Building a Virtual Production Studio at College with Unreal Engine 4

[Music] um [Music] what was that what's up everybody my name is max i'm a photographer and videographer from germany and what you just saw is the project i've been working on for the past four months at college it's a virtual production studio which allows you to see your finished visual effects shots in real time on your camera monitor it's awesome because this allows you to actually change your composition or change stuff of the cg background while filming and you don't have to do it in post hollywood studios use this on nearly every production and now i'm going to show you how mine works these kinds of studios that combine cgi effects or backgrounds with real people real-time effects are known as virtual production studios and you need a couple key components to create them um also what i want to say is that the setup right now with the lights and the camera and how the motion tracking system is working is different from the intro that you saw mainly because somebody else was in this room and had to take it down so i had to rebuild some of them that gets us to the first key component which is a cinema camera with an sdi in and sdi out those are used to actually send the video signal to the computer and back to the camera with the done composite the camera would be tracked by the motion capturing systems that are surrounding us right now there are no um tracking points on the camera which usually would be on there as they were on the intro we also have the light setup these are right now for the science fiction set that i created in unreal engine which is the software that i use and it's mainly actually a game engine so used for gaming but it's becoming more and more usable for filmmakers as well because it now has real-time compositing you can see what happens on the monitor of the camera and of course lastly you need this thing a green screen yeah that's the last component um you have the lights for the green screen up top and that's basically what you need but how does it work so what happens is you film with this camera the camera has the motion tracking dots on it what happens next is basically the camera movement data is sent to the unreal engine on the pc while in real time simultaneously the camera feed is sent via these green cables these are sdi cables also to the pc into unreal engine in unreal engine you then create the composite which then is sent out back to the camera and you see the finished composite on the screen as a preview basically so you can change lighting or how the person walks or whatever i'll show you an example well here we have my lovely girlfriend anna in front of the camera and this is the camera that i'm using as mentioned it's the blackmagic mini versa we have our lights and now if we walk over to the monitor you'll see that she's actually in front of the cg background which is being put in real time and she's moving so everything's happening in real time we could change the lighting we could change whatever we would need an hour set here in front of the green screen to make it look more realistic the only thing that's not happening right now on the intro video we had the dots on the camera which is not the case right now so we can't track the movement which would have been the case while filming that's sadly right now not the case okay so that was the basic setup of my virtual production studio and show you a little glimpse of how it actually works in unreal i'm gonna take you with me in unreal it's a bit of a weird program if you've never seen it before but yeah let's look and dive into it a bit okay so now we're in unreal engine um and the main part that i want to show you is the plug-in composure which you have to use to actually create your composite which is over here there are way more other things that go into this you have to actually install way more plug-ins i'm thinking about doing a more in-depth tutorial but i'm not sure yet so we'll see about that in the future but for now i'm just gonna concentrate on composure over here and this is basically your after effects type thing in unreal engine and what you have is a composite which you can create with right click create and comp i have one up here already and then you can create or add new um elements to the composition by right clicking on a comp and then adding a layer element then you have a media plate or a cg layer the cg layer is the background you use the media plate is the green screen footage you use and you use transform passes to do the compositing um these are right here on the bottom right and one of them of course is the keying material which you use to key out uh the footage furthermore you can also actually add a d-spill transform pass and you can also add a color grading transform pass the color grading transform path is usable but it's not the best but by using these material passes you can actually create your composite which then is output with your main plate up here so you can see we have the background and the smoke which is my foreground if we go on to my fg foreground you can see that my background is the cg background and my media plate is the video feed and these are put together with the comp at the top and to do this though you need the material materials are a completely different thing in unreal engine and in game engines in general which i'm not going to go into quite as much but as you can see it uses nodes and for example here we have my background and it's put underneath my media plate which is the video feed and that's how it works and it is put into an output which is this node right and yeah that's how uh that's how compositing works in unreal engine basically you then have an output which sends it to the camera and you can see it on the camera monitor that's all done in engine and you can get footage out of it that looks like this [Music] in my opinion that's pretty awesome and the best part is technology will become easier to use and cheaper for everyone which means that you could actually do visual effect shots if you have a home studio i hope this was interesting and you liked the video and maybe it showed you a bit of behind the scenes of how stuff works how stuff works that should be the name of this youtube channel how stuff works i hope it's been interesting to see what i've been up to these past months and you liked the video bye [Music] now it's time for me to go back into the black void that i came from in my opinion and give the camera its mask back you

Channel: Max Müller

Views: 19,612

Rating: 4.9365077 out of 5

Keywords: Virtual Production, Unreal Engine, Mixed Reality, Virtual Reality, College, Uni, Hochschule Furtwangen, Greenscreen, Compositing, Live Compositing, Real Time Compositing

Id: eYCnxCGatOo

Length: 8min 23sec (503 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 10 2020