>>Daryl Obert: Good morning everyone.
Welcome to the Epic Booth. My name is Daryl Obert.
I am a Technical Marketer for Epic, and today
we are going to be talking about Design Visualization
using Unreal Engine 4.23 which is in beta currently.
We are going to be going through this relatively quickly.
We have about 20 minutes to talk about a few concepts.
What they are going to be is Datasmith,
rendering and look development, virtual camera input,
as well as the collaboration template.
Datasmith is our way of getting CAD data and data
from DCC apps into Unreal, and it is really amazing.
It does lots of really cool things.
It handles solids, model packages really nicely,
gives you the ability to tessellate that geometry.
It works brilliantly with the packages like 3ds Max,
Cinema 4D, and Blender.
One other thing that is really great about Datasmith
is it preserves all your scene
hierarchy in your file system structure.
It brings in the metadata,
and it makes sure that all your pivots
and local offsets are set correctly.
It is a really exceptionally good tool
at getting that high-quality data
in a very high visual fidelity into Unreal.
The next thing that we want to talk about is look development.
We are going to be touching on PBR Materials ever so slightly
and how they work inside of Unreal,
the new HDRI Backdrop,
which is new in 4.23, Hybrid Ray Tracing,
and how we are approaching ray tracing
inside of the Unreal Engine
to maintain the performance that we need
but still achieve extremely high visual fidelity.
We will finish off by quickly talking about
the Post Processing effects and how we can use those
to really take your images to the next level.
The virtual Camera is something
that we are going to be playing around with.
It is going to be running on an iPad,
so we are going to be plugging that in
and it is going to be used to drive
a very physically accurate Camera model
inside of the Unreal Engine.
We are going to also talk about templates
and the template workflow.
These are workflows that we have decided to develop.
It basically gives you starting off points,
a little bit of logic, a little bit of game code
that allows you take your design data into Unreal
and quickly work with it
and do some very high-level things in a collaborative way
with the template tools. We will be checking that out.
That is basically what we have to talk about
in the next 18 minutes now.
One thing worth mentioning is we do have tech talks
happening outside of the booth.
It is also on the sign directly behind you guys.
Make sure you check those out. They are really pretty awesome.
With that said, we are going to jump into Unreal Engine
and start playing around with this design data.
What we have here is an Asset that has come in.
This is obviously some CAD data. It is pretty high-quality data.
All the geometry inside of here is actually modeled,
so all the rivets, all the cut lines,
all the seams -
everything on this is actually truly modeled,
physically accurate geometry.
This is about three and a half million polygons
that we brought into Unreal Engine.
This is sort of one of the default lighting
starting templates.
It is just a procedurally generated sky
with a ground plane.
What we want to do is we want to get this into an environment
that is a little bit more visually compelling,
slightly richer in its quality.
To do that, we are going to be using the new HDRI Backdrop.
If we go over to the Light section on the left-hand side,
I can simply drag and drop this HDRI Backdrop into my scene.
With that done, we are going to set its orientation properly
by hitting the reset button.
You can see as soon as we drop that into our scene
how much better the helicopter is looking.
It is reacting to that lighting
because it is a high dynamic range probe
and it is reflecting across the surfaces
in a very realistic way because we have RTX enabled.
This is using ray tracing.
In this scene, when we are ray tracing,
for every pixel we make a choice
about whether or not we want to use a ray trace ray
or the default rasterized render.
We are doing this so that you can balance visual fidelity
versus performance on a per pixel basis.
There is thresholds that get exceeded,
and that is when rays get decided
to be thrown or not thrown.
It really gives the artist a lot of control on again,
fine-tuning the performance for the visual fidelity
that they want.
On this scene, I am ray tracing reflections.
I am ray tracing reflections on translucency.
I am ray tracing ambient occlusion,
and I am also ray tracing the shadows.
By ray tracing all of those different passes,
it really does allow this to look much better
than it would have in the traditional kind of raster
rendering workflow.
Let us go ahead and turn off a few of those effects
just so you can see the difference.
On the ray trace reflections on the translucency,
I am just going to use a simple control variable
to turn that to a zero state.
You can see that is what the glass would have
looked like without ray tracing.
It still does a pretty decent job.
It has some nice baked reflections
and things like that. But as soon as we turn
on the ray tracing effects for that glass,
you are going to see that the reflections,
especially across the top of the helicopter there
where you get the reflection of that boom
or that arm kind of coming up
and you really get a good sense of what that looks like.
Another thing that is interesting about this
is the shadows.
If you look at the shadows right now,
we have got the HDR lighting model in there,
and I have also got a directional light
that is going to be kind of pumping
on this a little bit hotter,
sort of like a key light that I have put a traditional
Unreal directional light in there.
What I am going to do is I am actually going to go
and start to adjust the light angle,
the amount of spread that those rays
are going to spread out to simulate a more overcast day.
What that is going to do
is it is going to soften those shadows.
It is a very, very subtle effect,
but it goes a long way
into adding that realism that you need.
If we go back into this light - you can see
I have its light color temperature set to 5800.
We take this source angle
and we overdrive it to something like 5.
As soon as I do that, you can see that these shadows -
I will overdrive the intensity
just so you can see the shadow a little bit better.
As I adjust this light angle, you can see the shadows
softening upon the shadows that are far.
These objects are basically those top rotors
and things like that.
But notice how crisp and tight the shadows stay
where the landing gear starts as I adjust that light angle.
That transition and layering of soft shadows on top of hard,
crisp shadows based on
Object distance really is the benefit
of ray traced shadows inside of Unreal Engine.
Another thing that is interesting about this
is the ability to turn on and off reflections
and make these decisions based on Post Processing Volumes.
Inside of Unreal, we can set things globally
or we can set things inside of a defined region
or a Post Process Volume. They are really super powerful.
We will just drag one of those into our scene
to start checking that out. I will come over here
and I will search for “post," grab that guy out.
We will drop that into our scene.
We are going to first set this to be infinite.
The idea is sometimes you might want to have
a Post Process Volume in a specific area.
You walk into a room.
You want that room to behave differently than it does
when you walk outside of the room.
That is the power and the benefit
of Post Process Volume, is being able to define.
In this example, it is just a global environment,
so we set it to infinite.
I want to turn off the effect of the reflection rays.
If we look underneath the helicopter here, you can see
that we have got this really nice reflection happening.
Notice what happens when we jump back
to more of a legacy reflection model,
a screen space reflection model.
We will just jump into “Reflections,"
we will turn this switch on,
and we will jump back to “Screen Space."
You can see the difference between those really clearly
how that reflection model starts to behave
in a more realistic manner. An easier way to overdrive this
is actually just to view straight reflections.
This is with ray traced reflections.
Everything is reflecting realistically.
If we zoom out here, you can see how realistic that is.
If we go back to the legacy way of doing it with screen space
reflections, that is faked reflections.
That is really what the power of the RTX card brings to the table
is the ability to do this while still maintaining 70,
80 frames per second for this given Asset,
which is pretty spectacular.
The next thing we want to do is get back to our lit mode.
Let us get that light looking a little bit better.
Not liking it with the shadows being quite that soft.
Let us go ahead and turn that guy down to a value of three.
It looks a little bit better, and we will get
that source angle back down to something like one.
We talked about the HDR Backdrop in that lighting model.
One thing that is worth mentioning
is if you want to change the look of the scene
or the feel of this scene, all you have to do is drag
and drop another light probe onto that HDR map.
This is really easily done.
I will just drag out something like this guy
and we will throw it on there.
You can see how everything basically updates
and reacts correctly or properly.
The final thing that I want to do
is I want to change the way my bloom
or my highlights are working. As I move around here,
you can see that we are getting a little bit
of glow popping over and up in this region.
As I move across the surface here,
you can see that specular highlight
moving across the surface.
These are all done with PBR Materials.
The PBR Materials are kind of reverse engineered
from the host application that you are coming from.
If you are using Revit, it uses the Autodesk Material.
It has very specific sets of names
and sliders that uses a glossiness model.
When you bring data in from something like Revit,
it is going to basically take that shader model and present
the same exact attributes to you inside of Unreal
so it allows you to work in a way
that feels very familiar and comfortable
to the application that you are using.
That is worth mentioning.
The final thing that we want to do
is on that Post Process Volume,
I am going to go to the Bloom section.
In the Post Process Volume, we can adjust film,
tone mapping. It works with Open Color IO.
You can do all kinds of color grading.
You can also adjust how lens flares and blooms
and glows are going to work.
We are going to actually go in here to the Bloom section
and we are going to change the bloom model
from the standard model over to this one.
You can see as soon as I do that,
we get this really realistic little star burst happening
and these nice pops.
You are going to see a pop kind of come off the tails
I move around there.
All that little subtle detail is just really, really cool.
If we zoom in here on this paint, you can see
that I have got a little bit of orange peel right here
you can see on the areas that are really close.
I do not know if you can see it on that monitor,
but you might be able to. There is orange peel.
There are all these little subtle noise
and scratch effects.
That is all built into the standard PBR workflow.
That is derived from the roughness maps
and a normal map to kind of
get that super, super beautiful look to it.
Let us go ahead and hit “Play” on this guy.
When we do that, we are going to be jumping into a mode
that we set up using the collaboration template.
This ships with Unreal. It gives you some code logic
that builds this little user interface for you
that allows you to run around your Object.
When we hit play, we are entered into the runtime.
This is basically the executable
or the gamified version of these assets.
As you start to fly around this helicopter here,
when I am in this Game Mode, I can start to do
some pretty interesting things. If I hold down my space bar
and we kind of fly forward here -
let us just kind of move forward here
and jump over to the walk mode.
Let us just escape out of that guy
and get ourselves repositioned over here.
We will jump back in here and we will jump into the walk mode.
When I am in the walk mode, I kind of hit the ground.
I am going to fly around on that guy.
It gives you the ability to jump in and out of VR.
This is something
that we changed recently inside of Unreal Studio
was the re-engineering of this template,
giving you the ability at any time
to basically turn on and turn off VR.
It works with multiple users and it is super powerful.
The next thing that we are going to look at -
this is the area that is really pretty cool.
We are going to try to plug in this iPad
and see if we can get the Virtual Camera working.
This is the highest risk portion of the demo.
Let us hope that it works and we will check it out.
We are going to switch over our Game Mode from the collaboration
template into the Virtual Camera Game Mode.
This comes with Unreal.
The Virtual Camera can work with ARKit.
It can work with Live Link, which is an open protocol
for establishing connections
between different types of input devices.
It can also work with Vive and Vive Pucks.
In this example, we are going to be using ARKit to drive it
from this iOS device, this iPad Pro.
The next thing that we want to do
is just go into our “Project Settings”
and just switch a few things over on inside of here.
Let us just go to our “Maps & Modes."
We are going to switch this from Collaboration
template over to Virtual Camera,
and we are going to make sure that we are set to Game
Instance down here, which we already were.
With that done, I am also going to
turn on “Always Display Mobile Input Touch Devices."
With those few switches on,
we have now reconfigured this project
to use completely different game code
or game logic when we hit play.
Instead of using that multi-user collaboration template,
we are now going to be using a Virtual Camera input device.
How do we go ahead and do that? Let us plug in.
It might take a second. We are plugging in.
We are using a USB C to Ethernet connector on the iPad,
mainly because there is so much Wi-Fi noise on here.
If you are in your environment and you do not have a lot of
competing signals like you have on our trade show floor,
Wi-Fi is going to work really, really solidly.
But in this example, we were not getting a good, clean signal,
so what we decided to do
was basically just use the iPad to do it.
You can see it is going to go ahead
and it is going to connect. In a few seconds,
it is basically going to handshake and sync up,
hopefully. There we go.
It took a second there to establish itself.
There is our helicopter.
On this iPad I have got lots of controls.
I have got the ability to move my Camera around,
track my Camera around.
You can see the MTA in the upper right-hand corner.
That is specifying how we are
going to be handling doing our depth of field.
If I am on M mode, I can basically touch an Object,
it is going to take the point that I touch,
show me a really quick clipping plane
on where the focal point is going to be,
and then go ahead and generate that.
Or we can just go into an auto mode.
The T would be for tracking mode.
I am going to put my auto tracking point
to the center of my Camera here.
Now if we go ahead and start to fly around this helicopter,
it is going to move over here and do something like this.
You get these really beautiful depth of field effects,
all that glow,
all that bloom sort of happening on top of that guy.
You can obviously go in here and change your Camera lens.
Let us go down to something like a 40. You can pan up.
All the control that you want inside of this Camera
is right here at your fingertips.
The thing that is kind of cool about this
is obviously as we kind of move around this guy,
you can see the depth of field
grabbing to the focal point there.
Maybe I will grab a point there. As I shoot down the tail here,
you will see that it kind of pulls focus
as I move down that tail, kind of pop in there.
Let us go ahead and maybe give it a lower f-stop
just to get a little more depth of field in there.
You can see we are really overdriving that depth of field.
Combined with that little lens flare there,
that little glow effect happening, this is amazing.
We are running at 70 frames a second here with three
and a half million polygon CAD data Asset
that we just brought right in.
It just looks super cool. I could do this all day long.
The other thing that is kind of interesting about this
is we can set up waypoints.
I can basically say, I want to record that.
We click on this.
We have now just recorded a simple waypoint.
Here is a whole list of different waypoints
that have actually been kind of sampled around.
That one put me somewhere weird.
Let us bring that back up and get back to this one.
Now we are on a tail one. You can record waypoints.
You can also do-- Oh, I like this one.
Look at the depth of field on that.
We will just kind of pop this and then put that into focus.
Super cool. If you look at the options for the Camera,
the other thing that is kind of nice about this
is there are different controls for how this
Camera stabilization is going to work.
You can also lock out different axis.
If you want to kill the Dutch
that is doing all the rotation, you can.
Obviously it is setup with a kind of traditional film
back with a gate in front of it
so you can define and match the sources
that you want to use exactly as you would expect.
The final thing that you can do with it
that is really pretty cool is you can record takes.
I am going to go down here and hit the record button.
We are going to get a little countdown happening,
three, two, one.
I am just going to kind of move across the shot here.
That is all good. We can hit stop on this guy.
Now that we have done that recording,
we can basically kill this guy.
We will exit out and see what we have got.
We will process those frames. Hopefully it does not die on us.
It looks like it made it. Perfect.
We are going to go back into the Unreal Editor now.
Now that we are inside of here,
we are kind of back in our content creation mode.
We are going to go back to the root folder of our project
which is right up here.
You will see that we now have a Cinematics folder.
In that Cinematics folder, we have the takes.
This is to the 31st,
so this is going to be our non-linear editor.
This allows you to animate Cameras
as well as actually any attributes,
any Characters, things like that, lights, inside of Unreal.
We are going to just kind of expand this out a little bit.
We will go and we will activate this clip to make that now be
the primary source that is driving that viewport.
We will start to kind of scrub through this.
That is the take that we just did.
That is basically it. That is Unreal Studio 4.23.
We saw some pretty cool stuff today.
We talked about PBR workflows, how the ray tracer works
and the choices that we are making at a per pixel level
for the hybrid ray tracing,
Post Processing Volumes to go ahead
and get that really nice cool glow effect inside of there.
We talked about the collaboration
template for a few minutes.
That again allows you to have multiple people log
into the same session and work with it.
We finished off with the Virtual Camera
and how that is driving a physically accurate Camera model
inside of Unreal.
We can obviously take recorded takes
and use our Camera sequencer tool to output this.
It is worth mentioning also
that if you wanted to get this video out,
that clip, at any time you can render that out to a render pass
as we can export out EXRs, OVAs,
and there is lots of functionality and freedom
for using this in kind of a traditional post workflow also.
Keep that in mind when you are checking out Unreal Studio.
It is free, which is also pretty awesome.
Again, everybody, thank you for your time.
Make sure you check out these classes.
Here, we will just pull this slide up one more time.
These are going on today and they are super fun.
Thanks for your time, everybody. Cheers.
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