
but it has a bigger impact
on optimization, when making games
more than animations
So distance from the camera is key
Why is the camera important?
Because everything we see on the monitor
is what the camera is pointing at
All 3D graphic content
has a imaginary camera in the 3D space
And rendering is done in real time
from the perspective of the selected camera
And there are many ways to optimize
depending on how you want to make objects look
when they are close up to the camera
But LOD is the most popular one
It will automatically change
back and forth high-quality and low-quality
from high polygon to low polygon
When you download assets
from the marketplace or Quixel
Some will have LOD set up
and some will not
How can you view the details
on whether or not LOD is set up or not?
Before I explain how to do that
let me tell you what the features of LOD are
So, the LOD system generally works like this
First, the LOD levels are set up
LOD levels are the number of polygons
the object will have depending on distance
You can also set up LOD
to change depending on screen size
Next, the concept of performance optimization
So these three are important in LOD
I think it will be pretty hard to understand
if I told you just by words
So here is a screenshot to show you
Now, when you are placing downloaded assets
you can simply drag & drop it into the scene
or use Foliage
and if you double-click the asset
A large window will pop up like this
on the top left
and it has information on the current screen size, triangles, and Vertex
And every time I drag the mouse
to zoom in or out
the object will look smaller or bigger
in comparison to the entire screen
And depending on how zoomed in or out it is
the numbers will change accordingly
So let me give you a closer look of that
What I showed you before
is how the plant looks to the camera
when the LOD level is zero
By the way, if the LOD is 0
it means the object is as close up to the camera as possible
So if I zoom out from here to look at the plant from farther away
the monitor will obviously be the same size
but because I zoomed out
the plant will look smaller than before
since it's zoomed out
and you can see that the LOD level
has gone up to 3
Obviously there is a level 1 and level 2 as well
and you can make as many new LOD levels as you like
But most games and interactive content
don't need levels higher than 5
and having up to level 3 or 4 gets you enough optimization
And yes, there are some cases where you need more levels
And also compared to the screen from before
the triangle and Vertex numbers are also different
When the LOD was 0, Vertex was at around 600
right now, when LOD is 3
you can see Vertex is at around 100
But these settings don't come with every Quixel asset
Some assets have LOD set up
but other assets don't
A very simple cuboid box
would not really need LOD
So LOD is mostly set up in more complex objects
you should keep that in mind
And now, I will zoom out from the plant some more
And you should not confuse zooming out
with making the object itself smaller
The window on the screen
is where you can modify all of the settings related to the object
and what I have done is not scaling down the object
but zooming out the camera
that is why it looks smaller on the screen than beforehand
Now the LOD has gone from 3 to 4
So this is LOD 4
The Vertex number has gone down further from 3 digits
and it is now 26
and because it looks smaller
we can't tell differentiate between
each of the leaves on it
All the computer has to do is make us
just barely recognize that it's the same plant from before
So that's why Vertex can be very small
So this is what
the concept of LOD is
And LOD has a separate menu
Sometimes you have to force LOD to turn off
For example, when developing a game
you want LOD to change depending on distance from the camera
But when you're making an animation or video
you might want it to look as good as possible from start to finish
And if that plant from before
whose tiny, complex leaves
you should always be able to see
looks flat or stumpy
because it's too far away
that might ruin the video
So when what you're working on is a video and not a game
you can turn off LOD in that case
LOD is by default set to be on
You can change the setting from Auto to off
As you can see here
And then there are the settings on LOD groups
If you want to change them to like what I did
first you have to turn off LOD Auto
because it is on by default
You have to check on Custom, then in Advanced
turn off everything except LOD0, which is the highest quality level
Change the settings from what you see on the left, to the right
and you can get high quality objects
whether or not they are close up to
or far away from the camera
when you are creating videos
That will be helpful to remember
Now Materials will be connected by default
but you can change the settings
any way that you want
Then go into the detailed menus
to modify arrangement, color, or gloss
any way that you want
to optimize it
What takes a lot of time in Materials to compute is normal maps
but say that you don't need
normal maps for this asset
It would be better optimized
if you just deleted all of the nodes connected to the normal map
So completing level designs using Megascans
Megascans has so many assets, as we have seen
and you can consider the import time and the quality you need
and choose accordingly
from the quality options
so you can download assets in Low, High, 2K, or 4K quality
And after downloading, you can just click Add to use it
Then you can put those assets
onto simple terrains
to make it look much cooler in an instant
Even locations like stone caves
If you download some curved rocks
enlarge them and build a structure from there
You can make cool looking caves so quickly
using that method
There are so many amazing assets you can use for building natural environments
So I hope you download some assets and try it out yourself
So, as I told you before
The assets will be organized automatically
You still have to check if you have space in your drive
but you don't have to worry about the folders
All of the assets will go into category folders
like 3D Assets, or 3D Plants
And even if you don't have a good connection
you can still use assets you already used for other projects
that would be helpful to keep in mind
And finally, here is a screenshot
of an example scene that I created
The flowers I planted using Foliage
And then there is the tree trunk, and the mossy rocks
more rocks on the front
And you can use Foliage on top of the rock as well
The body of water is a little lake I made
out of presets in Unreal
Like so, anyone can make
beautiful nature scenes
out of just assets from Quixel
I especially recommend utilizing Foliage a lot
The Concept of Quixel Megascans What is Quixel Megascans? A library with high-quality photorealistic Textures and 3D-scanned resources Makes it easy to render realistic and immersive 3D environments
Current version of Unreal Engine automatically connects with Quixel Bridge Main Assets in Home Category 3D Assets: Assets that belong in modern settings; Desks, walls, etc.
3D Plants: Plant assets; Meadows, grass, flowers, bushes, tree roots, logs, etc. Surfaces: Assets for metal, soil, sand, etc.
Decals: Assets that can be projected on part of an object; Rust, blood, etc.
Concept of Quixel Megascans Accessing through Unreal Engine Click Add button to import Quixel assets to Unreal Engine projects Downloaded assets exist as files, thus can be copy & pasted
Utilization in Unreal Engine Foliage: Used to create fields, forests, mountains, ravines, etc. Textures and Materials can also be used as assets
Performance Optimization through LOD and Materials Settings What is LOD? Level of Detail Asset is automatically made high-polygon when it is close to camera
Asset is automatically made low-polygon when it is far from camera Object size does not change Use of LOD impacts game optimization greatly
How the LOD System Works Setting LOD levels LOD selection depending on screen size Performance optimization