Engagement 8k+ Views

Topics Included Post Process Volumes, Toon materials

Credit Epic Games

Model Epic Games

3D Environment Epic Games

Script Sam Anderson

Voiceover Sam Anderson

Editing Sam Anderson

Tools Twinmotion, Unreal Engine, Adobe Premiere, NVIDIA A6000, Atomos Ninja, Apollo Solo, RE20

Transcript

00:00 Introduction

00:30 Adding Post Process Volumes

01:43 Editing Post Process Volumes

06:27 Creating a High-Resolution Screenshot

07:56 Conclusion

Introduction

00:00 Hello and welcome to today's tutorial which will be covering easy post process effects for your projects inside of Unreal Engine. To showcase this workflow, I will be using the Demo Scene model from Twinmotion that has been brought into Unreal Engine using our Twinmotion to Unreal Engine workflow. Unreal Engine allows creators to have a lot of freedom when it comes to creating stylized media.

Adding Post Process Volumes

00:30 To create customized styles, creators can use Post Process Volumes. A Post Process Volume is a type of volume that exposes certain properties that the creator can control for the elements in the volume. So let's take a look at how this works.

00:46 Many starting templates include a Post Process Volume inside the template that you can edit. If you'd like to double check to see if your project has that, you can go over to the Outliner tab on the right hand side. Now, if you don't see this window here, you can go up to Window and make sure that the Outliner has a check here.

01:06 Now, I'll go back to the right hand side, hit the drop down on my project, and you'll see that I have a Post Process Volume already inside the project. If I'd like to add an additional Post Process Volume, I can do so by going up to the icon here with the cube and plus button, hitting the drop down button, going over to Visual Effects, and selecting Post Process Volume. Now you see that it comes in here and we see an outline of a cube. Now that cube or volume is going to be the area that the properties I change are going to affect.

Editing Post Process Volumes

01:43 Now let's go ahead and take a look at some of the properties that I can curate for that volume. So if I go over to the right hand side, go down to the Details panel, you'll see that I have the ability to transform the object. So I'll go down to scale. If I wanted to make this larger I can type in 2 here and use Tab to navigate to the next option and increase all of these to 2 here to make the size larger. Now we also have the ability to play with some of the lens setting. So this includes bloom, exposure, depth of field, and more.

02:24 Now for this one, I won't be changing any of the lens, but I will start to change some of the Color Grading here. So I'm going to go down to this Global option. Select Saturation, and I'm going to start playing around with some of the color wheel here. Now you'll notice that not much is changing, and that's because the camera, or the viewport, is not inside of that volume.

02:46 So in order to see the changes, I'll go ahead and scroll into the volume, and you'll see that we are starting to see the change. So I'll go ahead and play around with these. Now, if I just wanted to desaturate in general, I can do so here. Now, this is all for the Global setting. You'll see I have the ability to change contrast, gamma, gain, and offset. And if I wanted to fine tune that, I could change those for the shadows, the midtones, and the highlights. You're getting a glimpse of some of the customization that you have for fine tuning the style or aesthetic.

03:30 Now, we also have the ability to change some of the film settings here. So I'll go ahead and play around with some of these numbers. I'll go down, and you'll see you also have the ability to change global illumination, reflections, and rendering features as well. So here, you're going to have access to motion blur, translucency, and I can also make changes to my path tracer here. Now, I won't be going into each of these, but we do have a lot of documentation on our Unreal Engine website.

04:03 So for now, I'm going to stick with that global desaturation. But say we want that to be for the interior of the lake house and not the exterior. So one of the nice things about Unreal Engine is that we can use these volumes to dictate those styles for the space inside of the project. So what I would like to do is I'd like to align this Post Process Volume with the plan of the lake house. In order to do that, I could go up to the perspective view and select Top or Alt J to go to a wireframe top view. But I could also navigate there in my viewport by hitting Control and the scroll button dragging up and you'll see that I'm now in a top view.

04:55 In order to navigate to the item in my Outliner, I'll select that, hit F on my keyboard, and it's going to take me to the object I have selected. So now I'm going to scroll and move this, using the gizmo, to the lake house here. So I'll go ahead and transform the scale here to better match the size of the lake house. And then I can go back to the Perspective view, either by going to Perspective or Alt G, or in my viewport, I can do the same system of commands. This time using Control on my keyboard, and the scroll button of my mouse, and dragging diagonally.

05:35 So now I'm inside of the perspective view, and as I transition into the interior of the lake house, you'll see that we are getting some desaturation here. Now this is a blend tool, so it is going to nicely blend between the two settings that we have curated.

05:59 Now one thing you may notice is we have some icons here in the scene. If I'd like to remove those icons, I can hit G on my keyboard and it will toggle in between showing the icons or removing them from the viewport. Now if I wanted this desaturated look to be applied to the entire scene, I could go up to the Post Process Volume in the Outliner, go down to the Search tab, type in Extent, select that here, and you'll see that it applies the Post Process Volume to the entire scene.

Creating a High-Resolution Screenshot

06:27 Now, here I have a few Post Process Volumes that have been further developed. One is based on the non-photorealistic Post Process Volume that comes with the ArchViz template inside of Unreal Engine. Now you'll see that I can toggle in between these two quite easily.

06:49 Now say we would like to create an image for each of these. The quickest way to capture what is on your screen is using the High Resolution Screenshot, which can be found in the top left hand corner by hitting the furthest left icon here and going down to High Resolution Screenshot. Now you'll see that you have a couple of different options you can use here. I'll go ahead and select Capture.

07:10 In the bottom right hand side, you'll see where the file is saved. When you click on it, it will pull up a folder that will then showcase your image. If you'd like to fine tune your image output, perhaps create an EXR, PNG, or manipulate settings such as motion blur and high resolution tiling, you can use the Movie Render Queue and Still Automation Setup to render out different views. We will not be going over that today, but you can find more information in the Unreal Engine documentation and videos linked in the description of this video. If I wanted to create an image of the other option, I can simply close out of each of these windows, hide that NPR Post Process Volume, and go through the same level of commands.

Conclusion

07:56 Now, there are a lot of possibilities for your projects by using the Post Process Volume. You have the ability to edit rendering features and add post process materials if you'd like to create your own sketch scene or create stencil buffers. You can find more information in the description of this video, as well as on the Unreal Engine YouTube page in Epic Developer Portal. Thank you for joining this tutorial.