Wednesday 15 May 2019

New Tutorial Released: The Gaea to UE4 Workflow














Following on from the success of Gaea:: A Practical Guide, my new tutorial 'The Gaea to Unreal Engine Workflow' is now out and available for sale.  This 4 1/2 hours of video (along with project files) take us from an empty scene in Gaea to a real time high quality terrain in UE 4. Showing the correct way to import Height maps and other control maps from Gaea into the Unreal Engine allowing you to leverage the level of control you need.

We will be creating the landscape shader in passes creating a distance shader using distance textures created with the help of Quixel Mixer & Quixel Bridge, through to a Parallax Occlusion  material and finally adding in displacement.  In this tutorial All textures used are from the Megascans library, and supplied with the tutorial is a link to a free access to the Megascans free assets along with Quixel Mixer and Quixel bridge for 30 days.

This  is aimed at terrain arts, Quixel users, UE4 users and of course Gaea users. Although World Machine users can also benefit seamlessly from the non Gaea specific videos.  It is assumed that you are comfortable to some level with Gaea and know your way around the basics of UE4.  The UE4 version used is 4.22 for this video.

Also included are two extra videos, one on setting up height based and slope based masks and another (from an alternate take) that goes far deeper into the theory behind the conversion and settings for taking Gaea height maps into UE4.

Includes project files for Gaea, Quixel Mixer (minus the assets of course) and UE4 (minus the textures).

If you would like it direct from me for $35 (thus saving a bit on the Gumroad price) , send $35 to me on PayPal using  paypal.me/WayneRobsonUK  making sure to include your email address you want me to send the videos and project files to.

Running time is 4 1/2 hours

Chapter 1: The introduction

Chapter 2: Creating our scene in Gaea, and exporting all the maps we will need (along with a few extra ones just in case)

Chapter 3: Adjusting someof the output control maps fomr Gaea using Photoshop

Chapter 4: Creating our previs scene in Quixel mixer and exportign our distance textures

Chapter 5: Quixel Bridge, setting it up for use with the Unreal Engine

Chapter 6: Creating our Material Function layers in UE4 with Prallax Occlusion and 1st pass at our main Landscape material

Chapter 7: Continuing our 1st pass at the Layered landscape material in UE 4 and adding in a distance fade via the creation of a distance fade material function for our distance texture set.

Chapter 8:  Adding in texture variation to break up any tiling on our main landscape material. Also importing our height map from Gaea correctly and setting up the landscape to work with our Landscape material.

Chapter 9: Creating a displacement material fucntion and adding displacement to our Landscape material

Chapter 10: Finalising our scene in UE4 and fiilising our displacement to suit the scene.

Chapter 11: Continuing t fine tune our material and scne in UE4

Chapter 12: An extra video covering how to create A slope based mask material function, a height based material function mask and how to setup tri planar mapping as a material Function you can use in other materials of your own.

Extra Video: This is an alternate take of the height map import section into UE4 I included as I went into far more depth in places as to 'why' things work and are correct in this way of working. Covering things like how the scales between the two programs work and how to ensure your terrain is the right size.