UE5 Environment Art for All Levels: A Comprehensive Course

Name: UE5 Environment Art for All Levels: A Comprehensive Course
Rating: 4.3 (19 reviews)

Create amazing landscapes, and versatile materials, using UE5 to further your game development.

Created byMichael Grodkowski

Last updated 10/2023

English

English [Auto],

What you'll learn

The basics of Unreal Engine, its tools and navigation.
How to create high quality environments quickly.
How to optimize your scenes.
How to render and present your work.
To be able to use the shader graph effectively, and to make custom materials.

Course content

6 sections • 57 lectures • 12h 33m total length

Introduction1:01
Explore three landscape creation methods and their materials in ue5 from beginner to advanced, including lumen, nanite, water and tree shaders, fog, and mastering the camera system and recording.
Install_UE53:31
Setting up a project2:33
Your Navigation Tools12:29
World Settings13:59
Explore Unreal Engine 5 world settings, including directional light, sun, exponential height fog, sky atmosphere, skylight, and HDRIs, and learn to control horizon, fog data, and sky distance threshold.
The Manage Tab10:48
Landscape Tools13:59
Your Unreal Tools
Shadergraph Introduction6:58
Create a shader in Unreal Engine using Shader Graph, vector color nodes, and a landscape layer blend. Paint layers like grass, dirt, and stone with weight blending on the landscape.

Beginner's Landscape19:44
Custom Height Alphas8:47
Gathering References3:44
Gather references for a spooky beginner forest scene using pureref, organize images on one screen, and pull inspiration from the Black Forest while planning asset packs from the epic store.
Tree It Crash Course16:18
I've decided to add in a few assets here to help speed you up. Here are a few tree assets I've created for your use.

Download the file, Unzip it and place the files into your Unreal engine Project.

For example, if your Project is in your (C:) drive. Navigate to your project, open the Content folder. Create a new folder and call it "Trees". Then drop these files into that folder. And then boot up Unreal and you should have these trees all ready for you. Enjoy!
CG Textures1:44
Creating Trees In Maya23:44
Create a Maya tree by drawing a trunk with the EP curve tool and extruding along it. Add branches with curves and edge loops, then apply leaf textures for export.
Tree Setup Unreal Engine24:17
Beginner's Water Shader12:19
Dressing The Beginners Scene34:12

Projection Mapping18:32
Learn triplanar projection mapping in Unreal Engine to texture rocks and cliffs without UVs, using world-aligned textures to blend adjacent meshes into a seamless material.
Starting our Automatic Landscape Material22:07
Custom Rotator9:02
Distance Blending5:43
Material Functions7:29
Explore material functions as reusable folders within a master material. Create grass, dirt, and rock functions, drop them into the graph, and map uvs with landscape coordinates.
Our Auto Material's Functions32:19
Quiz: Checking what you know.
Macro Variation Texturing18:51
Incorporating Triplanar Projection18:13
The Grass Output Node15:12
Learn to wire a master material for landscape grass by creating multiple foliage layers, adding a grass output node, and using a world-aligned blend mask to control where grass spawns.
Foliage Control Setup4:05
Temporal Dithering AA4:17
Create distance and close grass variants from Quixel Megascans, use opacity mask tied to alpha or red channel, and apply dither temporal AA with world position offset to smooth transitions.
Finishing Foliage Control8:46
Intermediate Water Shader11:16
Update your intermediate water shader by refining texture coordinates, object scale, and blend angle corrected normals to keep wave scale consistent, adjust refraction, specular, and color absorption for realistic water.
Water quiz
Creating a Waterfall13:29
Learn to craft a convincing waterfall by layering the main body, foam, and spray, using Maya and Unreal, and a translucent master material with depth fade and world position offset.
Introducing Niagara12:50
Creating Water Rapids3:46
Creating LODs9:57
Explore creating levels of detail for foliage in Unreal Engine, balancing subsurface scattering in leaf shaders and billboards to optimize distant trees.
Tree Shader for Fall Trees7:42
Dressing the Intermediate Scene35:13
Dressing the Intermediate Scene Pt 214:54
Intermediate Material overview (for troubleshooting)11:51

Gathering Lidar Information7:55
I will provide a processed Lidar image ready for import into Unreal if you don't want to go through these steps to get lidar information.
TeraSculptor Height Map8:29
Creating Splat Maps24:57
Advanced Landscape Material Introduction19:06
Material Layer Blending10:38
Quiz: Material Layers
Distance Blending17:58
Fixing Blend Layers and Adjusting our Textures3:56
Adding New Layers25:23
Fixing The Shadow Problems4:20
Rotate the directional light and enable ray traced shadows to fix shimmering shadows in Unreal Engine 5.0. Set source angle to 30 and samples per pixel to 2.
Advanced Material Foliage Controls12:30
Runtime Virtual Texturing22:43
Dressing Our Advanced Scene24:42

Lumen Explained8:22
Explain how Lumen uses ray tracing for open-world scenes, and how to optimize with mesh cards, surface cache, hardware ray tracing, and Nanite for reflections and emissive lighting.
Nanite Explained7:55
Explore Nanite in Unreal five: compact, high-detail geometry with pixel-based rendering and single draw calls via clusters; and discuss Lumen, import considerations, and Nanite limitations.
Creating Custom Rocks15:19
Packing Textures for Unreal Engine10:54

Requirements

No programming needed, no experience in Unreal Engine needed, basic understanding of game development, basic knowledge of 3D modeling

Description

Learning Unreal Engine can be difficult. Especially when you don’t know what to even look for in order to learn. So I put together a course that will guide you from a beginners level, all the way to advanced topics. Not only to teach you, but to give you direction on what you may be interested in studying further.

I'll show you custom materials for trees. And how to create effects like waterfalls. I'll introduce you to cameras, and particle systems. And will focus on teaching you step by step how to create new types of materials and how to incorporate them into your landscapes. From the basic painting of landscapes, to auto materials, to advanced material layers. I show you everything you'll need to make stunning art. This is an environment art course, but we will not be focusing on modeling hard surface objects like buildings. I will go over creating foliage like trees, as well as show you how to create rocks. I will be bringing in some photoscanned assets for composing our scenes, via quixel. Quixel is a photoscan library free to use in Unreal engine. I’ll use my own assets later on, and show you how to mix Quixel’s textures with your own models to make great looking materials. So lets get to it!

Who this course is for:

This is meant to cover UE5. From a beginner's level, all the way up to advanced techniques used in the game development industry.

UE5 Environment Art for All Levels: A Comprehensive Course

What you'll learn

Explore related topics

Course content

Introduction8 lectures • 1hr 5min

Beginners Landscape9 lectures • 2hr 25min

Intermediate Landscape21 lectures • 4hr 46min

Advanced Landscape12 lectures • 3hr 3min

Cameras3 lectures • 32min

Bonus4 lectures • 43min

Requirements

Description

Who this course is for: