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Greetings and welcome.
In this video we are going to take a look at some of the available View Modes and Show
flags that are found within your Viewport.
We won't going over each and every single one of them, frankly because there's a whole
lot of them and you probably won't need them all when you start out.
But it's good that you know that they're here so that you can start experimenting and using
them as you get more and more familiar with Unreal Editor.
If you take a look in your Viewport you'll see a little menu that starts off with the
name Lit - and that's actually your View Mode menu.
By default, you get the Lit mode, which shows you the result of all of your materials and
all of your lighting.
It's by far the prettiest way to look at your environment.
But some of the other View Modes that you may find yourself needing from time to time
include Unlit - which just shows you the color information from your materials and none of
that lighting information, as you can see here.
Let's also jump down here at take a look at Wireframe.
As the name suggests, this shows you all of the polygon edges available in your scene.
Keep in mind that on really dense scenes, if you have a lot of polygons, this will start
to get pretty busy.
Moving down from here we have Detail Lighting - this shows you just the lighting, but also
the result of any normal maps that may be in your scene.
Alright, now I have (pretty much) objects that have no normal maps, but let's see if
we can change that.
I'm going to jump into my Materials folder and we've got some Rock materials here.
Let's just grab the one at the bottom - M_Rock_08 and drop that in.
That's going to take just a second to process and there we go.
There's no color information here, but we can see the result of the normal map.
To contrast that, if I switch to Lit mode, you start to see that color coming back into
place.
Some of the other more importing Lighting Modes that you're going to use would be the
Reflections - which is going to show you the result of any reflections in your scene.
It's a nice way to diagnose what reflections are there.
Of course there are some that we're not talking about.
Things like Light Complexity and Shader Complexity.
We're not going to stress those at the moment.
That's a good look at some of the View Modes.
The purpose of the View Modes is just a way to take a look at your scene from several
different aspects - particularly for diagnosing certain problems.
When I say "certain problems", I mean if you're just not getting the look that you want, you
can start analyzing from different angles; if you just want to see what lighting is doing...that
sort of thing.
I should also mention that we are making use of Exposure, by default in Unreal Engine 4.
Down here at the bottom you'll see Exposure currently set to Automatic.
A good way to show that off would be if I move the camera right in here to this dark
area underneath the table and we give the camera just a second to adjust, when we fly
back out, it was probably really hard to see on the video, but it's kind of like an eye
adaptation.
When you go from a dark area to a light area, the scene will be very, very bright and then
it'll even back out.
It's like active adjustment of your eye as you go from one lighting environment to the
next.
I mention it because if you're building your own environments, particularly if you're building
areas that are dark and areas that are light, it may be a good idea to temporarily turn
that off or lock it at zero so that you get a real sense of what that brightness is without
things automatically adjusting.
Here you can see that things look pretty bright, but as soon as I turn Exposure back on to
Automatic, there's a very subtle dimming that happens.
To really show it off, we could take our Brightness...and here's super bright - this is what the Exposure
would do if we were in a very dark area.
And if we're in a very bright area, it can go all of the way down to here as well.
The idea is, during gameplay, you'll leave this on Automatic and it'll automatically
update as you move between dark and light areas.
Moving over from here we have the Show flags list.
This allows us to show and hide a lot of things.
For the most part, this list is pretty self-explanatory.
You can turn on and off things like anti-aliasing or any atmospheres, any BSP brushes, etc.
and so forth.
Some common ones that you may find yourself are the Grid - We see the Grid receding out
into the distance, we can go under Show and turn that off and hide that away so it looks
like we're floating on a sea of emptiness.
In fact, it's kind of scary, so let's go ahead and turn that back on.
And then we can also show and hide a variety of other features - all of the different aspects
of Post Processing, various Lighting Component results, etc.
As you start flipping through these you'll see a lot of these are on and off.
By default, if you start playing with them to figure out what they do and you suddenly
feel lost or you feel like there's something that you can't see any more that you should
be able to, remember at the very top you can click Use Defaults and that'll set everything
back to the way it was.
For instance, If I turn off Static Meshes, we turn off the Grid and we turn off any atmosphere;
I guess that's really enough because now our scene is completely black and is really scary.
We can go under Show and click Use Defaults and that'll put everything back to those default
settings.
Definitely keep an eye on that setting.
That is a quick, down and dirty, look at the various View Modes and Show flags just to
give you an idea of the existence of those modes and generally what they're here for...same
with the Show flags.
That's going to wrap things up for this video.
Thanks a lot.