Creating an atmosphere - Unreal Engine Tutorial

- Alright, the engine is running smooth. That is good, because we are moving forward to something more advanced. We're going to create a landscape, so let me take my hat off to get serious. Alright, I'm going to open up my content browser, because I want to create a new level. By default, you'll have a main level, which is the one that we've just been working in, and you can kind of see this as a composition from After Effects or a sequence from Premiere. So that means that we can create the multiple levels as well. So just right click to do that, and from there, you'll see Level. We can also click here on the Add button on the top left, and then choose Level. Let's call this Lesson 4, as it's Lesson 4 that we're working on. Alright, let's open up Lesson 4, the new level, and straight away it's going to ask you to save that, so let's do that. Alright, so we've got a completely empty level right now. You can see here in the outliner that there's nothing in there and the viewport is also completely black. So we're going to have to create a new atmosphere first, and that means a sun, the actual atmosphere, and all, so we have like an outdoor and natural outdoor lighting. So let's create that. There are three things that we need. The first one is, if you go here to Add New Item to the Project, to that button, we're going to start by going over to lights, and from there, choose directional light. Now the directional light can be used as a normal directional light, like this one right here, or you can also use it as a sunlight. Now to use it as a sunlight, we actually need to enable an option from it. With that layer selected here in the Details panel, you want to make sure that atmosphere, if I can find it somewhere, right here, atmosphere sunlight is enabled, and by default it will actually be enabled, so we don't need to do anything. Alright, the next step, let's go back to that Add New button right here, and choose under Visual Effects, choose Sky Atmosphere, Click on that, and badda bim, badda boom, we got a sky atmosphere, and already we have that low golden hour. Really cool. Alright, one last thing that we want to add. Go back up here and choose under Lights, Skylights. Basically this is the light, the reflection light coming off from the atmosphere or from the sky. Now we can't really see it yet or what it's actually doing that, is because we don't really have an object where we can see the lighting appear on. So I'm going to create here on top from Shapes, add a new plane, to have a floor. Seems to be right here. Let's scale that up a little bit to make that floor bigger and then go back up here to create a new cube, and place that in there as well. Move that up, perhaps. There we go. It's right there, the cube. Move that into place. So we now have a cube on the plane, and that way we can see what the shadows and everything do. Now if you hold down control and then press L, we can kind of see here what the sunlight is doing and how it's casting its shadow on that cube. At the same time there, we can see in the atmosphere as well, if we move that sun down, you can see it there. There is the sun. If you move it down, we can see how the atmosphere is reacting onto that and we get that golden hour. Very awesome and very cool. And now there's one thing that isn't really working yet, and that is the skylight here. Now our outliner, it's not really casting light from the atmosphere just yet, and that is because we need to enable here at the bottom that it should work real time, and the option is right here, real time capture enabling. That, you can instantly see what that does to your shadow. It's getting lifted because of the reflection or the skylights. Alright, so that is the basis. That is looking good. There are two more extra elements to make your atmosphere look really realistic. You don't need those, but it's highly recommended that you do. Go back up to that menu. To add a new item, we're going to go over to Visual Effects, and from there, choose Volumetric Clouds. Adding that will add clouds to your atmosphere. Maybe you don't want that, but if you do, there is the option, and one last thing. Go back up here and choose under Visual Effects, Exponential Height Fog. Adding that to the scene will drastically change it and will make it look really good. This will add a natural fog to your scene, giving off reflections. Now let's put all of those layers, or actually I should say actors because they're referred to as actors inside Unreal Engine, into a folder. So I'm going to select them. You can hold down your control key to select multiple actors and then hit that folder to put that into the Atmosphere folder. There we go. Alright, now there are a few things that we can change within our atmosphere. Right now it looks natural as it is on Earth, but as you know, I'm not normal, so let's make this not normal as well. And the first thing happens in your sky atmosphere. This is actually trying to reproduce an actual atmosphere. So we also have some options in here, if you go over to the Details panel, such as the mie scattering, which are the particles in the atmosphere. If we change that, you can see what that does. It will scatter more light around. We also can move up the atmosphere, like the height of that. Like is the atmosphere high up in the sky, or is it more down below, close to the ground? We can all change that. You can kind of see here what that does to your scene. Your whole light reflection is starting to become way different. We can also even choose like the roundness of earth, or maybe it's a different planet. It's right here. The ground radius, if we decrease that, you can see here in the distance, what that does. We're standing on a smaller globe, which is really cool. You have some more options for the mie or the particles here, such as the absorption scale, like how much of the light is being absorbed by these particles. And finally we've got the general absorption scale of the atmosphere itself. You can also increase that, and you can see here what that does again to our scene. So you can really create this alien planet, if you like. So by changing all of these settings, like before I asked you to play around with a chair and a table in between two lessons, I want you to do the exact same thing right here as well after you start the next lesson. Play around with the sky atmosphere, with the fog and everything, and see what you can create. Is there some kind of cool planet, cool look that you can create by changing these settings? But before you do that, let's first have a look at some other settings. So we also have the exponential height fog. You know, something very important in here that you want to enable, and that is to enable volumetric fog. Right now it's kind of 2D, I would say, but we can make that more 3D or more volumetric by enabling this option right here. This way, your sun will actually interact much better with the fog. And of course, we have some default options, like the fog density. Do you want to make it more foggy? Like what's the height of the fog and everything? What's the opacity of the fog? We can also bring that up or down. We can of course change the color of the fog and everything. Definitely try to play around with these options. Really cool. And lastly, the same thing goes with the cloud. So we can change a few options to make our clouds appear a little bit different. Like how high are those clouds? We can bring them down, put them really low, bring them higher up. So again, play around with these settings. Now this was a lot of work, guys. If we have to do this for every single new level that we create, we're going to lose a lot of time, so I want to create a preset off from this. Now you might be wondering, Jordy, why should I do that? Like if I create a new blank project, I also have an atmosphere. Why should I create my own one? Well, let me open up the previous map. Yes, I'll save the current one. So back here with the chair and a table and everything, we also have these clouds up here, but the problem is, let me just locate my sun. There it is. When I'm going to press control L to move my sun around, it's actually not going to do that, and that is because the default scene is driven by a blueprint, and we'll talk about that in a moment. You can see here in our outliner that the sky sphere, if I'm going to disable that, which are the clouds, is actually driven not by the clouds which we added in there, but by a blueprint, something that Unreal Engine has created itself. That's definitely an AI or something, I'm not sure yet, and if we open up that blueprint, we can actually do that. Let me just make that pen a little bit bigger here. Edit BP sky sphere. We can click on that here on the right side, which is going to open up the blueprint and we can see here how the blueprint is made up. We can see these different nodes, and this here is the programming language within Unreal Engine, which are the blueprints. Now this is pretty advanced, guys, so I'm not going to bother you too much with all of this, but basically this is going to give functionality to your scene. It's going to automate certain things, things that you can control through these blueprints. That is very cool but maybe for a different class. For now, we are not going to bother with blueprints because we don't need that yet. So let me just close that back, open up my content drawer, and open up my Lesson 4 level again. Yes, let me just save that. Doesn't really matter. Alright, so we've put a lot of work into this. Can we save this as a preset to use at other levels? Well, yes we can, but in order to do that, we are going to have to create a blueprint. No worries, guys. We're not actually going to program stuff. We're just going to use the blueprint as a file or a folder, a preset kind of thing where we can put all of our layers or actors that make up the atmosphere in, and that way, we got a preset. Now to do that, we're going to open up the content drawer again. We're going to right click and choose Blueprint Class. That way, we're going to create a new blueprint, and we're going to choose actor 'cause it has to be something that we can place in our scene, an actor. So click on that. It will create a new blueprint. Let's give that a name, Custom Atmosphere. There we go, and open that up by double clicking onto it. There we go. It's an empty blueprint. You can see here on the tabs that we don't have any notes. There are some starting notes, but they're not being used. What we can do now is, actually, let me just make that window a little bit tinier like that. What we can do now is simply select all of the layers or actors that make up my atmosphere. Hit control C to copy them, go to my blueprint, and here on the left side where it says Components, this here is actually the outliner for the blueprint. So we can just go ahead and paste them in here. There we go, and you can see here in the blueprint itself, we can also see our clouds in the atmosphere and everything. So that is good. We can go ahead and save that blueprint right here. Hit the Save button, close that window. We could go ahead now and just kind of remove all of these layers. Hit Delete. We don't need that atmosphere folder, either. Open up the Content drawer and simply drag in that entire blueprint into the scene, and badda bim, badda boom, everything is back. And by hitting control L, we can still move our sun around, so everything is working nicely and everything sits now inside of that blueprint. So that is great. Everything is working as it should, and if we go now over to our custom atmosphere, just select that layer, you can see that we have everything in there as well. So here's the sky atmosphere, the skylights, the clouds, the fog, and the directional light. We can select them individually and then change any settings from it. So if we select the sky atmosphere, you can change the settings of that here in the Details panel. And it's nice now to just have that one file which we can reuse, and here's the cool thing, guys. I'm going to minimize Unreal Engine for a moment and locate my project here on my desktop. You'll find back the same hierarchy that we had inside Unreal Engine as well. So here is the Content folder, and in there we have our Lesson 4 map and everything, but also our custom atmosphere. So even if you create new projects, you don't have to create new levels. You can create new projects, you could go ahead and just copy this file right here into your new project file, and automatically your custom blueprint will appear in there and you can just reuse that as a preset. Alright, and after making such an atmosphere, you're kind of putting pressure on the engine, so I'm going to clean up a little bit here and I'll see you guys back in the next lesson when we're going to create an actual landscape. (objects clattering)