Thank you for the nice comment Peter, the videos always endup taking way longer than I expect so its always nice to hear when people enjoy them. so thanks. I need to check over the timelapse, I am away for a bit but hope to have it up in a week or two

Thanks pleased that you liked it.

Great, pleased that you are finding a use for it!

Thank you that is very kind

Pleased it helped!

Pleased that the video helped!

Thank you, always difficult to find the right balance between amount of content and length. Not sure I got it right but pleased you like it.

Thank you, pleased that it was helpful!

Great really pleased it helped! In the small bit of free time I have had to try the Geometry scripting stuff I have really liked it, in fact I have a plan to do a tutorial on one of the things I made, its not super complicated but hopefully it might be useful for some. Hope your tools work out well!

Haha, thats great, really pleased it helped.

Thank you! pleased you liked it.

Thanks and your welcome

Pleased you liked it.

Thank you very much. Definitely want to do more, just finding the time is always the issue. :-)

Thank you, I know they continue to add lots of cool stuff to Geo script and the modelling tools so I am sure they will. With Geo script, you can pretty easily create a displacement tool to be honest, I might make a quick video on it. I think there is still issues with displacement stepping but I am sure they will fix that at some point.

@@CB3DART Btw there is a cool video about applying a disp. map from geo script here kzfaq.info/get/bejne/fr9zdZZzqJbDeZs.html

Sorry, your other reply seems to have disappeared, anyway, the tutorial you mention is by Ryan Schmidt kzfaq.infovideos he was actually the (or one of the) programmers on the Modelling tools! So definitely check his videos out.

Pleased you found it useful!

Thanks for the comment, pleased the tutorial was helpful!

Thank you

Thank you! I will try!

pleased it was helpful

Thank you! Yeah, work has been super busy but I do have a plan for a new tutorial as soon as I find the time, hopefully not too long.

This is true, this could work. As you say unreals booleans seem solid and it might work well. Would be good to have the option to select polys based on texture channels but this is a good idea for a work around! Thanks

Thank you for the comment. yeah you can mask the polys and get a nice edge rough obviously this loses the benefits of nanites rendering speed and can introduce overdraw (and other performance related stuff) but if performance in the scene is not a issue then you could totally do this.

Yeah, I am sure there must be a reason that its not working yet. Obviously the folks at epic are super talented and I am sure if it was easy it would be in already.

Pleased that you liked it, I did try to aim it at people that might not have used much of unreals modelling stuff, so pleased that it came across that way. As for the street scene I have a time-lapse of how I created it (but its not a tutorial really its more of just a video showing what I did, so not sure how helpful that would be for you. also given how long it took to create it would be a sped up timelapse)

Thanks, I have a time lapse somewhere on my pc but its not well edited. and some of it never recorded, so I will probably make a different scene using similar techniques and then show that when work is less busy

@@CB3DART that would be amazing! Thanks so much

Hi Robert, I am not sure I will get time to show how to displace a landscape material in UE5 but I would recommend looking into Virtual Hieght Field meshes for UE5, these are experimental (i.e. epic is still improving/working on developing them) but these allow for landscapes to be displaced and rendered correctly, etc. With regards to applying different materials, Ryan Schmidt has been releasing some great tutorials about geometry script and the modeling tools (he is one of the people at Epic that made the modeling tools, so he obviously really knows his stuff!) anyway he made a video about polygroups in Unreal Engine and at the end of that video he shows how to add/change materials using this method. kzfaq.info/get/bejne/e9iBnNBet7S6e2Q.html

thanks

Thank you Maciej, you are right about the wall, I also noticed that it needed more break up but I have to be honest the scene was way larger than I initially planned (was originally just a road and pavement for a single shot/image) and I was kinda running out of steam on editing it more but I agree it would have helped. I decided to spend a bit more time playing around with lighting (rather than add more variation) as I was enjoying it more. You can see some alt lighting and videos here if you are interested... www.artstation.com/artwork/ZeevV1

@@CB3DART I am also guilty of the same, small scenes morph into monsters as I keep getting new ideas. I really dig the night scene among your alt lighting setups.

Thanks. Yeah, when doing stuff like this (non work stuff) I generally expand/contract it if I am enjoying it or not, this can lead to massive "feature creep" haha

Hi Gavin, In the case of this scene I made almost all of it inside unreal 5 using no external software (apart from the Railings on the wall). Some assets are obviously just quixel megascans models but most others are using the displacement method I show in this video. The walls, Road are a simple UE5 plane with displacement. The pavement is a megascans model but it could be made with a plane and displacement, just used a premade one for speed tbh. As I mention on my artstation, I would not say this is the best method to make roads and walls, etc I was just experimenting with ideas and techniques and wanted to see how far I could get with UE5/Megascans only. If I was doing it professionally I would likely take a different approach (depending on the time limitations available) Exporting a modelled mesh from blender as you mention could be one method and likely would give more variations options. You can displace inside blender as well so you could just model and displace in blender if you wanted, this would allow for further sculpting etc. For this scene I tried to "create" everything inside unreal rather then use other software, partly to see how for I could get and partly for speed.

@@CB3DART Brilliant, thanks very much for the reply :) I'll have a check out of your artstation too.

thanks for the feedback, I mainly put the "cards" in there so that people can jump to different sections easily (also helps me when having to add the "chapter" bookmarks in youtube) but yeah, as I record it not knowing where I will put the "breaks" then they can sometimes be a bit sudden. (As usually I have had to shoe horn them in, while I am still talking, haha)

No Problem, Glad it helped!

Great hope that it works out the way you want it too.

yeah, its nothing to do with scans really (though its a great process for scan data) I just used a scanned displacement as an example (as it was quick and something everyone with UE has access too) It should work on imported Geo, its basically the same as subdividing in blender, max, etc it just takes the existing Geo and sub divs it. So to get good results you will need nice clean imported geo topology that will sub divide nicely or you might get rendering issues

Thanks for the message, yeah, there are many ways to get the texture info in the channel UE requires. I have been working on a new tutorial and in the Geometry Script you can select a channel for the displacement texture, so thats really helpful. (I have not checked the Modelling tools to see if that option has also been added in there, it might have been!)

Yeah, hope that its something they can fix pretty easily.

haha

:-(

Your welcome, Not looked at the mask stuff recently, so not sure if there has been anything new added. I did have a (potentially silly) idea of using the mask of a decal as a displacement (which would push all the polys of the mask up) then you can easily select those pushed up polys (as they are now separated by the displacement distance) then apply the actually displacement to the remaining polys.

Hi Chris, Thanks for the message. I tried a number of different formats at the time and nothing made a difference (mostly use EXR for non real-time displacement maps but tried others too) sadly nothing seemed to resolve the issue for me. (I am not sure when I recorded this, if I was using the most up-to-date version of UE5 though so it could have subsequently been fixed as I have not retested it.)

Yes, you can use it on anything really only issue is that you need to be carful with UV seams and sharp corners but it should work.

Yeah I think I talked about this in the video but if not then totally agree a weight based sub division would be good. I did talk about using the simplify (Decimation) feature though. Basically if you subdivide the mesh to get the look you want then use simplify to automatically remove any polys that are "wasted" on flat areas, etc. It works very much like having a sub div that is weighted but it requires a few extra steps.

That sounds strange, I have not updated in a while tbh.

Sadly it will would likely need more software, you can create displacement textures manually by sculpting/modelling in free programs like blender or paid programs like Zbrush. A more automatic way is to use software like substance Alchemist (Which I think is now called Substance Sampler) an alternative is ArtEngine (both are paid software but might have free trials to test them) I am sure there are free equivalent software but I have only used Substance and Artengine so I cant say what other software is best. I would recommend searching for "image to material software" and see if you can find something that works for you.

No this will work on any shape but with displacement the normals of the polygons, the shape/number of polygons and the UV's of the mesh have a big effect on the displacement quality and "cracking/gaps" If you use a cube with chamfered/filleted corners and good UV's then you should reduce the issue with cracking on the edges. I did a quick test using a cube from the modelling tools and applied a displacement texture to it, set a pretty high displacement amount and it seemed to work for me. Have you tried the latest versions of the tool?

Pleased that you liked it, with regards to the missing panel, did you enable the modelling tools in the plugins menu? are you using UE5?

What asset did you use to do the displacement on? did you create a plane in the modelling tools or did you take a plane/object from the engine folders? if so it might be that you can not edit these and its giving you an error

in 5.1 you can use world position offset, this is not the same as tesselation and not sure how performant it is but might be worth looking into.

In the tools ideas and suggestions section of the video, I talked about wanting to use the mask as a selection method to "automatically" remove the unneeded parts but I could not seem to see a way to get it to work. Do you know a way?

This will work on any shape but with displacement the normals of the polygons, the shape/number of polygons and the UV's of the mesh have a big effect on the displacement quality and "cracking/gaps" If you use a cube with chamfered/filleted corners and good UV's then you should reduce the issue with cracking on the edges.

Hi, I have not done much with Virtual Textures in combination with the modelling tools, so I cant speak about this specific message but if its causing a issue with a texture, if you find that texture in the content browser and then double click it (if I remember correctly) there is a checkbox for enabling or disabling VT on each texture. Try disabling that. (obviously if you use that texture in a shader that needs VT then it will likely cause issues with that shader.)

Yeah, as I mention in the video its something I struggled to fix in unreal also. I am not sure if it been improved in later versions of the editor? I have not tried it in a while.

@@CB3DART Yeah, 5.0.3 and its still very stepped. Oh well, one of these days. Thanks for the tutorial anyhow!

This should work on any mesh but with displacement generation, the normals of the polygons, the shape/number of polygons and the UV's of the mesh have a big effect on the displacement quality and "cracking/gaps" you get in your resulting mesh

@@CB3DART can i set(increase) the tesselation of the mesh in UE, right? but if not, it's still better to ad the displacement map in UE instead of bake it into the mesh, and every time i want to change something on the displacement i would have to rebake, reexport the mesh

Thank you, I am not 100% sure what you mean but I think you mean after you have accepted the displacement? If so, I dont think there is a way to go backward, so you would need to be apply it to a new plane. However if you are just wanting to reduce or increase the amount of displacement you can do that by scaling the plane in the Up axis then recalculating the normals, ofcourse this might no produce exactly the same results as redoing it but it can work sometimes.

I think they have added a option in the newer unreal 5 engine versions that allow you to select a channel to use on the texture. This was not available when I did the tutorial.

Hmm, obviously its hard to say with out doing comparisons but it sounds odd.

Not 100% sure what you are looking for, but from the sound of it, what you want to look at is how to make height or displacement maps inside, either photoshop, substance painter (or similar package if you want to do it with out using 3d models) if you are ok with 3d models then you want to make a model with the depth you require for your displacement and then "bake" that displacement onto a plane (you can use other shaped objects to bake onto but plane is the basic and most common one). I would google "baking displacement in blender" there is lots of ways to do it, its very similar to baking a normal map but instead of normal information, you are baking height difference information.

Thanks! English is definitely not my strong point, haha, think it might be a uk English thing but could also just be my crap way of pronouncing things