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New Niagara, Quixel, and environment building presentations released

June 3, 2020
Games
Niagara
Quixel
Epic is happy to announce the free availability of Building Advanced Effects in Niagara, Megascans in UE4: Photoreal Environment Creation, and Building Natural Environments in Unreal Engine—three presentations designed to empower developers looking to get the most out of Unreal Engine.

In Building Advanced Effects in Niagara, Chris Murphy covers the fundamentals of Niagara, Unreal Engine's new VFX system, and extends what begins as simple functionality into an advanced character disintegration effect. This presentation acts as a primer for new developers looking to create effects in Unreal Engine and provides a demonstration of the kind of advanced systems that developers can achieve in their own projects.

Please note that for this demonstration, a simplified version of the character Crunch from Paragon has been used. However, developers looking to do this themself can feel free to use any Single Material Skeletal Mesh.
 
In Megascans in UE4: Photoreal Environment Creation, Quixel's Galen Davis covers the fundamentals of the Megascans ecosystem in Bridge, Mixer, and the UE4 plugin. Viewers will learn how to bring Megascans content into the engine with a single click, re-texture existing scan data in Mixer, and create photorealistic worlds in real time.
 
In Building Natural Environments in Unreal Engine by Epic’s Paulo Souza, we use the power of Quixel Megascans to build a natural looking environment in Unreal Engine. By relying on the latest world-building tools in Unreal, we're able to quickly create a terrain leveraging its new Edit Layer functionality and sculpt it very quickly with the use of Landscape Blueprint Custom Brushes.

We also show techniques that can help you create interesting blending effects using Runtime Virtual Textures. At the end, we use the Procedural Grass system and the Procedural Foliage Placement tool to quickly add very natural looking vegetation to the scene.
 

    Looking for more learning content?

    We hope you enjoy these presentations and we invite you to visit our YouTube channel for even more content.
    You can also learn Unreal Engine for free with easy-to-follow video courses and guided learning paths with Unreal Online Learning.
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