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in a video I made a few months ago I 3D scanned My Old Reliable ax and I made these three shots in Unreal Engine 5. now a lot of you asked me to make a video about how these shots were made so here it is I'll show you my workflow and process from start to finish from the 3D scanning part to mesh cleanup and texturing to fleshing out the environment in Unreal Engine 5 lighting rendering and color grading as always now full disclosure this video is sponsored by capturing reality and I use reality capture to scan this ax I have many tutorials on 3D scanning but this time around the process was a little bit different reason being the act itself has many different material types a well-aged wooden shaft high carbon steel a leather sheath with brat rivets so I wanted to make a high quality asset that rendered cleanly in Unreal Engine because I knew this was going to be a close-up shot and when you're doing a hero shot like this the 3D models need to hold up to a whole lot more scrutiny so step one scanning the ax itself with the help of photogrammetry to make my life a whole lot easier to not have to you know move the camera around so much I mounted the ax on the ceiling with a rotatable arm that way the camera can stay fixed on a tripod and all I need to do is spin the ax at five degree increments and taking photos from every angle the chonker camera rig you see here is a cross polarized setup the purpose of this Flash and filter is to cut out all Reflections on an object giving you a very matte look which is ideal for photogrammetry because you need consistency between photos and when you have reflection node Reflections shift and change based on view angle right which is no bueno once a loop is done I lowered the camera and shot another loop until all angles of the ACT were shot with the photo taken I hopped into reality capture aligned the cameras as you'll see here we get a point Cloud preview of what the ACT would look like and generated a 3D model based on those photos now I did run into one issue and that's the shininess of the edge of the blade itself looking closely here even with a cross polarized setup it's really hard to remove Reflections on some near chrome-like metal and on top of that there is just not much in the way of feature point it's too smooth too polished to mirror-like you'll see that the result is not great that polished metal needs to scan in this area will not turn out well unless I use this stuff a sub scanning spray which is kind of magical and what it does is it covers a surface with texture allowing you to scan your object and get better cleaner result but the best part is it just Fades away over time on its own there's no need to clean it off it it kind of blows my mind so that allowed me to get a much cleaner scan to work with now it's still not perfect I brought it into zbrush for polishing and read apology for adult unaware re-topology is the process of cleaning up your mesh going from this kind of wireframe to this to get a cleaner topology again you can see that entire workflow in this video right here link below so I don't bore you with the details now I actually repeated this whole process twice one version with the letter sheet and one without then using a Boolean operation zbrush I was able to get a proper separate piece of geometry for the sheet itself giving me clean overhangs and a slightly more realistic look it's really nice to have granular control over a separate piece of the Geo like that now bringing the polished model back into reality capture then I generated the textures from the photo taken which we get for free as part of the photogrammetry process that provides a good foundation to work from but really only the base color that we get the Albedo map I needed to bring this texture into substance painter because we need to ensure proper physically based material definition between the various types of surfaces wood Steel leather and Brass like I said the base color and normal matte texture we get out of reality capture is fantastic working painter however just allows us to push this even further with our model exported our textured exported out of Southern painter Now's the Time to jump into Unreal Engine 5. with unreal open the first thing I love to do is to set up a basic daylight system using the environment light mixer and in just a few clicks we've got a fully Dynamic sky and clouds totally free which helps us see what we're doing I like doing it because I don't like working in a black void so having a decent lighting setup to work with is a good starting point now after that first step in creating any shot is establishing the composition the framing setting up the camera early on really this should be roughly one of the first things you do place your subject in the frame place a camera and get that composition nailed down before you start spending any time fleshing out your Heen you want to start working on only the things the camera will see there's no point in spending hours making a beautiful level only to realize that most of your hard work isn't even going to be in the frame you get the point then I just move my directional light in the rough Direction I want it to come from to establish the initial lighting pass but because my end goal here is to render a top quality no exceptions kind of image I went with unreal path Tracer which is simply put a no BS Brute Force approach to rendering the path Trader sacrifices all performance and throws it out the window for the sake of Maximum quality and that's what I wanted for this shot now when I'm working and moving assets around I do turn the path Tracer off but when I'm testing things out and getting a feel for the lighting that is when I switch it on I've made a tutorial on the patches are here which was in ue4 but I'll be making an updated one soon so be sure to subscribe so you don't miss that when it comes to detailing a level this is going to sound silly but a lot of it boils down to opening up the Crystal Bridge finding the assets you need and adding them to your project I'd like to spend a good half hour or so building a good library before doing anything and from there kit bash away My Philosophy is to start with the big shapes like establishing the ground larger rocks and trees plant there's no need to dive into the details yet that comes later don't get bogged down into the details too early now because I'm using the patch Tracer I can't make use of nanite which is unreal's way of handling literal billions of polygons on screen at once because nanite isn't quite real geometry so to speak it's what we call virtualized geometry and that is not supported by the patch razor at least not now so as crazy as it seems when I'm using Unreal Engine 5. I needed to go disable nanite all the objects on the models I wanted to use in the shot just be careful because that can put a lot of strain on your graphics card now with this wide open patch of ground it's still really not feeling like a forest right from there it's just a matter of adding relatively larger scale foliage bushes Shadows cast by larger trees that make it feel like a forest floor because this is a pretty close up there is no need to bring in actual large trees I just scaled up these bushes here so they cast shadowed on the ax area all we need our thermody busy pattern Shadows a kind of filtered light look right from there it is a process of experimentation moving the sunlight around trying to find an angle that looks nice and adjusting the tree Shadow casters accordingly it's definitely a bit of trial and error here now this next part is kind of all part of the magic sauce so far you might think I'm really oversimplifying things but this whole process is the easy part find reference go outside pay attention to detail notice the little things notice how to graph grow between rocks notice the difference in the frequency of detail small high frequency details and larger lower frequency details make sure your rocks are not all the same scale you want variation but variation in a way that makes sense I see students of mine painting rocks everywhere with the foliage tool they go nut with scale variation but it's never going to look good this way because the randomness is too even too consistent again look at referent and notice patterns and how Pebbles and sand and mud blend together it's really going to open your eyes as to how things look and feel natural reference is key do not try to make things from memory your brain will lie to you and your Arc will suffer as a result let me explain to you why I'm talking about this take this large Rocky pebbly Mega scans model for example you don't need to use this at a one-to-one scale a little trick or a hacker call it whatever you want that I like to use all the time is to take this bad boy and scale it way down and duplicate it across the ground like this then rotate it to break up the repeating tiling pattern and boom we have a sand like ground no landscape mesh no complex blending material no displacement thanks to the Past tracer you just know it's going to look good that is the kind of detail that is much trickier to nail down with Lumen and nanite because nanite doesn't really render polygons that are smaller than a pixel and you miss out on that sub pixel detail that is why I often opt for path raising take this comparison of the exact same scene one rendered with the patch Tracer and another with Lumen and nanite the different in Shadow and Global elimination detail is day and night no pun intended hey so future will here I just want to take a moment to say that I am not hating on Lumen here this comparison is a testament to how good Lumen has become but at a beacon fee path racing is King when it comes to Max quality lastly it's all about the attention to detail the final touches adding leaves and twigs and very small details that make a complete world of different when it comes to that last little five percent this is the part that people often Overlook or just don't push hard enough or just don't have the eye to notice these things here's a quick before and after it's a subtle change but it really ties the whole piece together you can also use the details to hide imperfections it's kind of a win-win with that done before rendering I decided to have a little bit of fun just to try some different times of day I went for an overcast feel and a nighttime shot really this is purely creative work having fun with the various lighting tools and unreal I recommend watching my dedicated lighting tutorial right here to learn the basics as there are a hundred ways to light a shot and all of them are valid you just need to know what you're going for and a tool available to you for the overcast day I simply use a skylight with an hdri found on hdri Haven and for the nighttime shot it's really just the bluish directional light and I added a point light to simulate campfire with our shots done now we move on to the rendering and color grading phase so I'm going to be rendering these out at Max quality using the movie render queue here we can determine the resolution we want the console variables we want and the anti-aliasing or sampling settings in the post profit volume under the path rating tab I'm going to disable the denoiser because I will denoise myself in DaVinci Resolve but we're going to get into that real soon in the movie render Cube be sure to delete the Deferred rendering Tab and add the patch rating tab instead because we want the path Tracer always render in 16-bit exr to get the highest bit depth which gives us flexibility in post in color output be sure to disable the tone curve and under anti-alia thing override anti-aliasing should be checked set a a method to none and with the path Tracer 16x16 is a good starting point troubleshooting pass rate renders is really easy if your shots are noisy you need more samples that's all there is to it in the output tab is where I determine my desired resolution and in this case I want 4K when you're ready hit that render local button and wait the patch Tracer is way slower than a deferred renderer so go make a sandwich or something and come back later six hours later now I've talked about this in many videos I even have a whole video dedicated to color grading intervention resolve but really this part of the process is where you really make your renders shine color grading is entirely subjective what one person might like another person won't there isn't a good or bad way to grade it's all about taste and getting the look you want I don't want to spend too much time on nitty-gritty here because again I've made two whole videos on color grading and resolve already the one thing I do want to show you however is denoising in resolve because the past Tracer by nature is going to be substantially grainier than when you use the Deferred rendering in the free version of resolve select your imported clip and go to the fusion page press shift space and add the noise reduction tool from there your denoise setting will be on the right if you own the 300 studio version of resolve you can add the noise reduction in the color page which is by far my preferred way of working I generally don't really enjoy using Fusion so here the quick before and after of each of the three final renders I did you may or may not like the direction I took and that's okay but that being said I hope you found this video helpful I hope I was able to shed a little bit more light on my rendering workflow thanks so much for watching and as always happy rendering