Instead of just prefabs, if the structure is pretty uniform and majority of the same material, you can merge them to reduce a ton of draw calls. You won't be able to remodify them but you'll gain ton of performance. But if you do use the blueprints, make sure it doesn't tick to save CPU performance since those will be running every frame even if there is no code running in it.
I rewatched your entire series because I'm starting a new project both at work and at home and I'm still learning new stuff form your videos ahaha! I use ue4 but I didnt make a habit of creating blueprint for assets. God it's going to save me some time. You've help so much with my production time. It must be an awesome experience working in studio with you. Thanks once again!
Its me, I am the player that not only notices but greatly appreciates all the individually placed grasses, foliage and assets in games. But that prefab ability is amazing as well, a mix of the two would be *chefs kiss*
yea for sure :) using prefabs to get the overall base in place quickly is great for building momentum and then creating variations you can swap out or doing some more custom hand dressing during a polish pass if there is time (especially during production post alpha) is the way to go :) thanks for watching!
you can also use the construction script in the blueprint and create a spline mesh component. So you can have a mesh at the start of the mesh and other at the end. Then once placed in the world you can then drag the spline and create wall, fences. Also you can add a random seed to randomly place the blocks on top at different heights.
This is absolutely incredible. I'm a programmer, not an artist, but I love watching and listening to your in-depth explanations of your processes because it helps me think about how to create tools and organize data in a way that best enables these types of highly efficient workflows.
I've been searching for tips like these for almost 2 years..... you the hero we need but we dont deserve. Please keep making more videos every tip every move you make in Unreal & Max is worth so much learning experience for some of us. Thank you for your knowledge you have given us.
I am only on 4th episode and this is probably the best series I ever seen. I always use skeletal mesh but now I will definetely use blueprints. Thanks!
In my last scene I used bluprint with enumerations so I could swap the deco mesh that would be place on top of, say, a wall or a floor. So i made a base wall, and each time I'd create a new trim to put on top, I'd add it to enum and expose it so in the editor I just have to select with deco I want from a drop down list. I think I'll keep using it for all my next projects actually :p Another time I randomized the placement and orientation of flower on a surface and put it in a BP, so when you instance it, it always looks different without changing the mesh location. Anyway, thanks for the cool videos :)
Great explanation of the prefab instance, I knew a bit about it, but did not realize the level of control you have in adding and changing components. I've been sharing the hell out of your page trying to let people know how good of a resource you're creating, keep up the amazing work.
I see a new video by Tim - I click it - Like it cause I know its gonna be helpful and then watch... boy was I so right. Great video Tim! Keep up the good work!!
Not only that you can use instanced mesh for optimization even add the broken peace(for the tiles) at random by looping through the group of meshes and some logic in the blueprint, even present logic for the different instances so some can have random rotation in range and other tile group don`t. Great tips.
Thanks Tim, great tips to save time on the tedious tweaking and more time on the fun parts. Plus those Japanese References from Jonas Ronnegard, nom nom nom too good!
Joshua Atkinson thanks! Means a lot having awesome support from you guys, especially in the beginning where its tough to gain momentum with youtubes algorithm. Academy crew represent! 🤛🔥🔥🔥
I feel like the tips you give will become more and more valuable the more time I spend level designing. Maybe I'll show the level I build following your tutorials when it's done! Anyway, thanks for your time and effort
@@PolygonAcademy Hey, I wanted to ask your advise on time investment. I'm diving into game development and level design seems the most fun for me. Should I focus on designing in Unreal using assets from marketplace or learn 3d modeling for creating assets. Or should I balance my studies in both?
Denys Mamonov if you want to do level design, you dont need to model. Use market place assets and also show some simple greybox work with some nice lighting, that always looks cool. Focus on showing and communicating gameplay spaces and flow through a level. Like have a top down map that shows combat spaces and traversal areas etc.
@@PolygonAcademy Really? I thought that having the ability to make my own assets would make me more hireable. I still want to give Blender a look, maybe I will enjoy making 3d. However it is nice to hear that you can live without 3d modeling. Is it possible to contact you outside of RU-vid comments? Maybe discord or smth. If you want to, of course
Denys Mamonov yea it wont hurt to learn asset creation, especially if you have never tried it much, you might really like it :) but in general level designers are more focused on layout/gameplay, while the artists are making the assets, so just figure out what part of the process you enjoy more by trying both out :) you can hit me up on artstation or instagram dms, i dont use discord that often.
For some of the meshes in the prefab, I'd throw in a random bool function to enable or disable visibility. So, for example, not all blocks get the same amount of grass. Or at least add the ability to manually control them on a per instance basis. At least, that's the route I've taken. It really only became a performance issue in really really large levels.
yea thats a cool idea, players would never notice slightly different grass layouts while running around, but for larger modular prefabs like shrines or statues that would be quick and easy to add large scale variation. good suggestion!
Hello! just want to say the videos you put out are amazing and honestly ive learned more here than any other channel especially when it comes to seeing the fuller picture when it comes to workflows and pipelines that are all explained in a easy way to understand. Im afairly new subscriber and was wondering if this channel is going to start uploading again because all the videos i see on the channel are from a few years ago. Just curious is all. thank you for all the knowledge you have put out there!
thanks for watching! hopefully will resurrect the channel at the end of my current game production I am working on for my studio day job once I have more free time :) appreciate the sub!
Hi there ! Thank you for your videos man, its really interesting to get tips from people that good ! I was wondering if you would bother talking about your lighting setup in UE4 and what little tricks you can use to quickly define a nice light in your scene ? That would be super cool of you !! Thank you and have a great day :D
DanielH hmm good question, i think there used to be a way but i cant find it. You can actually move components inside that specific instance of a prefab uniquely just by selecting them in the details panel of that prefab, and it wont move all the rest, but breaking them back into individual meshes i cant find. I wouldnt recommend it generally, its better to make a variant with the changes you want. A scene full of old broken prefabs bit me in the ass on watchdogs 2 when it came time to fixing things :/
This is awesome! I have one question though: the materials that you use are procedural (so you can reuse on different meshes) or do you have a single material for every single mesh in your environment? Thank you and keep making videos like that :)
cheers! about half the materials in this scene are tiling textures and then things like the bricks and tiles are unique unwraps/sculpts. so a lot of the meshes have a shared material for the moss etc.
Ok I see a pattern here, molecularity and re-usability at every level of production. Like u make models and make assets, and then assets to make prefabs. Also question what if we need to edit just 1 of the prefabs, should we just copy and make it as a different one or like un-group the blueprint?
yea I would just duplicate and make a B version of the prefab. sometimes you can break them too but it makes going back to fix them an issue. better to just make prefab variations and swap them ;)
@@PolygonAcademy I have seen people willing to help and share their techniques so that we can all grow as a community, but they all pretty much say the same things, or how to achieve some effects or how to model something. Nobody gives an insight and workflows to further help people speed up or who want to break in the industry on their own. Take an example of me, i am alone having no connections and no mentor,i don't have anyone remotely related to 3d, just polycount, so there was little to no chance i could ever find something like this so thank you and keep doing what you do :)
First of all, AWESOME videos. I learned a ton from them. I started doing a personal scene project and after watching your videos I learned I was doing EVERYTHING wrong :D. Basically I started from the back to front with creating models and stuff. But, that is not importnat. I have a small suggestion, which may be beneficial for us newbies to learn better. You could use some of the softwares that provide what buttons you are pressing, so that it is easier for us to know what you are actually doing :) And again great content and I am waiting impatiently for more :D
PixelGalleries yup, this series is more of a vlog for the challenge, with any tips i can think of tossed in. I will have some more in depth tutorials soon, and then some reaaaly long in depth paid gumroad tutorials or something for those who want to get nuts 😂
Your videos are the most helpful things I found while working on my own game , keep that great work dude. But can I ask what the texture that are you using , you now how it's changing when you move the object 😅
Jihad Sadi cheers! I am using a z-up shader that puts the moss procesurally on a mesh on any faces that poubt upwards, with a world aligned texture co-ordinates to have it work properly. Look up lincoln hughes prop shader, its the one i used.
BUT.... How do you make it work? Using Blueprints with many assets is the road for a low FPS game... it is terrible for optimization, when I started working in games I did the same mistake, latter figured out, that every BP had lots of useless things or those static assets, like dynamics, gravity, tics, nav stuff... and dropping my FPS, it was way better to just add those meshes to the scene, under another mesh, combine them and duplicate them, BTW... never use single Blueprints, always use childs.
Hey Tim I really love this video series! keep up the great work. Could you do a video on lighting. That has been something that I have always struggled with personally
I agree, I've been struggling with proper lighting for so long. Also lighting at night or dark interiors is really tricky. Hope Tim covers it in a video one day =)
Hell yea, lighting is probably my favorite thing to do haha. Will cover it towards the end of the series when i finish up the scene! Ill probably create more lighting focused series as well as some uber in depth long form gumroad tutorials at some point for you guys as well!
These tutorials are Very helpful and I'm very grateful! One quick question," How do you get the idea of size and scale of assets you need to make the environment?" And again thank-you for all these amazing tutorial!!!! 👍
Vivek Kumar Ranjan when i build the blockout pieces in 3ds max i create a biped or sometimes just a 2m tall cube to act as a scale reference for a human size. Thats why blocking out simple shapes first before going super detailed is important, you test in the game and see if it feels right, and then add detail after :)
Thanks a heap for these, I started very very late, played Elder Scrolls starting with Morrowind, now trying to build those world styles in UE4 to keep my ole brain working, I come across some choice Prefabs in Unity way way back that where rock forms with grass and mushrooms etc and they had a tree or bush in them, not sure this can be done with speedtree trees or trees with wind componats. the other thing I was thinking of is (and I'm not sure of best practice as yet) modeling or making a material that can be instanced with texture parms so that one could bang in different substance's to change the useage of the model, not sure mu 70 year ole logic has this right lol, for example I thought of changing the normals etc under your tiling trim to change it from rock to metal, cracks could become scratchs. Time to stop rambling, sorry.
yea totally, if you standardize the widths of your trims to things like 1m, 0.5m .25m etc you can easily swap surface materials and styles if you keep it all consistnent with the uvs, allowing for quick variation with a material swap :) good call!
Hey Tim! another great helpful video =) I was wondering when I was watching the video, specifically at 13:00 you moved pieces around in the prefab mode and the texture on the brick changed as you moved it around, it wasn't the exact same when you duplicated the piece, what is going on? Thank you!
alex achim the moss on the top is being added procedurally with a z-up shader, and the moss texture is using world space uvs, not the meshes uvs, so it looks different when i move the meshes around, makes it easy to eliminated repetition ;) just look here on youtube for z up or moss shader and world space for some in depth technical videos. My buddy made the shader, and will probably put it up for sale soon ;) its super useful
Usualy in the editor thats my go to, but in the blueprint editor, atleast back then, alt + drag doesn’t work, its really annoying haha. They might have fixed it since then hopefully.
Hey, great work, very helpful. I have a question though (slightly unrelated, but not sure if you're reading comments here anymore), I see on some of the brick wall pieces such as at 5:00 that there are bricks popping out and the silhouette of the model and the corners sort of matches them. I wonder how you've made that? The way I'd do it would be to simply model a cube, bevel the edges, unwrap it and slap a tiling texture on it. But how would I get those bricks to pop out and change the silhouette like you did? Cheers.
all the bricks on those wall meshes are individual models, not a tiling texture. there is lots of geo there exactly to pop those silhouettes like you noticed :) polygons are not that expensive these days, and with aggressive LOD's these walls stayed pretty performance friendly.
@@PolygonAcademy Thanks a lot for the reply! Sorry if I bug you with questions but I'm trying to learn since I'd like to create similar assets. What would be the workflow to get something like that done? Would you sculpt the brick wall in zbrush, then retopologize it and bake the normals? Or would you for example model every single brick individually in Max and then stack them to form the wall piece? Right now especially for very large stone walls I'm just using a simple model with tiling textures, and I'm not sure if that's 'correct' or the 'best' way of doing it. Hope these questions don't sound dumb. Cheers!
@@Silen00 on this one i think i sculpted and baked 3 unique bricks, and then just assembled them into modular wall pieces in max, scaling and rotating the 3 bricks to break it up a bit.
Even though using BPs for this works, I feel like it is kind of limited. Especially when you want to modify them in Scene View. Other engines do it better imho. Fortunately, there are plugins on the market place that enhance this Workflow, like Prefabricator, which sort of immitates unity's prefab workflow.
Hey Tim, thank for this awesome stuff, it`s really helpful! I hope you will keep on even after the Artstation Challenge. Just to know, you going to show also something about, Master Material and so on ? Thx again mate ;-)
hey emmanuel, thanks, yea I will keep up the content after the challenge for sure, lots more industry info tips about how to actually get a job and stuff planned as well. Yea I will dive into master materials in the texture/materials vlog coming up and probably make a longer tutorial on them as well. glad you are enjoying the content bud!
Note however, having too many Uobjects, such as actor blueprints can kill performance. Replacing the current meshes by highlighting all meshes of the same type in the editor and then setting a new maeh for the selected seems like a far better solution for staic mesh that don't need extra functionality. Otherwise prefabs would be a better option (marketplace, free and paid).
yea for sure. the problem with the select and replace issue is that if the pivot was changed or different you will have big problems in your level. but yea, the prefab tools from the marketplace are a better solution.
Great tutorial. Hi are the textures of your stone tiles using a world position? They seem be projected in the world position when you are moving them. May I know the rationale. Thank you
Yea the moss shader uses world position, so it gives a more organic result when you move the meshes around so you dont see the same moss pattern on every stone. Its also just projecting down on the z axis so you dont have to do another uv set for it
yea its a z-up blend shader with world space uvs for the moss, the shader used is actually made by my buddy lincoln hughes and it has a ton more features in it too, really useful! heres a link to an overview video for it ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-AQkdPoBXqis.html
@@PolygonAcademy haha, well atleast it will fend people off that sees your ear "jesus this guy does martial arts, do not fight him" :P keep'em coming TIm!
I will try to remember to do so in future. the polygons were pretty dense for this scene but it small and enclosed, for a large open world scene it would be a bit more lowpoly for sure.
Or just build the asset in the editor after building select all meshes rightclick and confert to staticmesh even faster and no BP needed that way is a real prefab so the same as in every engine so its not called differend youre just doing it differant
That works after you are sure the asset is locked, but a lot of times during production we are constantly changing or updating blueprints until past beta, after beta yea we tend to convert to sm and instance them all. If you convert to sm right away, you cant update the thousands of meshes used across multiple levels without replacing the baked down sm, its a time sink for production when using thousands of assets across multiple maps
@@PolygonAcademy intresting i never had this problem youre recaling to of course the update as long as its the same SM or instant of that mesh because youre updating the master this will overright and update all the other masters or instants placed in the world
well i see blueprints more like scripts, since you can apply logic to it or creat BluePrints out of CPP code. So kinda had hoped that you have something other as a Prefab mechanic, but well can't have it all but never forgett to de-check "Start with Tick Enabled" otherwise it will generate Tick-Events and that will slow performance down even if it doesn't do anything and is only a collection of Static Meshes
yea good call, we actually just had to deal with that exact issue at work, I wasnt familiar with that before haha. hey, im an artist, not a tech artist ;) haha thanks for the info!
@@PolygonAcademy You're Welcome, well even a programmer that started learning the Unreal Engine can easily miss it, in my opinion the "Start with Tick Enabled" checkbox shouldn't be enabled by default since you only want to have it enabled when you actually are using the tick event. Also i found out that there is another way. If you select Multiple Actors in the Level Editor you can Right Click and there should be a "Merge Actors" which will open a dialog to creat a new Static Mesh Actor with the selected Actors in their current position, you can convert it to a blueprint afterwards but i don't think you can change the relativ transform of one actor since it treats them all as it they were one instead of when creating a blueprint out of a selection it will add every actor as its own component which allows you to reposition or change one single part of the selection. Haven't looked too much into it since i already used blueprints as prefabs and the group functionality.
@@MJBJK yea here at the studio after we found out that tick problem we changed the engine code so its off by default, was a quick insta fix for some performance gains.
Hey! Great video, using this for book stacking in my scene :) I need to make all my BP's static for the stacks to be seen in the game port? Is this normal?
I have a question: if you create a level like this in a separate Unreal scene, what are the steps to import everything, including the height map for the floor, into another scene such as a larger map?
easiest way would be to use the levels system inside unreal and have the smaller one you want to bring in be a sublevel of the overall master/world map.
Hi, I used pretty much the same method to do blueprints but now there are few different settings when creating them. Could you tell us which options you choose once you are in the editor and click convert to prefab? Your video is a bit dated and skipped that part entirely. Also I'm about to stop using blueprints altogether since it's absolutely impossible to vertex paint on blueprints. Did you find any ways to solve the issue? It would be a game changer and it would help alto since I'm working on a very important project that uses blueprints alots Thanks so much!
After added in the prefab, if needed, is there any way to "unlink/ungroup" to get back the individual static mesh objects? . Also is there anyway to set Pivot at floor or similar, so when you place the object in the scene it does above surface?
Hey Sir, just sh9ort question, i do exact same way, but when i move in the Scene it just the Gizmo. he Mes itself/Blueprin stay at the place ?! Where is the lock ?! thanks Man i learn really a lot about lighning here :D
I just realised your awesome videos about UE4. Lighting academy, dinusty and this is top 1 tutorials. And I have a question about your scene (may be this is dumb question). I see you are using world align textures, and I can see even dinusty using it. I searched and I found it is performance heavy. So how often do you recommend world aligned textures? For example, Can we use masks as world aligned textures to blend tiling materials on large scale without vertex painting? Or it is not good idea, because we have to use many masks? Hope I could explain my question )))
Tural Memmedov yup your question is great. Its a bit more expensive yea, but i know several big aaa games here in montreal that are using world space uvs for almost everything, they just find ways to offset the performance cost elsewhere, but in the grand scheme of things its nowhere near as costly as lighting and volumetric fog etc. Using it for masks to breakup dirt maps on buildings is a great way to use it too, makes everything look unique!
@@PolygonAcademy Thank you very much. The people like you from industry is a big gift for us )) Last few years I have learned hard surface and tried character modelling a bit. Right now want to move to environment art and after that I want to decide which one I want to work mainly. :) This is my artstation and my two WIP models in polycount. (nux car model from mad max and sci fi robot. Because of work, progress is too slow but I will finish them one day :) ) www.artstation.com/klavitel polycount.com/discussion/186242/wip-the-nux-car polycount.com/discussion/193777/sci-fi-robot-wip
CptEddyPrice you can get a free educational license of 3ds max from autodesk, or blender for modelling, substance painter and designer are only 20 bucks a month, so with all that you should be covered, and unreal is free too ofcourse :)
While it was helpfull and answerd all my questions on how, over ten minutes of explaining why befor felt a little long for something relativly simple. Still nice video thx for posting it.
yea like larger chunks of pre-assembeled modular kits that make snapping large sections together much faster than moving 1000 individual modular pieces
Having a shit ton of static meshes in a blueprint actor prevents you from being able to instance them. Creating a ton of drawcalls. Unlike Unity you cant break the blueprint down to its components again after you've combined it. It's a one-way road.
whats up friend. So i want to ask a question. I know the stairs is a mesh as well as the other items in the scene. is the floor also a mesh or is that a landscape? I'll be following on twitter shortly. thanks for the vids and giving me a better scope on what I should focus on. I keep trying to make a "video game" with no prevail because the scope is to big but now after watching your videos I feel like id have better time and learning and gaining experience with just doing scene and different themes. thanks after being away from ue4 & maya for 6 months you gave me that drive to create! ever thought about making a subreddit r/polygonacademy and every friday or something giving the subscribers a theme idea in a video and in a week we post it on said reddit? I feel it would be a nice way to inspire viewers.
oh good idea about the subreddit, maybe one day when I have more time! yea the floor is a combo of rock meshes and also a landscape mesh made with unreal's terrain tools.
@@PolygonAcademy is the art direction will not compromise since in studio they have texture set where they will sent you a texture and from there start to make a mid-res poly ready for integration or yes right it is depend if worth it, I assume one is exceptional like character weapon, armor. thank you man! been re-watching this journey of yours many times :) btw for the last abusive question of mine, do you think or consider using Quixel Mixer in the future since in production speed is important and most studio's now doing photogrammetry and quixel asset is made from that. thank you again and please take care.
@@pawpotsRS yes, lots of studios are using quixel mixer and megascans heavily, it saves time and looks great. I will use it in future for sure for my personal projects :)
Thanks for the video but if do that with my door, door-frames and walls, the c++ component used for opening the door doesnt work anymore: do you have a quick solution? Thanks man.
on most games ive worked on, openable doors tend to be their own seperate blueprints and not included in building prefabs, usually its the level designers who are placing those elements within the world. I would try and keep it as a self contained blueprint per door/button that opens it etc. there are probably ways of having the c++ components interact with specific actors within the blueprint, or just script the functionality within the blueprint itself via nodes.
