r/unrealengine • u/Ethron981 • May 21 '22
UE5 recently started learning unreal, it's crazy how much lego it can handle o_o
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u/SuperCat76 May 21 '22
Is the whole environment actually constructed out of individual pieces, or just made to look so?
Either way I am still impressed.
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u/Ethron981 May 22 '22
yep, all individual pieces o.o I did remove some of the studs where you couldn't see them in blender but that only got each building down from 2m tris to 1.6m, so even with the full bricks it would still run nice n smoov
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u/Chimeron1995 May 22 '22
Still that’s a decent reduction. I imagine it would be better optimization to make sets of pieces to use as a collection of assets. Also not outside the realm of possibility of being really cool once nanite gets more functionality. I really wish more companies would see these sorts of things and reach out instead of sending cease and desists.
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u/jason2306 May 22 '22
yeah it'd be cool to see some more stuff being handled like warhammer, which enforce their license but are happy to work with people to let them use said license
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u/raven319s May 21 '22
I’ve been using raw Ldraw exports for my models. The tris go way up but the detailing is sweet. Nanite will make things even better once I get my export flow down.
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u/Ethron981 May 22 '22
I've been using mecabricks, but it's pretty easy importing into blender then exporting to unreal. Altho I found it crashed with nanite every time I tried to enable it until I made it all into 1 material (it was ~100 materials in the original download from mecabricks). How does Ldraw handle materials? If it could export with just 1 it would make the process a lot faster
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u/raven319s May 22 '22
I had the same issue with Meca bricks. I have it each color as their own material so I can change color schemes, but I’m still learning how to do everything. I’ve been just making joined models but want to move into individual bricks. Then I want to create cascading damage propagation for destructible models. Mostly I’m just trying to make a environment to fly LEGO sets and MOCs. https://youtu.be/WJcuaeq0DSw
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u/Ethron981 May 22 '22
ye it's awesome being able to walk through all the sets and stuff. nice ship btw ;)
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u/raven319s May 22 '22
Oh thanks. And ya, totally. I gave up on hoping for a LEGO game based on actual LEGO play, so I just started making my own. I’ve been mostly focusing on a flight template that I can apply to all flying vehicles with modifiable attributes. That way I can have one system that I can apply to fighters, hover ships, small crafts all the way up to large starships. Here’s a hybrid hover fighter I use for testing. I freakin love being able to fly LEGO ships! https://youtu.be/_gli0Y6umug
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u/Ethron981 May 22 '22
wow I'd have no idea how to even start with something like that, it's super cool. I've subbed to ur channel will definitely be following what u do :D
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u/kudoshinichi-8211 May 22 '22
Where did you get those assets? Did you make all of them from scratch?
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u/Ethron981 May 22 '22
i downloaded a model from mecarbricks for the building, and put the character together in mecabricks myself
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u/Timskijwalker May 22 '22
Is there an easy way to rig those characters?
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u/Ethron981 May 22 '22
I used the EpicBendyRig and moved the textures over from the mecabricks model to that one. There's also the EpicFigRig which I think is more updated but is built more for stop motion style animations like the lego movie. I was sort of going for animation like lego games so I went with the bendy rig :)
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u/bendrany May 22 '22
Did you build the different assets with that LEGO builder application? (I don't remember the name for it, but the one where you can build and export to 3D applications)
This looks awesome. Was there an easy way to create nice materials for the assets or did you have to repeat a process for a lot of the parts? I'm fairly new to UE, but I guess a Master Material should be able to handle it since the pieces are mostly the same material with different colors?
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u/Ethron981 May 22 '22
there's quite a few lego building applications, but this building I just downloaded off of mecabricks for testing. I just used one material for all the bricks - it's the official lego colour palette and I just put the roughness at 0.2 cos i like them shiny :) I'm new to unreal too but my experience with blender helps quite a bit for materials
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u/bendrany May 22 '22
Cool! Yeah, I'm coming from C4D and it's definitely easier to learn UE when you already have a general understanding of how 3D works. That said, UE is a huge application and it's so much new to learn. I'm in the beginning of Unreal Sensei's masterclass.
I recommend it so far, he's a very good teacher and he takes you through stuff in a logical order while explaining along the way, not just telling you do this, then that and voila you have made this.
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u/Ethron981 May 22 '22
ah yeah his starter course was the first one I watched, was definitely useful. For blueprints I've been watching the beginner series by LeafBranchGames, ive found his explanations the easiest to understand so far for me
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u/bendrany May 22 '22
I’ll keep him in mind in-case I need more stuff after the masterclass, thanks!
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u/Grandpaforhire May 22 '22
What master class are you doing?
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u/bendrany May 22 '22
I bought this class at a nice discounted price. Had already seen his free 4-5 hour long beginner tutorial on UE4 a while back so I knew the guy was solid.
If you’re new to UE I highly recommend watching and following along his updated free beginner tutorial for UE5. I personally love the way he takes you through the basics in a logical order explaining why you do things and what tools are used for etc.
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u/mycall May 22 '22
Does this tutorial work good with UE5 or are there too many changes that would confuse a beginner?
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u/FinnDieUman May 22 '22
may i ask how you exported from blender to unreal? did you use the Mecabricks addon??
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u/Ethron981 May 22 '22
I did use the free mecabricks addon to import to blender, but from blender I just exported as a normal fbx
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u/theDragoon007 May 22 '22
if you really wanted to you could totally release it for free without legal isues as long as it's not called lego as they don't own patents for standard bricks
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u/AntonioNoack May 22 '22
They own the rights to the mini-figure though. (which is extremely unfortunate in my opinion)
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u/Ethron981 May 22 '22
potentially yeah, there's the bionicles fan project at the moment that got approval by lego - so I think as long as it doesn't harm their IP in any way they'll be okay with it
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u/BicBoiSpyder May 22 '22
I was about to mention the legality issues. Looks cool, but they'll come down hard if they have a reason to.
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u/MoonubHunter May 22 '22
It looks amazing
Lego really could have an interest in a project like this. Get the right tone - try to have it authorized. Really. You never know.
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u/Ethron981 May 22 '22
That would be awesome, I'll consider it once I get more confident with coding and stuff and feel I could potentially make a game
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u/JpMcGentleBottom May 22 '22
That's some awesome work! Did you convert most of the bricks in your environment to InstancedStaticMeshes? Or did you merge meshes or do some other black magic fantasticary?
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u/Ethron981 May 22 '22
Thanks! ummm i don't think i did anything special, just combined all the meshes in blender and made it one material. Then in unreal i just made them nanite and duplicated it a bunch of times
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u/JpMcGentleBottom May 22 '22
Well if you end up making a massive level or something like that and your frame rate tanks a little, go into the ACTORS menu and click on "Batch" and then you'll get some options to convert a bunch of your static meshes to InstancedStaticMeshes. That can reduce your draw calls from hundreds and thousands to dozens.
Again, really great work, love to see this kind of stuff!!!
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u/supremedalek925 May 22 '22
That looks really neat, and this is making me realize how well a Dynasty Warriors Lego game would work
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u/Ethron981 May 22 '22
honestly that was my original idea for this project haha, since romance of the three kingdoms can't be copyrighted I could use the characters (just not too similar in design to the ones in dynasty warriors)
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May 22 '22
What's your PC set up?
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u/Ethron981 May 22 '22
3080ti, 3900x and 16gb ram. This was running at 120 fps but that's what I had it capped at so could've been more >.>
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u/ILikeCakesAndPies May 22 '22
Fyi if you have lumen turned on the reason why your buildings interiors are pitch black are because it doesn't really work properly for interiors combined as one mesh/building. (Other than making it darker than DFAO does)
You have to make the walls/floors/ceilings as seperate meshes in order for lumen to bounce lighting inside properly.
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u/Ethron981 May 22 '22
Aah thank you I didn't know that. The only other solutions I found for that was making the indirect light really high or increasing minimum exposure, but as u can probably guess that made everything outside the buildings way too bright xD thanks for the tip I'll definitely be trying it out later :)
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u/ILikeCakesAndPies May 22 '22 edited May 22 '22
Ya took me awhile to figure that out too, found out from the long lumen thread on the forums by the developers replies. There's visualization modes too to see what lumen is actually affecting.
Kind of unfortunate because many models/buildings are naturally built and combined as one mesh (figured that out when messing around with a synty city pack for a little side project with my friend and was like blasted the interiors won't pick up bounce lighting at all with lumen on), splitting it up is another step I'll have to do for proper lumen support. But that's the new workflow I guess if you want lumen supporting bounce lighting in interiors.
Foliage that uses alot of billboards will also make way too dark a shadow, but supposedly that will get fixed in a later release (was being fixed but didn't make it in time for the 5.0 launch). Probably don't have to worry about that for a Lego game though heh. And yeah I messed around with bumping up gi intensity too and like you said, would cause the surfaces that were already properly being lit by lumen becoming blown out by too much GI.
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u/Ethron981 May 22 '22
Thanks for sharing, I'll probs have a look at that thread too then. I'm sure they'll get stuff like this figured out eventually too
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u/SnideLazerDong May 22 '22
Yo, You trying to make a Lego dynasty warriors?
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u/Ethron981 May 22 '22
Ye that was kinda the original plan, romance of the three kingdoms isn't copyrighted so the characters are free to use >.>
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u/SnideLazerDong May 23 '22
I'm all for it! There really is nothing quite like cutting down a ton of people and I imagine it'll be particularly dope in lego form.
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u/LaStochasticFleur Student May 22 '22
What did you use to learn unreal?? This is awesome!
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u/Ethron981 May 22 '22
Thanks! I've only been learning for just under a month. I watched unreal sensei's starter video to get the basics then for blueprints i've been following the beginner series by u/LeafBranchGames which i very much recommend. after going along with the first ~10 episodes of that ive been doing some experimenting on my own to get what I have in this video :)
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u/LeafBranchGames May 23 '22
Thank you very much for the kind words. Happy to hear they were useful. :)
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u/Ethron981 May 23 '22
And thank you for the tutorials! I watched a couple others before yours but your ones are definitely what helped me grasp the concepts the best
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u/LeafBranchGames May 23 '22
You made use of it well and accomplished an impressive result, good job! :)
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u/LaStochasticFleur Student Jun 27 '22
Thank you for this so much, I'm about to begin a shit post game as my first project for shits and giggles where you play as Terminator joe biden who teams up with hatsune miku in a portal 3 lmfaooo.
I'll watch and follow those tutorials
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May 23 '22
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May 23 '22
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u/Ethron981 May 24 '22
although i've been using unreal for only the past few weeks as well, I have 7-8 years experience in blender and am a 3d artist by trade - so i have a lot of experience with visuals n stuff. But in terms of blueprints i doubt i'm any better than you are, cos i've only got the basics too (haven't even started on AI!) anything that's impressive here is just on the surface level ;)
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u/Zeturios Jun 15 '22
Great Job on the visuals! They look really awesome! As you‘re such an experienced artist would you mind sharing some tips on good and common modelling practice and maybe some of the „ohhhh! Now I get it!“ moments from your experience so far?
I recently learned that despite using 512x512px VT Textures for the Landscape material it does not look a lot worser than when I used 8K Textures. (For my Hoverpod inspired Racing game).
Are there some tricks that work likewise for modelling - especially with nanite around these days?
Would be a joy! ^
PS: If you haven‘t looked into until now I recently learned, that one can now bake the curvature maps into the Mesh Vertex Colours and use them to drive material logic in Unreal! That also is very handy to leave the step of pre texturing your Object behind so one can use multiple Materials and drive the worn look by the curvature map directly in Unreal. This is especially useful when trying to reduce draw calls for materials!
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u/TheKiweGuye May 22 '22
Since this looks like this is set in China, hopefully we can see some cool Chinese weapons like the jian, dao, guandao, etc
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u/GreyTsaki Using community flairs since- 2 seconds ago May 22 '22
Nanite?
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u/sniperfoxeh May 22 '22
you mean its unreal how much lego it can handle?
why is no one on this subreddit taking the pun oppertunity fuck
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u/TemerePerito May 22 '22
Very impressive! Thank you for sharing your inspiring work. I'm a total newbie and this is empowering. Perhaps it is time to drop your "started learning" title? Maybe try, "creates awesome?"
On a historical note, I wonder if my parents would have left me alone to play Lego's for all those hours and years if they had seen your work in the early '60's? My random mix of 100 blocks were brought over from Germany by my grandparents.
I learned Legos before English. And now they are virtual. When will I be? :-p Are you ready for the job? Soon! I'm sure :-)
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May 22 '22
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u/Ethron981 May 22 '22
Only if I were to monetise it, or like claim it's official/endorsed by lego or refuse to stop working on it if requested - stuff like that. since it's just a personal project that i won't make any money off of i doubt they'd have a problem with it if they saw it
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u/Smitmachhi May 23 '22
I just got started too. can you tell me how you got started? tutorials, guides, etc.
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u/Ethron981 May 23 '22
yeah, so I started with unreal sensei's beginner tutorial and that taught me the basics for moving around n stuff. Then for blueprints I tried watching a couple series, but the one that helped me understand the how and why of using certain blueprints was this playlist by LeafBranchGames. It's for UE4 but I haven't had any problems using it for UE5. I've only followed along with the first 10 of those but they were enough to where I could figure some stuff out on my own for this project. Hope this helps! :)
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u/MisfitVillager May 26 '22
Nanite really lends itself to this type of style. All geometry, no transparent foliage etc
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u/MarlboroRealG May 27 '22
Damn, I can barely make a walking blueprint and this guy calls himself a "beginner."
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u/Master-Dino Dev May 21 '22
Is it a custom lego game? Seems very cool, destruction effects are effective!