Unreal 5

Real-time rendering with unreal 5

I had heard about real-time rendering before and also had heard of Unreal and Unity, but hadn’t actually been too interested in them as before my enlightenment I thought they were only used in the game industry. So when Sean started to talk about the possibilities it offered (and seeing 99% of my LinkedIn job notifications include the phrase “huge plus for understanding real-time rendering”) I felt like it was worth the research to find out if I could use it for my work as well. Since my idea for the Degree Show layout is to have three digital paintings on the walls, I needed to of course render my pieces somehow to achieve that. So far I had only thought about Blender as I prefer cycles over anything else but after some talk about render times and the possibility of using VR for an immersive experience I started to lean towards Unreal after all. At least for now!

I spent A LONG time watching different youtube videos about it and checking how my classmates were working on it before finally downloading it to my laptop as well. It’s been a while since I’ve last tried to learn new software, so I was quite surprised at how utterly abysmal I was at navigating it. The UI is completely different to what I’m used to, so I found the task to learn this software almost impossible. Almost, being the keyword. I felt determined to learn it, at least the basics!

First test

After watching through a few videos I decided I’d learn best by doing, so I found this “easy” tutorial by Pwnisher on Youtube. He explained things pretty well, but me being an absolute noob at this point still struggled like crazy. He never mentions how to actually import things into the software, so I was kind of left hanging and definitely didn’t do what was supposed to. The long tutorial I had watched before mentions this, but since at the time, I wasn’t actually following after while watching I hadn’t fully understood how to do it (my bad). Surprisingly I still managed to import some assets in, even if it was at that point a pure accident.

I downloaded two free models from TurboSquid since I wanted to focus more on the actual software instead of spending time on modelling. The actual scene from the tutorial was a bit different, but since I had no talent to actually replicate something so detailed yet I opted for something easier. The tutorial also mentioned a plug-in called Ultra Dynamic Sky, and it looked very neat so naturally I was sold and bought it right away. I’m not sure if the purchase was absolutely necessary since I haven’t fully explored the software to find if there’s a way to mimic the effect without the plugin, but what’s done is done!

I had to admit, that the effect the plugin made was very beautiful. With just the fluid sea and the dynamic sky set up the scene was already pretty cool looking. Not to mention how bizarre it is that I could see the movement of the waves and the clouds in real-time. I know that’s the whole point of Unreal, but it’s still weird to see after spending so many years with Cycles and Arnold.

I imported (somehow) the boat into the scene and decided to try if I could animate it to glide across the water for my render. To my delight, and absolute accident, I found the timeline and since the animation worked with keyframes like in any other software I was able to animate some simple movements to the boat.

After the boat, I wanted to add some sort of dock into the scene as well, like the one in the tutorial. I rearranged the dock I got from TurboSquid in Blender and imported it in as well. The dock didn’t have any material on it, but I didn’t want to dapple into Unreal material stuff just yet. In the viewport, the dock seemed only to be visible as a silhouette so I figured it was fine to leave it as it was.

After that, I added a new camera and played around with that one too for a while before using the timeline to set it to place as the tutorial showed. I had some serious trouble with the rendered export, as for some reason my renders came out bland blue every time I tried to export. I was slowly losing my mind over it, so I went to complain about it to my classmates and Sean during one of our group tutorials. In the end, it looked like I had placed the camera underneath the water surface, just a tiny bit so that it for some reason didn’t look like it in the viewport but was visible in the render. So after lifting the camera up a little I was able to render an mp4 file with water simulation and moving sky, as well as a tiny bit of animation in less than 5 minutes. It was crazy.

Paint effect in post-processing

During this semester I’ve been thinking about how to create the illusion of a real painting even though the end result would be digital. We had a lot of talk about it until I was told about a person who had used Unreal for her MSc film and used post-processing to create a painterly-like filter on her 3D scenes. I got to meet Kelly during our open studio day in March and she showed me her work with the filter and how she had achieved the most amazing results with it.

She had combined some 2D elements in her film as well, but the filter alone made a huge difference to the overall look of the film. Kelly also explained how she textured everything with a hand-painted look to further sell the idea. I hadn’t even thought about the possibility of texturing like that, so I would definitely need to look into it. I was already enjoying the process of poly painting, so texturing most if not everything like that didn’t sound too bad either.

Kelly sent me an email after our talk with the link to a youtube tutorial which she followed to achieve the look she had. I wanted to try this out right away so I booted my Unreal 5 and got to work. It turns out the filter was in fact a group of nodes for post-processing and then tweaking those values to achieve the look you wanted. Easy enough.

At first, I figured I’d quickly put together a scene in Blender and import it in, I even took the time to check an actual tutorial for it to finally understand how importing works, but unfortunately got some issues with the transparent textures the leaves had so I had to give up on the idea since I didn’t want to spend the time needed to learn the paint filter for something I can figure out later on.

So instead I went to the Unreal marketplace and found a free plugin called Landscape Pro 2.0. I added the plugin to my project and loaded up one of the test levels just so that I had something to try the filter on. The nodes were easy enough to add, even though I struggled at one point for a good while since I couldn’t hear what the tutorial person was saying and I couldn’t for the life of me get the same node to appear on my end. Thanks to Phil and Syam they were able to tell me before I threw my laptop out of the window after spending over an hour searching the internet for a solution.

In the end, I was able to set up the node tree and saw the effect on my scene as well. The effect was nice for sure, but I felt like it could’ve done more. In the tutorial, the effect was striking, but on my laptop, the effect was barely there for distant objects. I’ll need to experiment more with it to see if I can tweak the settings a little more or even try to add some other elements to it as of right now it doesn’t really scream romantic oil painting to me.

I also had a very annoying problem with Unreal constantly crashing on me every time I rendered something out. Luckily it waited patiently until the render was done so that I wasn’t left with nothing but it was annoying nevertheless to relaunch the super slow editor every time afterwards. I had a feeling that it was my memory running out as my laptop is pretty full of stuff so I might have to spend some time cleaning it up during the break before we come back for semester three.

The render that came out was quite nice, however. You can see the effect of the post-processing nodes on the blades of grass the best as those are the closest to the camera. I do like the effect it makes but as said, I think I need to evolve this a little more to really see if I can create something I want. It’s a good idea to combine this with the hand-painted textures too, as I feel like those are what really made the difference for Kelly’s piece as well.

I’m not a huge fan of the rendering happening in the background during the video though, as you can see in the background how the texture of the rock appears after the video starts rolling. It’s useful for games of course, but for my stuff where I need to keep looping the animation, it could be tricky trying to trim the video so that none of the above is happening within the finished work. Even though I would end up not using Unreal in the end, I think it’s still an extremely handy tool to have in your arsenal when finding a job, so I don’t feel like I would be wasting time either way.