Hey, guys, and welcome to this part.
The first set of videos I said we were going to do would be just
about the about the cloud planes and getting those to work an engine.
So what I've done is just grab some pictures of clouds
that I found that were really free online.
There's quite a few out there.
So if you don't want to use these ones
that are supplied in the resources and want to find something else
you can do, there's loads of free cloud images out there
that have an offer on them or are closed out for themselves
in the images, which is basically what you want.
So I can't imagine how long it would take you
if you tried to lay out an image of cloud, a cloud, clouds, clouds.
So just have a look online.
If you want to use different ones.
But what I've done is in the resources folder for this section,
I've just thrown in these ones called Cloud A roll on cloud
B, roll cloud and B, the targets are the what?
I'm the finished product of what I'm about to do in Photoshop.
Just in case you don't want to download a trial
for Photoshop to get through this bear or you don't have another image in software.
There are some free ones out there,
another image and software to do what it is that I'm about to do.
But basically what I'm going to do is take these images here cloud a role in
cloud B roll, run them through Photoshop just to change the size of them.
And while I'm there, this is something
that you could do an engine, but I think it's
what if you're going to be resizing them anyway in Photoshop
you may as well added in here to is just add
some alpha a gradient to each side of the image
so that when the clouds pan across the plane from left to right,
they don't have a hard cut and you kind of see them fade out
and then feedback in as they come back the other side.
And it's quite an important thing to have in the scene.
Otherwise you end up with a line where the cloud is like past
the side of the size of the image.
So I'll show you how to set that up.
So the first thing
that I want to do is just open YouTube images, the cloud, a rule and cloud B raw
images in Photoshop, and then let's just resize them to something.
That's the power of two.
So considering how far away they're going to be,
I think we could go for height
1024 by 2048
and just resize the images
so that they are that big
and this will squish them a little bit.
But we can we can fix that in engine when we bring the
when we add the texture to our planes, we can just resize the plane
so that they scale as however it is that you'd like them to really.
And what we're going to want to do is just steal all of this
image here and
just throw it into if you go over to Channels
three into the Alpha Channel, when you do that,
just by clicking the plus there, just paste your
paste of cloud into there.
The both of them, I'm doing them both at the same time here.
So yeah, we just get them done quickly.
And then over on the main layer, what we want to do
is just flip or white,
do the same for the other one.
So go back to layers.
Where did it go
to Two sorts.
I don't. Yeah. So at the
the white on top of the.
Okay.
And now what we're going to want to do is
you can just flatten that because we've got the M
we've got the information stored in the alpha.
Okay.
So we need to add the So at the moment, sorry, this is going to be alpha
for the cloud.
So this will say what you should be showing
and what shouldn't be shown and it's going to show using white.
We could set that in engine if you wanted to have them
a little bit beige or a little bit gray or whatever.
So let's just leave it white for now.
And then what will do is in one of the channels
we will add in the gradient either side.
So I think if we use the red channel for our color, so for the white
and then in the green channel, we can start to add these gradients in.
So if we just go back over to our layers,
just stay in the main color layer for now and add a new layer
and in it just put in a
what do we want to do when I go black to white, don't miss, that's fine.
I don't need to do anything.
I just take the gradient tool there over on the side and just make sure
that you've got this gradient, the linear gradient selected,
and then just hold shift and move out.
That was the wrong way.
I think that would probably be okay.
Let's have a look at the image in full
just to get size for it.
So basically what will happen
is as the cloud moves off of this image to the left, it's going to fade away.
So we won't get a hard line where half of the clouds on and off the clouds off.
But I think probably we need a better fade than that.
So let's go for that.
It's a bit much
set up back.
I think something like that would be great
and then just throw another layer on
straight away again
and then you want to try and get it
so that they're sort of equal.
All What you could do
to make them perfectly equal is just copy this gradient here
and just rotate it.
I know I could have flipped it over, but
rotating seemed easier at the time.
And there we go.
So that should be perfectly flipped and just merge those two together,
controlling to merge those two layers together or emerge as the layer at the top
to the layer at the bottom and then just control to select it all
and then try to cut it and then we can delete that layer.
And then if you just go over the channels
and then to your green channel and paste it, that will paste that mask.
Now the gradient into our green channel, which is what we want.
So let's do the same thing over in the Green channel for
the first cloud,
and that's those two now ready to be used.
So we've got a gradient as they come off left and right, and then this is our,
this is our mask for our cloud, and then red is driving our color.
So we just save that out and save a copy of that
as a target.
To which cloud is that cloud A
Think it was cloudy
and just make sure that you're on 32 bit.
Yeah.
And then save the second one.
Perfect.
So we should be ready now to take these over into Unreal.
There's not really anything else we need to do.
We're just going to import them
and throw them onto planes that we're going to put into engine
and add a little bit of shader magic into the shader workflow
just to get them moving from left to right.
Okay, great.
So now I'm back in. Unreal.
I'm just going to create those materials and add those pictures in.
Sorry.
So let's get the textures in first.
And if we go over to our textures folder
and import
desktop, find wherever that was,
what do we call that?
Okay.
And then open toggles
value in cloud
B and just make sure that we've got all the layers in there.
Yes, we do see them also.
So let's also make our materials in here.
So we're just going to create a new material and pull this coming
out and
actually, sorry,
that's just all about putting cloud now.
And then what we'll do is let's try again.
Our cloud
and let's just set this material up.
So to start with,
what we're going to need is you have the texture that we're using
and we're going to want to hook this up into emissive and opacity.
So we need to go down to our blend mode on the left hand side
where it says opaque here and just change that over to translucent.
This is going to be a slightly more expensive interior,
but it's still cheaper than other cloud systems and it works, I think
quite well for clouds in the distance that don't need to be super expensive.
So we're going to set out a few things.
What we're going to do is set up the panel
that allows it to pan from left to right.
We're going to set up a way to control how Emissive it is, so basically
how bright it is.
And then we're going to also hook in just the we're going to add
in some contrast to the gradients on either side, just a control how much or
how little of the cloud gets blended out as it moves from left to right.
So just to do that, let's start first with doing the which once we start
with let's start with the panel first because it's quite a visual thing.
So if we just plug in our Alpha Channel into our base color
and so you can see here,
let's just put it on a square so you can see it so on a key.
And then if we right click anywhere and just type of
bring that one out and then plug that straight into the lives of the
texture sample
and it won't move just now because we've got these both set to zero.
So to make it start moving and set that to one
and then you'll see it just starts sliding across the screen as if by magic.
So we don't want it that quick.
We're going to want to like maybe even slower
than that,
probably
even slower than that.
That feels right.
But we don't want to set that there.
What we want to do is set that
in a parameter that we can control and then we don't
have to come back into this material to change it.
Every time we want to speed up or slow down some clouds.
So so
let's just start off by making two parameters.
So if you hold one and then click anywhere
and then hold one again and click anywhere and this will just control
the speed X in the speedway.
So Speedway
does the same speed X, but just on
the Y axis.
So these two values will control both of these.
And then basically we want to type in make floats to
and that will allow us to put a value for x,
value for Y and then shove that result into speed.
So we turn these into parameters by right clicking them
and say converts parameter, and then we call this
bring them up to speed X
and then do the same to the other one
Speedway.
So that's those two.
They should have a
load of max and min between zero and one.
They're never really going to need to go faster than that
unless you're in some crazy cyclone
and that's the first part out.
So the next part that we're going want to set up is the emission.
So we need this to glow
because we're going to use Alpha to make it transmit.
Even if you want to control how much, it's how much it shows
and how bright it is, then you need to pump that into a massive.
The other thing that we should do actually is if we go to shading model down here
on the left and change that to where are you,
where you are left.
So it's the top one, my mind.
So if you change that to unlit,
it basically takes it out of base color
and it just means that those planes are not going to get shadowed,
which is kind of what we want you don't want the clouds
to not get shadowed by things like the trees and stuff,
and they will look like nice, wispy shadows, nice, wispy clouds over the top.
So we're now going to you'll see that the view is not showing anymore.
And that's just because no light can show the base color.
So you need to
pump it into the emissive color, which is what we're going to do now.
And you'll see you now have clouds back again.
You can leave that there or you can break the link if you'd like to.
So what we want to do now is just create something that lets us control that.
So if you hold M and collect
to get and multiply, put your emissive the alpha into that
and then the output into the emissive color.
And then let's put another parameter down
and this will control how bright it is.
So we're multiplying against black or whatever value
is that we're going to put in here so we can call this
emissive our
or emissive brightness,
whatever you'd like to call it, that's fine.
And then we'll do that between zero and one because
it's never going to need to get brighter than what it was just then.
I think maybe what we should do is set the default value
to 0.5,
maybe even lower.
But we'll, we'll see properly once we've got the once we've got the opacity on.
So next what we're going to do is just start hooking up the opacity for this.
So we want to copy the texture that we've got going on there
and we want to get the green channel,
which is the to the gradients on either side.
So now what we're going to do sorry, after
we've done this, this emissive is we're going to
mix in the gradient on either side and we can also add a contrast to that.
So if we hold down or if we just press the right click and type contrast,
we'll get cheap contrast.
And then we want to put in the green channel
because that's where our gradients were
and then press one to get another parameter
and cool this edge
blend contrast
and then put that into the
contrast
section.
And then let's then what we're going to need to do
actually is
multiply that with the result
of the the alpha.
So if we press and get another multiply,
put that in there
and then we're going to do the result of that, it's
going to have this emissive brightness parameter on it.
And then that's
pretty much the material that we're going to need to make.
Sorry, actually,
we need to
put the result of
result of this one
into the emissive color and this one also into the opacity
area.
Got there in the end.
So that will give us some clouds.
So if we apply that and then save it
and then close that, we've got a planning cloud here
and we can create a material instance of that and call this one planning that
can include a
leak instance at the end, then create another instance,
pull it out. BE
and what we didn't do actually was turn
the texture into a selectable parameter,
which is something that we also need to do.
So if we go back to
base material
and let's just convert these into parameters,
it will use one
cloud
and do the same for this one as well.
Or actually we don't need to because this one is using
is just doing the edges, the gradient and the gradients the same for both.
So we're just going to be multiplying this one,
which is the gradient, which is exactly the same as the both of them both.
So what we need to change is this one here which drives,
which uses the actual cloud mask and then drives that through.
So that should be fine.
Let's close those too.
If we have a look here now, we've got a start for the cloud, the
massive and then the speed.
So let's have a look at that.
Make sure everything's working properly.
Emissive brightness is fine.
The edge blend contrast, you're not actually going to see
until we get it panning.
So let's put in
one and I'm not sure you can watch it real time.
Also, that's boost the emissive
and you can see it blending out here
so we can add some more contrast
and that the blend out, as you can see, should get tighter
or there's a nice fade there
on and it flips it to the middle,
which you don't want.
So that's fine.
So let's save that one.
So that's cloud a and then let's open cloud B
and then popular
other cloud texture and you'll see the update there as well.
Let's give that speed of 0.01.
And we didn't do
that for the other one degree, so we should do that too.
7.01 And the emissive brightness three
say both of those.
Let's get them in the scene and have a look.
So to do that,
I'm just going to want to go over to create and then type plane,
if it will.
Let me go to shapes and then plane,
drag that into the scene
wherever that is.
Is it just because it's tiny, isn't it?
Let's make sure that we've got that
in our mesh level
and what we should do.
Actually, let's create an effects level.
So we want to create a new empty level and call it
tutorial
effects.
So make sure we make current and then move that one into that.
So now what we want to do is just go down to textures, find our materials
plonked down,
and what you've got is a cloud that's moving across the plane.
And here's where we just resize it
and we change it to a power to.
It's actually cheaper for the engine to render that.
Now you can kind of resize it
to whatever shape you want to, and we're just going to use this vista
to set where we have these so you can scale them quite large.
Don't be afraid of them.
We're just going to use them
to layer up the vista
and to give a good sense of depth
there.
And on here.
And let's give this one the other cloud
sounds quite cool.
So these are basically just like really low
hanging clouds that have come off the mountain.
You can see they've got a nice, fair movement to them.
And then yeah,
basically what you want to do is just be placing these into your scene.
Remember, if you've not got transmission select on, you need to press t
so that you can select stuff that is transmitted.
And then once you're done with them, I would turn it off because you would just
keep selecting them all the time and they can be quite annoying.
But yeah, there you go.
They seem they start to add a little bit of depth to the scene.
They allow you to layer things up a little bit.
You can have them set as close or as far away as you want.
You just need to make sure that your camera doesn't pass through them.
So just keep them a bit further away,
a bit further away than where your camera is going to be.
And they can be really useful.
But use whatever cloud shapes you like to try and find the path again.
whenever you go on, here is
can maybe even get another one
here somewhere and rotate it.
But of course
for that one we would need to pan the texture the other way.
So yeah, it's just got to be mindful of that stuff.
But these are really useful.
I like to use them because they add just a really quick
bit depth to the scene and some movement and it just makes it feel a bit more alive
and it works really well for this kind of forest fire, which we're going for here.
So one small thing
that I forgot to do is also if we go back to our base planning, planning, cloud
planning, cloud material, we can just add in a little bit of a tent as well.
So if you go back into our base material and then just hold three,
press that down, that'll give you a
color node,
RTP node, and then we convert that to a parameter
and then just call that cloud tint.
So the default value, I would leave it white.
And then we want to put that into a multiplier.
So you just hold m
and then plug that straight back into there
and then we can want to apply that.
What we should do actually is not put it there,
let's put that back into here.
Let's put it into the result of this
and then let's put that into that
just so that the tin is only
being added to the final output for the a miss it for the emission
rather than also for the opacity.
So that's great.
Let's play that
and then let's see how that's turned out in here.
If we can find it anywhere.
Cloud tint perfect.
Let's also just because I guess this is getting a bit unorganized,
I think if there's more than three or four things, it's probably a good idea
to just group them and organize them a little bit.
So let's do that.
Let's go back to our parent material and or each of the parameters.
So these to go down to group and do panel
speed and direction,
make sure that's set for both of them, which it is.
And then in this group, call it wild.
And then let's put in
let's put this one in as well.
The cloud mask
set that creates a cloud two
and then the emission can be in cloud as well.
And then this one will call mask
edge frost.
Great.
Maybe we want to add a bit of a contrast as well
to the actual mask, the cloud.
Let's do that as well.
I think that might be useful.
And then let's call that cloud and
mask contrast
and then we'll put that one into
and what we'll do is call it masks
to the same thing.
There.
Save it and then let's have a look that's a little bit more organized.
So in the cloud we've got the mask switch and then the tin and the emissive
brightness, and then we've got the mask contrast
and the edge blend mask contrast in the same place
and then the speed for the panning there as well.
So that makes it a little bit easier to work out what's going on.
I think that should be everything that we need to get those clouds going.
So yeah, get that.
So get them in the scene, use them or you can
just keep them off into the distance.
The folks going to do the majority of the up close stuff
and we'll have some of the light kind
of coming through the trees and where the trees are moving.
That allowed another element of movement as well, along with the extra bits
that we're going to make now using the unreal VFX
systems.