Awesome to see a bit of Aotearoa rendered out as beautifully as this is! As a UE animator based in Tāmaki Makaurau myself, it's so cool to see a local landmark recreated like this. Very much looking forward to what's coming next!
I’ve spent a day on that island 30 years ago.. Still remember those boulder bank beaches.. so impressive what you’ve built here. Top shelf. I’m amazed at what that engine can pump out in real time .. and super surprised that the Nz flora is there in megascans. Not taking anything away from your set decorating and art direction.
I just came back this week from visiting Te Ika-a-Māui so this really caught my eye. Hiking there I could see first hand how little of the visual richness of a dense natural environment is captured in a typical virtual environment. Nicely done!
A lot of tweaking of the materials, like balancing SSS with direct lighting. Also some tricks like fading to a spherical normal map the further away from camera it gets.
@@foldupstudios have you considered doing a little behind-the-scenes for these topics ? :) I'm doing environments inside UE and would really appreaciate your tutoring :)
👏Excellent work! If it wasn't for that telltale unreal wind anim, this could be from a docu. Sooooooooo well done 🤙 you can see all your hard work you put into this. 👊
Wow this is so so so good. I think if you want to take this up to the next level of realism you need to add some insects buzzing around and wildlife like birds. But that in no way diminishes what you accomplished with this.
@@Ryan1m Yeah, good call. I did originally have some flying birds in a few shots, and it definitely added some extra realism, but their movement drew the eye too much, distracting attention away from the environments, which I wanted to be the main focus.
can we please get a build version / executable to try it ourselves? I would love to enjoy this on my big TV without any youtube compression :) My 4090 can't wait :P
Virtual ISLAND is fantastic! it has a very clear picture without any ghosting or jitter, which means that this project has been set up very appropriately in MRQ, can you explain the exact parameters, and the console commands used?
Nothing special really. - Anitaliasing: I'm just using TSR. Spatial Sample Count and Temporal Sample count both set to 1. Warm Up 64 frames. - Game Overrides: Cinematic Mode. Texture Streaming set to Don't Override. - Lumen: Using Hardware ray tracing for Lumen with Hit Lighting for Reflections. Default settings in the Post Process Material, except for Max Trace Distance which I needed to increase to get the island's reflection on the water. - I'm not using any cvars for rendering
@ Thanks for the thorough reply, honestly these settings this is just as I imagined it would be, without too many fancy console commands, its already enough to output such a great picture!
This looks amazing Would love some tips on how you handled so much foliage and made it look good. I can't use ray traced shadows with foliage and it looks very bad, moving far from the foliage makes it look pretty terrible as well and I can only include so much grass before it disappears. Would love some tips and tutorials about how to tackle these aspects.
looks beautiful.. question: Ocean looks like Oceanology but waves look like Fluid Flux .. are those combined together in this this project or just one plugin?
Virtual Textures! They are magic. Most of my textures are 8k or 4k, but when using Virtual Textures I barely even worry about them. I do optimize when appropriate though, e.g. I'm not going to keep an 8k texture on a tiny pebble, or I'll down-rez an 8k roughness map that doesn't have any fine detail etc
The enviroment itself is easy with what is available nowdays in Unreal but the lighting you did in those scenes ...pff nice job. Question is could you actually get that photorealistic lighting in a game or just in a render scene ?
did you model a lot of those assets yourself? i cant imagine there are many nz native trees etc on unreal marketplace of this high quality. incredible work. 👍
Yeah, I made most of the trees in SpeedTree, as well as a lot of the plants. I tried using various marketplace packs, or megascans trees, but when I used them, it really didn't look like NZ at all.
Did you make this with the Film feature on Unreal? Or the Simulation setup? I'm wanting to create a VR experience with a nature vibe and I'm just getting started, but this is really inspirational, so I thought I'd ask! Nice work!
oops, I initially answered your question thinking it was asking about another video. Here's the proper answer for this video: This is a rendered cinematic, not an in game screen capture. It runs in editor at around 25-50fps, so you'd have to lower the resolution by quite a lot to get it to run smoothly in VR. Having said that, I didn't do much in terms of optimization. All the textures are either 4k or 8k, the trees are 500k polys, the plants don't have LODs etc. So there is potential to increase performance.
Nah, it's not available sorry. I'm going to use it in a show I'm making. And I wouldn't be able to sell it anyway because of the plugins and megascans and stuff.
@@foldupstudios Thankyou for letting me know.. would you be available to collaborate ? We have a few projects in pipeline which could really use someone with your talents.. 🤞🏼🤞🏼
Thanks! The water is made using the Fluid Flux plugin, augmented with some compositing in Resolve. The grass is megascans grass scattered using Unreal's Landscape Grass system.
Amazing job! TYVM for sharing! Just a question if I may. Just enabling nanite drops any project 50-100fps based on my testing. Does it actually worth it in the long run? Obviously you know your stuff so I though to ask since nobody actually mentions that enabling nanite drops sooooo much the FPS without even using it...
For this project I didn't notice a drop in frame rate when switching to nanite. It actually ran a little quicker, because my scenes have such a high number of assets. Before, I was trying to juggle quality with frame rate by optimizing models and setting up aggressive LODs, imposters, and culling distances, but thanks to nanite I don't have to worry about any of that. So, for this particular project, where I was already pushing my computer to the limit, nanite works great. But yeah, it does have overhead that needs to be taken into consideration and weighed up against what your fps targets are.
@@foldupstudios Nice, i just started about a year ago with UE and I am hooked. I am always amazed at what other creators are able to do with this software. Looking forward to more of your creations.
i Would add some 4D people in some of these shots specialy in the Sunset one with only the characters shadow showing, it will add hella realism to your render, Great job ! Wich Plugin did you use for the Water ??
@@JayEG784 I needed native New Zealand trees/plants that weren’t available in the megastars library. I tried using megascans as well as other marketplace assets, but because they are all mostly based on US or European species, it just didn’t feel like New Zealand when I used them.
Hi. This is not using the path tracer. It runs at around 25-50 fps on a 3090. Some of the trees have lots of masked materials that pull the fps down if you get too close (for example, the trees with small leaves at the 0:45).
I am doing something similar ,my shot look close to what have at sec 0.54. but even closer .like a drone shot over a lanscape full of trees .but my tree seems to pop or change shape ,its really strange and its only happeinng in some areas ,what could be the reason ?
I was getting some nanite popping in the shot at 0:06 on the copse of trees in the foreground. They would be lower res then pop to the higher res (even though they were nanite and not using LODs). It only happened when rendering. I couldn't figure it out though so just swapped the trees for non-nanite meshes for that one shot.
Hi, nice work, is this in real time? There's really a lot of vegetation in the background, how did you solve the performance issue? It doesn't look like the background is billboards, but I doubt the nanites can handle it.
It's all nanite. The forest going up the mountain is made up of trees with around 500k polys each. I didn't do anything special to optimize. I think my only secret weapon is having a 3090 so I have plenty of VRAM.
@@foldupstudios Speaking of which... what kind of damage to the VRAM are we talking about being used? My first interation of Oahu and I was burning 21GB... that was with many ships and building in Pearl Harbor. Once I optimized got it down to 10+ GB.
@@JDAeroVR Ha, yeah, it floats around 16-18GB. Most of the textures are 8k. This is for an animated series where the main characters are birds, so I need to be able to have high resolutions when the cameras get right down close to the assets.
Difficult to say. If its functionality is integral for your gameplay, I'd say yes as it would probably take you longer to rebuild it yourself. If you just want pretty water, it's probably not worth it.
![Virtual Bamboo Grove | UE5 [4K]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/AShGmWyFamY/mqdefault.jpg)
"MAKING OF" - we need this, please.
At least can you show how you created landscape with such detailed rock textures? Or its just separated meshes on it ?
This ain't video game graphics anymore, it's simply real life graphics :) truly unbelievable
Yeah just wait RTX 9090 and we can play game with this graphic.
@@AlFirous We will probably at some point, just give it some time.
@@AlFirous if the world still exist .
Awesome to see a bit of Aotearoa rendered out as beautifully as this is! As a UE animator based in Tāmaki Makaurau myself, it's so cool to see a local landmark recreated like this. Very much looking forward to what's coming next!
I’ve spent a day on that island 30 years ago.. Still remember those boulder bank beaches.. so impressive what you’ve built here. Top shelf. I’m amazed at what that engine can pump out in real time .. and super surprised that the Nz flora is there in megascans. Not taking anything away from your set decorating and art direction.
Thanks mate. Although, there isn't any NZ flora in the Megascans library unfortunately. I had to make the native stuff.
I just came back this week from visiting Te Ika-a-Māui so this really caught my eye. Hiking there I could see first hand how little of the visual richness of a dense natural environment is captured in a typical virtual environment. Nicely done!
This is honestly the best looking Unreal nature environment I've seen. Incredible realism and detail. Superb work Fold Up Studios!!
Wow, that's some high praise! Thanks dude
Totally agree !, my thoughts exactly !. I wish he can provide us with some insights or a making of.
Was waiting for Kramer to jump outta the bushes with this music selection... haha great render my dude!
This is incredible, I am one of the lucky people who have visited Hauturu and am blown away by your mahi, thank you so much for sharing
This looks incredible. Very well done to you I know the time and effort involved doing something like this
I would love it to take a stroll here.. now to think of it.. that could be a great niche market. A true walking simulator of real places.
Textures and lighting is really top notch
The colorgrading really helps with the realism, great work!
just beautiful...
This makes me homesick, and I live in NZ...beautiful work :)
Those waves! how? all of it, down to the music. very nice!
Thanks dude. Waves are done using Fluid Flux and "cheating" by comping in some extra foam in resolve.
its beautiful! i loved the sunset colors, lighting and a bit blurry looking.. very life-like, unreal :)
this is the most realistic environment ive ever seen in unreal 5, amazing work man!
Wow, thank you ☺
Nice!! I will never understand how people render vegetation this clean.
A lot of tweaking of the materials, like balancing SSS with direct lighting. Also some tricks like fading to a spherical normal map the further away from camera it gets.
@@foldupstudios have you considered doing a little behind-the-scenes for these topics ? :)
I'm doing environments inside UE and would really appreaciate your tutoring :)
@@foldupstudios A toturial on this would be great! Damn, beautiful work.
beautiful and inspiring work my brother!
Ka pai!
Wow.. Amazing
this is SEKAS!!Amazing work!
holly that first shot made me gasp
Amazing stuff!
Thanks Leo! I love your work
👏Excellent work! If it wasn't for that telltale unreal wind anim, this could be from a docu. Sooooooooo well done 🤙 you can see all your hard work you put into this. 👊
Chur this is impressive, I love unreal fr
Wow this is so so so good. I think if you want to take this up to the next level of realism you need to add some insects buzzing around and wildlife like birds. But that in no way diminishes what you accomplished with this.
@@Ryan1m Yeah, good call. I did originally have some flying birds in a few shots, and it definitely added some extra realism, but their movement drew the eye too much, distracting attention away from the environments, which I wanted to be the main focus.
Incredible, it looks so real.
Welcome to the matrix.
Oh my gosh.... amazing!
WOOW !!....das ist UNGLAUBLICH !!!!
I'm loving this music. Reminds me of the American DBZ soundtrack.
this is epic!
crazy good!
This is legit. I salute you
Astonishingly good
Speechless!
So many rocks
can we please get a build version / executable to try it ourselves? I would love to enjoy this on my big TV without any youtube compression :) My 4090 can't wait :P
This is insane!
Amazing work! would it be possible to have the native plants to buy? would love to have them.
No, sorry. I made the plants using SpeedTree and I think their license prohibits selling assets made in their software.
Wow i had no idea you could make UDS clouds look like this, looks great
Takes a while to get familiar with the various cloud controls, but once you do it's very versatile.
Absolutely stunning work! What lighting system did you use, HDRI, UDS, other? The lighting is so perfect. Congrats!
Thank you. I'm using UDS. It's great!
what does UDS mean?
@@kotn3l Ultra Dynamic Sky. fab.com/s/77a632ad8b62
Amaizing !!!!!!!!!!!
Nice work!
Wow nicely done!
awsome, congrats man realy nice piece o art
Virtual ISLAND is fantastic! it has a very clear picture without any ghosting or jitter, which means that this project has been set up very appropriately in MRQ, can you explain the exact parameters, and the console commands used?
Nothing special really.
- Anitaliasing: I'm just using TSR. Spatial Sample Count and Temporal Sample count both set to 1. Warm Up 64 frames.
- Game Overrides: Cinematic Mode. Texture Streaming set to Don't Override.
- Lumen: Using Hardware ray tracing for Lumen with Hit Lighting for Reflections. Default settings in the Post Process Material, except for Max Trace Distance which I needed to increase to get the island's reflection on the water.
- I'm not using any cvars for rendering
@ Thanks for the thorough reply, honestly these settings this is just as I imagined it would be, without too many fancy console commands, its already enough to output such a great picture!
magnificent.
Great quality!
amazing!
Solid setup and recreation. Using pathtracing in the sequence render? (Nvm, I just saw it's realtime) Very nice!
ultra masterclass!!! time rendering for this? or is pure real time?
Took about an hour to render 5,850 4k frames with Engine Scalability set to Cinematic.
@@foldupstudios Incredible!!! Unreal is really the future
i havent seen anything as good as this is really good i hope you make a tutorial some day for it nice work 👍
This looks amazing
Would love some tips on how you handled so much foliage and made it look good. I can't use ray traced shadows with foliage and it looks very bad, moving far from the foliage makes it look pretty terrible as well and I can only include so much grass before it disappears.
Would love some tips and tutorials about how to tackle these aspects.
Wowww amazing
This is great mate.
looks beautiful.. question: Ocean looks like Oceanology but waves look like Fluid Flux .. are those combined together in this this project or just one plugin?
Just Fluid Flux.
@foldupstudios nice 👍 I wanted to get this plugin but I remember that it doesn't support big areas and my project is big open world
I would be happy to pay 100+ dollars if available on steam or somewhere, just to roam around in this environment..
reality capture
looks amazing! was PCG used for the scatter? It's really well done.
Yeah, PCG for most of the scattering. The big rocks and logs on the beach were dropped using physics though, to get more realistic placement.
It is so perfect. Can you provide the engineering files for study or purchase?
Thank you! But no, sorry, I can't share the files because there are paid plugins in there that I can't share.
Truly amazing work!!👏
But seriously, how did you manage your Video memory with all those materials? My RTX 4080 would simply die. 😵💫
Virtual Textures! They are magic. Most of my textures are 8k or 4k, but when using Virtual Textures I barely even worry about them. I do optimize when appropriate though, e.g. I'm not going to keep an 8k texture on a tiny pebble, or I'll down-rez an 8k roughness map that doesn't have any fine detail etc
Damn bro, we need tutorial series from you
holy moly
Very Nice!
@@kegsfx8603 Thank you!
The enviroment itself is easy with what is available nowdays in Unreal but the lighting you did in those scenes ...pff nice job. Question is could you actually get that photorealistic lighting in a game or just in a render scene ?
I think it would be possible in a game. If you don't crank the Lumen settings too high, it runs pretty well.
did you model a lot of those assets yourself? i cant imagine there are many nz native trees etc on unreal marketplace of this high quality. incredible work. 👍
Yeah, I made most of the trees in SpeedTree, as well as a lot of the plants. I tried using various marketplace packs, or megascans trees, but when I used them, it really didn't look like NZ at all.
INCREDIBLE now i want to know how please make a breakdown i am begging you
Did you make this with the Film feature on Unreal? Or the Simulation setup? I'm wanting to create a VR experience with a nature vibe and I'm just getting started, but this is really inspirational, so I thought I'd ask! Nice work!
oops, I initially answered your question thinking it was asking about another video. Here's the proper answer for this video: This is a rendered cinematic, not an in game screen capture. It runs in editor at around 25-50fps, so you'd have to lower the resolution by quite a lot to get it to run smoothly in VR. Having said that, I didn't do much in terms of optimization. All the textures are either 4k or 8k, the trees are 500k polys, the plants don't have LODs etc. So there is potential to increase performance.
This is absolutely stunning! 🤩Would love to use this in a project🙂 Would it be possible to purchase or access the Unreal Engine source file? 🙏
Nah, it's not available sorry. I'm going to use it in a show I'm making. And I wouldn't be able to sell it anyway because of the plugins and megascans and stuff.
@@foldupstudios Thankyou for letting me know.. would you be available to collaborate ? We have a few projects in pipeline which could really use someone with your talents.. 🤞🏼🤞🏼
how many samples u used for.
None. Well, technically 1, but it's just straight TSR with no extra samples.
This is amazing! Fluid Flux 2.0?
Yep
Amazing job!! Very atmospheric and beautiful!! Please please do tutorial 🙏🙏🙏🙏🔥🔥
Amazing man. How did you start the work with the terrain mesh? did you use a hightmap or you simulated out the cliff faces in a separate program?
I started with real world height data, but it wasn't very good, so I ended up hand sculpting most of it in Unreal.
yikes that looks real.
Amazing work! could u share with us how did you make the sea/water and the grass ?
Thanks! The water is made using the Fluid Flux plugin, augmented with some compositing in Resolve. The grass is megascans grass scattered using Unreal's Landscape Grass system.
Augmented with resolve? How so?
@@xoart1 I think they mean they just composited some water foam into the video.
yup
Funky music
Amazing job! TYVM for sharing!
Just a question if I may. Just enabling nanite drops any project 50-100fps based on my testing. Does it actually worth it in the long run? Obviously you know your stuff so I though to ask since nobody actually mentions that enabling nanite drops sooooo much the FPS without even using it...
For this project I didn't notice a drop in frame rate when switching to nanite. It actually ran a little quicker, because my scenes have such a high number of assets. Before, I was trying to juggle quality with frame rate by optimizing models and setting up aggressive LODs, imposters, and culling distances, but thanks to nanite I don't have to worry about any of that. So, for this particular project, where I was already pushing my computer to the limit, nanite works great. But yeah, it does have overhead that needs to be taken into consideration and weighed up against what your fps targets are.
@@foldupstudios tyvm :)
A very cool job! Please make an instructional video
Great to see, but it would be much more interesting to see a video in realtime even though it might not look as flawless or cinematic.
bro need a full tutorial 🙏 of this video please
WOW, this is crazy. How long have you been doing this?
CG in general? Um, like, 23 years? Started messing around with CG in 2001 😳
@@foldupstudios Nice, i just started about a year ago with UE and I am hooked. I am always amazed at what other creators are able to do with this software. Looking forward to more of your creations.
what tree is that? reminds me of the flamboyant tree found in the island of mauritius
They are pōhutukawa trees
@@foldupstudios thanks!
I want the next Far Cry to be like this
i Would add some 4D people in some of these shots specialy in the Sunset one with only the characters shadow showing, it will add hella realism to your render,
Great job ! Wich Plugin did you use for the Water ??
Nice idea. I'm using Fluid Flux for the water.
what was the benefit of using speedtree instread over only using assets from Megascans?
@@JayEG784 I needed native New Zealand trees/plants that weren’t available in the megastars library. I tried using megascans as well as other marketplace assets, but because they are all mostly based on US or European species, it just didn’t feel like New Zealand when I used them.
Can try this demo?
wow ... I paid for a tutorial for that ...
Can you send me the course link? I'd love to. Thank you~🥰
That water and waves look amazing. What did you use to make it?
Fluid Flux + cheating. I composited some extra foam on top of the waves in Resolve.
@@foldupstudios Thank you! will try this myself
Path tracing + 4090: How many Fps if I may?
A part this, stunnig..
Hi. This is not using the path tracer. It runs at around 25-50 fps on a 3090. Some of the trees have lots of masked materials that pull the fps down if you get too close (for example, the trees with small leaves at the 0:45).
@@foldupstudios Thanks for your answer
I am doing something similar ,my shot look close to what have at sec 0.54. but even closer .like a drone shot over a lanscape full of trees
.but my tree seems to pop or change shape ,its really strange and its only happeinng in some areas ,what could be the reason ?
I was getting some nanite popping in the shot at 0:06 on the copse of trees in the foreground. They would be lower res then pop to the higher res (even though they were nanite and not using LODs). It only happened when rendering. I couldn't figure it out though so just swapped the trees for non-nanite meshes for that one shot.
@@foldupstudios and how did you solve the problem with flickering shadows in such dense grass?
Hi, nice work, is this in real time? There's really a lot of vegetation in the background, how did you solve the performance issue? It doesn't look like the background is billboards, but I doubt the nanites can handle it.
It's all nanite. The forest going up the mountain is made up of trees with around 500k polys each. I didn't do anything special to optimize. I think my only secret weapon is having a 3090 so I have plenty of VRAM.
@@foldupstudios That's really impressive. What is the FPS during the panoramas?
@@inversus1733 30-40fps.
@@foldupstudios Speaking of which... what kind of damage to the VRAM are we talking about being used? My first interation of Oahu and I was burning 21GB... that was with many ships and building in Pearl Harbor. Once I optimized got it down to 10+ GB.
@@JDAeroVR Ha, yeah, it floats around 16-18GB. Most of the textures are 8k. This is for an animated series where the main characters are birds, so I need to be able to have high resolutions when the cameras get right down close to the assets.
Is Fluid Flux worth it for Single Developer?
Difficult to say. If its functionality is integral for your gameplay, I'd say yes as it would probably take you longer to rebuild it yourself. If you just want pretty water, it's probably not worth it.
Can I know how did you do? The water? Is it fluid flux or a different one?
It's Fluid Flux
This is Path Tracing? Or lumen? Anyway amazing work!!
Thanks. It's lumen. Runs at an average of 30fps in the editor.
what's your pc requirements
I'm running a 5950x, 64GB RAM, and a 3090
how to render fluid flux simulation in levelsequencer
I didn't have to set up anything to get it to render with sequencer. It just worked.
Did you use any plugins ?
A few: Fluid Flux for the water. Ultra Dynamic Sky for the lighting/sky. Screen Space Fog Scattering for the fog/atmosphere.
Crysis 4 take notes
Wonderful job. This is path tracing right?
Nah, it's realtime 😎
@@foldupstudios Wow now it is even more impressive.
RTX 5090 Right ?