How to create interior in Unreal Engine in 30 minutes - Complete tutorial interior in Unreal 2022

In this video I want to show the simple process of creating this interior. Without attentions to photorealism or some complicated techniques, the video is aimed at beginners who are taking their first steps in the knowledge, in the study of Unreal Engine and its application in the architectural visualization. Well, what are we going to do? We'll do close-up, we'll make the main shot and we'll use just such a palette of colors. In order to start creating our file, our project, we need to go to Launcher, go to Library and here launch the version of the engine that is relevant for you while watching the video. Now this is version 25.3 for me. You must have Lightmass backing on a video card, so we select a clean empty project. No ray tracing, no starter content. Choose where you want to save it. You select here the folder where you want the project to be saved. Name it. Next, create project and we are waiting for the opening of the level. Now we'll remove some assets from this starter project and we'll use this free pack with the really cool floor and materials. Although this asset is paid, but it is relatively inexpensive and we'll use the side table from it. This pack will also participate in our project and although it is paid, it is also relatively inexpensive and we'll use this carpet models and this picture. So we have opened a project. I'm removing the floor from here. We don't need reflections. The sun. Oops, I missed. We don't need the sun either. Yes. Then we press Ctrl plus S. We are creating a level. Since this is a game engine, we need to create a level. Name it. Press enter or save. That's it. We have saved the level. Now you need to set it so that it will be default. Settings. Project settings. We go to Settings. Maps and modes. Set the saved level by default. And going a little down the list of product settings, we select rendering in it. Going down the list, we will set a slightly better quality of reflections right now. The maximum is 2k here. We'll set a thousand. That's enough for this project. Turn off the glow. Uncheck both of alien occlusion checkboxes and auto exposure. That's all. Done. Now let's move to geometry. We create a box. We will cut one box from another. One box is a little more. The other is a little less. Let's set 440 along the x-axis. Get used to it. In Unreal, all models are in centimeters. That is, respectively, the height we have is 3 meters plus 20 centimeters on the each side for a small reserve. After that, we create a smaller box that will be cut out of the larger one. Press CTRL plus W. But if we press it, you can see that copying occurs within an offset. So we click. And in the world outliner, we can see it. CTRL plus C and CTRL plus V. We do copy-paste. And for the second box, which has now been copied, we enter without those 40 centimeters. But nothing has happened now. You see, we need to select subtractive for the second smaller box so that we can subtract it from the first. Next, we create a smaller box. 90 centimeters in height. This is our height of the windowsill. We put it here in order to navigate where this height of 90 centimeters is. If you open Unreal for the first time and don't know about navigation, I'll tell you quickly. We hold down the right mouse button and rotate it. That's a simple navigation. Rotating the view. If you want to move, then do it as in the game. WASD. This is moving forward, backward, left and right. Cue the view is lowered for us. And E is a hotkey. The camera rises. And there are moving rotations coming here. There's also snapping to the grid. We'll turn it off for now. There is an angular snapping, a rotation of 10 degrees and a scaling 25%. These hotkeys for moving, rotating and scaling are the same as in 3ds max. These are W, E and R. So we set attached our box in such a way that we can roughly understand where the windowsill is. Since we create such an additional box, then we create another box which we are going to cut out now. This will be a window. Let's see how the snapping is carried out. Put one box above the other, ensure the object has collisions and press enter. So we have a snapping. Next, here we set a value of 150 on the x-axis and 100 on the y-axis. This is the size of the window that we will create. Now we insert it inside the wall. And for this box we also select subtractive. That's all. We chose and now we go inside our box, our interior. And right away I'll create the cameras. First, you can find the camera this way. Here in the search. Scene camera or cinematic camera. Or you can choose an approximate view and click here. First of all, this is the cinematic viewport. It's more convenient to set up the camera. Then open the drop-down list. Create camera here. Choose a cinematic camera. Scene camera after. Go to it and put the created camera. And let's create a simple material for our walls. To do this, in the content we create a material. Call it material. M. And then write wall. Open by pressing enter twice. I hold the number 3. Left click. This is a node in which we can set the color. I've already set up the color. We have this palette. You can transfer a color from a project created earlier by copying the color index. How to do it? Go to material. Only in this case we do not need a sofa. We need walls. We go to this index. Double click on the color node. Go to the settings of our planes. Our walls and select the plane. To select all the planes of the smaller box we press shift plus b. Then go up. We just assign this material to the walls. Well, here's our node. We inserted the index into this node. Ctrl V. Clicked ok. So look. Color connects to base color as diffuse in corona or in V-ray. Don't forget to save after that. Our changes will take effect and we will see the color of the walls. Here we saw it. Next we hold the number 1 and left click on canvas. Next we connect it to roughness. Let's take a look at what roughness does. The larger this value, the rougher and the more matte our surface is. Here let's set for example 0.8. You saw that the material was glossy before. Now it will be semi-gloss, closer to matte. That's all. We created, made changes and saved it. For our box which cuts out the window we select one plane. For this we press shift plus b and drag this material. That's it. We can bake. So now the value 32 of lightmap resolution is set for our walls and such geometry has an inverse relationship. This means that if we have set a higher value then there will be less light mass. That is the light unwrapping will be less. We have everything black here now because I forget in the sky sphere to remove the check mark for the color determined by sun position. We need to set the sky, the zenith and all the colors so that they're white. Okay. Here we check everything. Then at skylight we need to set that we have captured scene going on and strength. Intensity scale is the brightness of the white that fills the space. Done. Now we click on build again. We had light but it was firstly not white. A shade was taken from the sky and secondly the intensity was set to one. Now we have increased it three times. That's it. Build occurs fast but as you can see the quality of shadows feeble. Right? Now we are going to fix that. So quad is not great. In the values for the camera now I will type in cam in the world outliner. Here I'll select the camera and here we can edit the exposure directly from the camera. Exposure cam. We set the value 4.0 here. Yes. And just to see that the light is baked but it is not very high quality. How to fix it? I'll do next. I'll select those planes that we can see better. That is we don't see the back wall. Therefore we'll not increase the light mass for it. So once again this is an inverse relationship. That is the lower this value the better we are shadows and light is baked on the selected planes. So we press build again. Now let's see. Our light was baked for approximately 5 to 10 seconds. Right? Now it will take about 30 seconds. Plus I have screen recording, sound recording at the moment and my video card is not very powerful. NVIDIA GTX 1080. If you have a better video card the backing will be a dozen times faster. The backing is done. In swarm agent we will see how much time did it take to bake the light. 30 seconds. And as you can see we already have a better quality it's baked. The next step is to transfer the assets that I talked about at the beginning. To do this we need to go back to launcher. Then back to library and those assets that we bought or downloaded for free from marketplace. There is a lot of free content there. All this purchased content will be here. In short it's purchased and free. And now we are interested into the project we are currently working on. This is firstly the floor. And secondly two collections. Modern apartments we added them to the project. And the last one. It is called something like essential. This is it. Yes. From it as I said we will only take the side table. That's it. Here we need to press import. Go to wood flooring. Then to materials. And let's use some material. We just drop it on the right surface and it is instantly applied. It's like creating a multi-sub material. Next we will need to take a sofa from the first collection. Let's turn it right away. We will turn on the snapping and set it at 90 degrees. So we can to turn the sofa faster. This is one thing. Next we need a plant. We need. Where's the table here? This table? Let's reduce it right now. I decreased the height and make the width proportional along two axes. That's the way I make a table wider and larger. I will lower the speed to a value of two. The camera doesn't move that fast. And at the very bottom we will choose the decor. One. Two. What else will we need? We need another lamp. The lamp is too huge. Let me reduce it right now. I will use hotkeys. But you can use the button icons at the top. So what else do we need? Let's go to 3ds max. We need to transfer these two simple objects into 3ds max using Datasmith. Since these objects are simple their unwrappings are also simple. Datasmith copes well with these unwrappings. If the models are complex then it is advisable to create them manually either in 3ds max or in the editor you are using. But it is best to use Ryzen for unwrappings because the automatic unwrapping doesn't work well with complex furniture. Besides it is best to use a well-prepared model for commercial projects. We save it as a Datasmith object. In selection we only need the selected objects here. Export. Done. Now let's go to our project. Here we don't see the Datasmith button yet. So we need to go to settings. Then to go to plugins. Enter Datasmith in the search. We need to go down to the bottom of the list. Activate. Agree. Click restart now. And here we also click save selected. In order for the Datasmith button could appear we need to reload the project. So we saved it. Save your project more often. Unreal has a good backup system but still the more you save it the better. That's all. The Datasmith button appears and we go to where we saved our two assets. The painting and the carpet. We save it to content. Here we need to specify a value of 256 for auto unwrapping. We do not need lights cameras and animations but only geometry materials and textures to transfer. All done. Firstly I will go inside the camera because there we have the exposure adjusted. And now I'll find. Here's our carpet. Here's our painting. We arrange these assets. We turn it 90 degrees. We already have an unwrapping and we set it up. Here end will not work because the carpet has no collisions. But you can somehow do it. Collisions are easy enough. But let's not waste time on it. Let's make it so that there is no gap between the wall and the painting. We put it like this. And also you know what else we need? We need to take a mirror from here from the first collection. We are looking for a mirror. Here it is. We put it and press F. So we flew up to our mirror and turned it. Look at this. There is some blurring of the picture. Right? This is because our camera has a strong aperture. We will return to it a little later. I'll scale the picture a little. Scale the mirror a little. Like this. Well basically everything is ready. Look. In the same way as we did with the wall we need to do with the material of sofa. Edit the colors a little. I don't want it to be gray. How easy to track it. Here you can see base color. This is diffuse. We follow our link our node tree and find color. Right? And here in the project that I have already created I found the shade that I need. A shade of blue. We go in by double clicking on the node and copy the index. Everything is the same as with the wall. Yes we have already opened this node and the palette too. We enter it here. Okay. Then we saved. Done. Let's do the same thing with pillows. So we need a yellow color. We go to the node that is responsible for the color. Copy the index. We go to our current project we are making. So what do we have here? This is fabric 2. That's the title and you can see the title of the tab. We enter the copied index and click ok. Is this that project? No this is not that project. The wrong one opened. This one is needed. Let's just minimize it. But only here the saving takes place. Soon it will be saved but now it is inactive because of this. Remember to save the project for the changes to take effect. Here now we need fabric 2. We have already copied the index. We go into the palette. Paste it here. Okay. Saved. Now we'll have a save. That's it. Now what else do we need to do? We need a sofa. From it having edited the geometry we need to create a poof. This action is buggy enough for Unreal because the editor is not that good. Just remember to save from time to time. So how to find static mesh or geometry? We click on the object we need. Click on the magnifying glass icon or press CTRL plus B. Here's our model in content. We right click. We can copy or just use the hotkeys CTRL plus W. We can rename that. This will be a name for poof. We can double click to enter the model and I advise you to save completely here. So CTRL plus S will set the entire level and the save all button at the bottom saves the assets. That is the models and the levels are saved separately. Here we need to go to mesh editing. Here we select edit mode. We choose that it will be an element. Select all the objects that we want to delete. Press delete and we also delete these legs. We do not need them at all. We need to leave the poof itself. We do this by holding down CTRL. Look here. Yes this can be when you press CTRL plus Z or CTRL plus Y. In this mode Unreal may hang or crash. So just remember to save and although these backups work well they always push us back to the last changes. CTRL plus S. Don't forget to save here. Save all and we put our poof. Let's turn the poof. Now it is not very convenient to rotate it. Now I'll choose the moving and by holding ALT I will move the pivot. So we hold ALT and also hold scroll. Now we shift our pivot and fix it. Right click pivot set as pivot offset and now rotate it 90 degrees. Let's make the poof a little smaller and I'll edit the current view right now. I'm going to cine camera actor. Here you can type it into the search. Select the needed object from the outliners. Then for current focal length I set a value of 20.0. Everything is almost ready to bake. I have to correct assets a little bit. I want to enlarge the carpet. Move it closer to sofa and expand it a little more in order to create a more beautiful more interesting composition. I also forgot about side table. Now we'll put it here too. It is in the second collection that we downloaded. Let's put the table there. Well I think that's all it takes. We can bake. CTRL plus S and save all. Let's click on build and wait. The second time we have a lot of furniture we have a larger walls resolution than the first time, right? The first time we render it 10 seconds and so the light can be baked for about two minutes. From a few minutes to several hours the light is baked. It usually happens it crashed. Press send and restart. It's okay we saved it. Do not forget most importantly to save this. Most often this happens when you have made changes to the geometry and then did the light baking. A frequent situation. Let's wait. So it's already loaded. It's loaded. Yes. We go to the camera and press build again. Now while baking is in progress what can I tell you? Like it if you like the suggested format. If you like it then I will do such high-speed lessons telling you some interesting things. As I said this video is intended for beginners. So write in the comments how you feel about this format because I read in the comments that people ask to tell simpler things about Unreal, about interface to do this such simple analysis. I think that this type of lesson it is a basic level, right? So that you can make your first renders in Unreal. But if this is too easy for you then let me know. I will write something more difficult. Maybe in a more complex technique. And I'll show you some of my commercial projects. Don't hesitate. Welcome to the comments. We will chat there. So what else did I want to tell you? What should we do next? I'll tell you right now. In settings there is a function called engine scalability settings. This is the quality of shadows and materials. Anti-aliasing in short everything. Install cinematic here and then on next launches your engine will produce cinematic quality. By default I think this option is epic or high. I mean medium settings. Here we have a screen percentage and the drop-down list. Even though the screen is small if you put 200 here then roughly speaking the picture will decrease. But it will be scaled to the current resolution. That is due to this your anti-aliasing will be of better quality. Okay what else can we do here? You should definitely check there is such a standard error when a blurry picture is obtained especially for beginners if you set the current aperture to a minimum here. By default it's set to 2.8 here. But you need the maximum DOF which depends on the aperture value. To set the maximum for this value then the DOF will be either minimal or none at all. But usually the values of current aperture and current focal length are set in the top tab. I'll find it now. Now look at this. So that we can get rid of DOF that is from blur in the current aperture we set 22. This is the maximum. Lens settings contains the minimum f-stop and maximum f-stop indicators. So if it is limited to a smaller value then in the current aperture you will not be able to put a larger value. And the same thing with the minimum f-stop. Okay so we got this picture. Well not bad but there are not enough reflections right? We got such dark reflections. What we need to do? Let's choose visual effects. Here we need the spherical. No not spherical. Let's choose box this time. You see our reflection starts working right now. With and without our reflection what does box reflection do? In a nutshell it copies the reflection the image and applies it to the surface to the reflective material. That's what happens. Here you can click build reflection captures and build and that's it. In terms of what remains to be done it is primarily we did everything we could. We improved the quality, increased the scalability and indicated the value of 200 here. Now we press the tilde button. Here we'll write sharpen and let's make sharpen value of 3. As you can see we have a sharp picture now. After that we can select our camera, click ctrl plus w and go to this copied camera. There are the values at the top here but they will most likely be hidden for you. So you will need to open these scrolls. There are also sensor width and sensor height here. You can control it like this. For example another view like this can be saved by pressing ctrl plus w. The third camera that we have is close up and now we go into this camera. Move our view closer and now let's put it like this for example. Going to the camera first let's set the current aperture. We set the lower value so you can see that tof starts to work right now. If you want to set the min f-stop even lower that is the minimum value. You can set it even less if you wish and then we need focus. So here in focus settings we take an eyedropper and click on the object we want to focus on. And look what beautiful backgrounds are here. Great! That's all. The next step we need to save. You see in this area the quality needs to be slightly improved. For lightmap resolution you can Well it will take a little longer to bake but these dots this mess will not be on the wall. Now I won't waste time on this but if you want to repeat it for your project try it. Next to save the images we need the high resolution screenshot in the drop down list at the top left. Here we set the value 3 or 4. The maximum value is 10 here. What is it? This is a multiplier. A multiplier that will multiply your current image resolution by the specified value. That is if there is 500 here and 1000 here that be the value of 3 there will be 1500 and 3000 respectively. Well that's logical. And then we click take a screenshot. A window is highlighted below in the right corner. We can click on it and then the location of the saved screenshot of our render will appear there. Let's open up and see what you should get. Something like this. Let's go into another camera. We take a screenshot in the same way and go into the next camera. As you can see the renders renderings are made as quickly as possible. I mean it's enough to bake the light once and you can shoot an infinite number of renders from the scene. If you are confused by enough contrasting shadows then we can go to the camera. And there are such parameters as exposure which you already know. There is slope. This parameter will lighten your shadows. This also affects the contrast. There is gain here which can be increased and the shadows will also be lightened and the overall visualization will be brighter. There is also gain for shadows separately. Just go to every parameter in settings, try to change each of it and you will see what it affects. You can increase a bit the value of global contrast, contrast of shadows, highlights and mid-tones. There's also saturation. In short these actions are no different from Photoshop or tone mapping in Corona or V-Ray. So that's all I wanted to show you today. If you like such format about the basics of the engine be sure to let me know. Like this video, support the project and see you soon. Goodbye!