ENVIRONMENT TECH ART FOR UNREAL ENGINE ARTISTS

Introduction to the Unreal Engine 5 Rendering Pipeline

• Use Unreal Engine (and GPUs in general) to render images.
• Introduction and very basic overview of fundamentals.
• Generation of a frame in Unreal5.
• Lite-tech foundations for how unreal work low-level at painting images with the assets given.
• Learn to debug and know what to avoid. Learn to choose proper lighting methods.
• Software and hardware rendering, SDFs, raytracers, and cutting-edge features.
• Statistics, easy pickings, and general guidelines for efficient rendering. Advantages and disadvantages of lighting methods.
• Goal: Open provided scene or any other scene, and check statistics, buffers, and pieces that compose the scene.

Game Assets: How and Why

This week is all about importing, optimizing and understanding how art assets work in Unreal and in general for 3D engines.

New UE5 asset technicalities. Nanite, VirtualTextures, UDIMs

Generated mesh placings, LODding, optimizing, perfprofiling.

Goal: Import, set up and properly optimize a set of assets, in prepare for the environment were going to set up.

Materials: Shaders and Fundamentals

This week we will learn how the Unreal material framework functions.

Basic PBR layer material setup and its most regular uses.

Coordinates, Gradients, Mappings, ShaderModels, MatStructures, Basic profiling, Switches.

Goal: Assemble your own usable Master Materials to shade and show your environment, using topics explained.

Materials: Advanced Features

This week we will go over the following: Advanced material building, advanced features, vector use basics, light approximations, translucency, custom code, volumetrics, texture and mapping tricks, advanced masking building, scene material postprocessing, profiling, and advanced optimization.

Goal: Continue advancing your Master Material with additional features. Optimize and prepare material for multiple hardware setups. Elaborate a post-processing material that can be loaded into our scene.

Assembling your scene: Post-process Environmentals and atmospherics.

With imported and setup assets, we proceed to configure our material instances and do a scene setup.

Scene setup, groups, batching, Profiling, and optimizing.

Explain and practical use of the Unreal rendering features, like fog, atmospherics, and volume-post process.

Goal: Set up your scene to make use of all these features if applied and get it ready for the lighting pass.

Lighting the dynamic and classic way. Optimizing your scene.

This week we’ll do a complete lighting setup from scratch, both on Lumen dynamic GI, software and hardware differences, and the classic precomputed way.

Profile and optimize the scene, and understand where and how the resources are used effectively on real-time products.

Goal: Complete light setup, on the preferred way or both, optimize and profile the scene to make it as efficient as possible. Understand how to use Unreal debugging tools.

Conclusion Week: Extra tools and helpers.

Our scene is ready. This week we’ll learn how to make some nice screenshots.

Extra advanced tools: basic overview of Bluetilities, self-made editor helper tools to make work faster.

Extras: Project configuration insights, and rendering features to come.

Scene importing by plugins

Extra experimental features.

Goal: Deliver the scene and if wanted, elaborate on some simple tools to automate processes in the future.

Wrap-Up and Extras

During this week you will wrap up any unfinished tasks and go over any last questions.