Create EPIC Movies in Unreal Engine 5 - Filmmaking Series Part 1 | The Basics

hey everyone welcome back to the channel I hope you're having a fantastic day this is the very first part in my series on how to use Unreal Engine to create cinematic movie sequences first of all quick reminder you can use the chapters or the timestamps below to jump to anywhere in this video that you want so you can skip all of my Waffle why Unreal Engine well I've actually been using Unreal Engine for quite a few of my recent projects and Unreal Engine I hope that doesn't need to be said looks absolutely amazing if you've got a wealth stopped scene it looks photo realistic it's absolutely mind-blowing and Unreal Engine is being used for Hollywood movies and big budget TV shows such as the Mandalorian Unreal Engine is also absolutely free all you need is an epic games account which you can sign up for free and then either manage your games library or alongside all of your games you can download Unreal Engine and use it to create games or like me Tinker with visual effects and film projects now Unreal Engine also has a couple of downsides the main one I've experienced as a newbie when I first started is that is a rather complex program the interface can be overwhelming there's a lot of detail in everywhere so it can take a little bit to to get into but I'm making this series to hopefully make this really easy if you're just new to under engine you haven't used it before you've just tinkered a little bit hopefully this series will make it really nice and easy for you to get the most out of it now in order to work easily within Unreal Engine you also do need a pretty decent computer with a good graphics card but you can get started on very little and I'll drop you links to all of the information that might be relevant to getting started with Unreal Engine down below the video so you can go and check that out now in this part which is part one of the series I'm going to cover all of the very basics of unread engine how to get started how to get set up how to create your first Project work with objects light move things around how the interface works all of the bases that you need to start tinkering yourself with Android engine is going to be what I'll cover in this part but now I feel like there was plenty of waffles let's jump right into it foreign [Music] in order to use Unreal Engine you first need to install it on your computer for that head over to epicgames.com and click the big blue download button in the top right hand corner to download the epic games installer if you have all of that set up already even easier if not install the program launch it and then sign in with your free epic games account or create one if you don't have one already once you sign in on the left hand side of the epic games launcher you will find a tab for Unreal Engine click on that and you'll see a ton of information for Unreal Engine articles tutorials and more across the top of the interface you'll find a row of different tabs one of them called library in here you will find all of the versions of Unreal Engine that you have currently installed which is none for me as well as a list of all of your projects and any assets that you may have purchased on the Unreal Engine Marketplace you can click on the plus icon next to engine versions to install a specific version of Unreal Engine or simply click on the big yellow install engine button in the top right hand corner which will then install the latest version of Unreal Engine on your computer now this might take a while as Unreal Engine is pretty big but once all of that is done you can now click on the launch button on the specific engine version or click launch engine in the top right hand corner to fire up Unreal Engine you will now see the Android project browser where you can open up one of your recent projects or create a new one based on a number of different templates for Games Film architecture design or simulation let's jump into the film video and Live Events category and select the blank template on the right hand side make sure that you tick the check boxes for starter content and Ray tracing to make sure that your project starts out with some basic assets that we can use and the real-time Ray tracing is enabled at the bottom give your project a name I'm going with learning unreal in one word and then click create now unreal will create and set up your new project and this might take a little while for me around about five minutes but don't worry this only happens the first time you create your new project and then we're finally in Unreal Engine let's have a very quick look around the interface at the very top you will find the main menu bar and just like in any other program you'll find all of the most important operations for Android engine in here opening and closing projects managing the interface tools compiling your levels and more in the very center of the interface you will find a big 3D view where you can navigate around your 3D World and we'll get to all of that in just a moment over in the top right hand side you will find the outliner where you can see a hierarchical representation of all of the objects in your current scene below the outliner you will find the details panel where right now you can't see anything because we haven't selected anything yet so let's simply left click on the floor in our 3D View and now in the details panel you will see all of the properties of the currently selected object which is our floor at the very bottom of the interface you'll find a few hidden helper Windows the most important one you should probably know about is the content drawer that you can open up by simply clicking on it in here you'll find all of the scenes meshes materials textures sounds and other assets that are part of your project and from here you can then easily add them into your scene you can close the content browser again simply by clicking on the button again that was a super quick look around and don't worry we'll get to all of these a little bit more detail throughout this series let's move on to how to work with the big 3D view in the middle of the interface the 3D view shows you a rendered 3D preview of your final level if you click and hold your right Mouse button you can drag to look around the scene with your camera with the right Mouse button still pressed you can then use the wasd keys on your keyboard to move around the world and you can also use e and Q to move the camera up or down alternatively you can click and hold the left Mouse button and drag to look left and right or moving the mouse forward and backwards moves the camera forward and backward you can also click and hold the middle Mouse button and drag to strafe the camera around the scene you can select any object in your 3D World simply by left clicking on it and if you ever lost and looking for an object you can press the F key on your keyboard to focus in on the select object this is super useful if your camera is looking way off you can for example come into the outline in the top right hand corner select the object you want to see let's pick player start and then press F to focus your 3D view on it if you find your camera is moving too fast or too slow you can also adjust the camera movement speed up in the top right hand corner of this 3D view do note that the 3D view does not by default execute any game logic or run scripts and events to play this level press the Big Green play button just on the top of the 3D view you will be spawned at the position of the player start object and you can then move around the scene like you could before but and this is not really obvious right now as we have no game logic in our level just yet Unreal Engine will now also execute physics events and triggers and other game logic that you might have in your level to exit play mode simply hit Escape cool let's talk about creating objects in order to add objects to your level come up above the 3D View and select this icon here of a cube with a green plus icon that says quickly add to project in the pop-up that appears you'll find tons of different things that you can add to your level but for now let's come into shapes and select Cube this will add a simple Cube into your scene you can see a little arrow Gizmo in the center of the cube because we're currently in select and translate mode you can change your mode between select select and translate select and rotate and select and scale up here in the 3D view or highly recommend it just use the shortcut keys q w e and r in select mode you can only select objects in select and translate mode you can select objects and then click on the Gizmo and drag on any of the axes to move them around your 3D scene in select and rotate mode you can use the Gizmo to rotate the object and no surprise in select and scale mode you can use the Gizmo to scale your objects note that you can either drag a single axis off any of the gizmos but you can also scale in two axes or all three axes at once depending on where on the Gizmo you click also if you don't like the snapping that happens by default you can disable snapping for translation rotation and scaling up in the top right hand corner of the 3D view let's add a sphere to the scene by going to the quickly add to project button and selecting shapes sphere the sphere had added but it stuck underneath our floor so let's press F to focus on it in select and translate mode which you can enable by pressing W on your keyboard move the sphere up and then position it in your scene wherever you like I might scale it up a tad as well let's do the same thing and add a cylinder again it's tucked away a little bit so let's move it closer and higher and up might also rotate it a little bit shortcut R to get into rotation mode and that's not too bad you can also select multiple objects by holding down control on your keyboard and left clicking on the objects you can then move rotate or scale all of those objects together pressing escape with your cursor over the 3D view will unselect everything you can Marquee or box select a bunch of objects in your scene by holding down control and ALT on your keyboard and left click dragging in your 3D view again press escape to unselect everything and note that you can also select objects in the outliner and holding down control will select multiple objects let's unselect everything again and do something about our new objects looking all exposed and naked let's assign some materials to them for that click on the content drawer tab at the bottom of the interface and go to the starter content if the icons in the content drawer are a little bit too big in your folder view simply hold down control and scroll on your mouse field to make them a little bit smaller let's navigate into the materials folder in here you'll find a ton of nice looking materials that you can use as a starting point let's apply them to the objects in our scene and for that let me get the sphere a little bit better into view and the content drawer hides Away by default because you clicked outside of it no biggie simply click on it again to bring it up let's select the gold material and simply drag it from the contact drawer directly onto the sphere in your 3D view nice that looks great let's bring up the content drawer again and assign a steel material to the cylinder let's repeat this one more time and this time let's assign a burnished steel material to our Cube now if this constant hiding of the content drawer just drives you nuts you can open the drawer and select dock in layout in the top right hand corner this will pop up an independent floating panel for the contact drawer and you can move this around your screen to anywhere that you want and it won't collapse you can also drag this panel to anywhere in your interface and dock it right in for example let's drag to the bottom of the 3D view it's now permanently docked in here and you can simply click and drag on the borders to make it larger or smaller let's assign the material to the floor as well maybe this marble material cool that looks pretty nice let's click on the little X on our docked content drawer to hide it away again but feel free to keep it around if it makes you feel more comfortable let's talk about another way to apply materials and tweak many many more parameters of your objects using the details panel select the gold sphere in your scene in the bottom right hand side of the interface you can see that all of the properties of the sphere are now displayed in the details panel now Unreal Engine objects have a ton of properties and you can extend this to your heart's content with custom properties to control anything from Material properties to rendering game logic and more but let's stick to the basics for now you can quickly filter down the properties to specific categories using these pills at the top but for now let's simply select all at the top of your properties you will find that the transform and you can click and drag left and right in any of these values to adjust them so we can also reposition us here from here you can also type a value directly in here but let's leave that for now let's scroll down a little bit and you can now tweak a ton of properties in here for example sample what mesh is used for this object or what material is used and you can simply click on the value for the material property a little window will pop up and you can find the material you like directly in here by scrolling or type your search text at the top and then simply click on the material to assign it to your object and that's easy but I do much prefer the warming glow of the gold so I'll hit Ctrl and Z to undo that and then you can go down the list and dig through all of the properties and play with them and I highly recommend you experiment as much as you can to get familiar with some of these just for fun let's simply enable the simulate physics property on the sphere but nothing happens that's because physics are only executed when you play back your level so let's play our level back and oh there was something let's turn around and there's a big ball of gold rolling off the edge of the world bye bye ball okay let's hit escape to exit play mode and let's turn around our player start object so that when we do play the level we're actually looking at the objects as they are falling down let's all to move this player start object back a little bit further from where the objects will drop I think that should work just fine now let's also add physics to the other objects in our scene select the cube hold down control and select the cylinder as well and in the details panel you'll now see that it has multiple since we have multiple selected objects whenever you select multiple objects in Unreal Engine the details panel will display only the properties that are shared and common between the objects that you have selected both of these objects support the simulate physics property so let's enable that and let's hit play and now we can see all of our objects tumbled to the floor and roll around our 3D worlds and that is pretty cool lets it escape to get back to our normal 3D view as a last step in this part of the series let's check out the sky the lighting and the atmosphere now scene so that you know how to tweak it to your liking jump into the outliner and there's four objects in your scene that are relevant the atmospheric fog object controls the fog in your scene and the color and light absorption of the atmosphere if you click on the little eye icon in the outliner next to the atmospheric fog you can toggle its visibility on and off to see what it does in the details panel you can see all of the properties of the fog that you can adjust I won't go through all of these detailed settings here try tweaking the atmosphere height the relay scattering coefficient or the mie scattering scale and I have no idea whether I'm pronouncing this correctly and this will change the look and feel of your atmosphere but it might be a little bit hard to truly see the effects here since we don't have a terribly large scene set up yet next select the light source object this directional light represents the light coming from the Sun let's press F to focus on it and zoom in a little bit you can see that it's a directional light because it has a big arrow pointing in the direction of the light if you follow this Arrow backwards you can see the sun is positioned in the sky exactly where it needs to be to cast light in the direction defined by this light source if you rotate this light source you can see that the Highlight for the sun is moving in the sky but for some reason the sun is not and I'll get to the Y of that in just a second let's rotate the light source so the sun is just above the Horizon and let's zoom out a little bit so we can see our scene a bit better let's adjust the intensity of the light source as well to create a nice evening feel and now let's fix the sun being in the wrong spot for that select the skies here in your outliner the sky sphere represents the rendering of the sky the Sun the stars that surrounds your scene in order to fix the Sun not being in the right spot come into the details panel and click this update material checkbox enter some position and the light on the sky sphere update to match the settings of the light source that represents the light coming from the Sun you can also see this dependency because the directional light actor property on the sky sphere is set to our light source so the light of the sun is driven by the directional light if you select this light source object in your outliner and hit F2 to rename it let's call it sun light source and now reselect the sky sphere you can see that the directional light active property now says sunlight Source because it's referencing that particular light in our scene with the sky sphere selected in the details panel you can tweak a bunch of different settings for how your sky looks but by default a lot of them are simply determined by the position of your direct sunlight and that is because the colors determined by Sun position property is checked you can uncheck it if you want to but you can also still tweak things such as the cloud cover the cloud speed the star brightness and a ton more things so have fun and just play around with this let's select the Skylight in our outliner the Skylight represents the indirect light coming from the sky itself if you disable the visibility on this object our Scene goes completely black and that's because of the Steep angle of our sun Skylight if you rotate our sun Skylight around a little bit to point downward you can see the harsh Shadows that are now being cast by the sun alone enabling the Skylight adds indirect light coming from the sky itself and makes you see look much more realistic let's undo a couple of steps with Ctrl and Z so we can get back to our nice dramatic Sunset scene and to make sure that both yield sunlight source and your Skylight are enabled reselect the Skylight go into the details panel let's tweak the intensity scale a little bit but if you change your mind and you liked it just the way it was you can always click this reverse arrow on the right hand side of the property to reset the value to the default for now I'm simply going to tweak the color a little bit to something a little bit more evening appropriate finally and this is just personal preference I'm going to rotate my sunlight sauce a little bit again to get the Shadows back onto the ground I think it just looks a little bit more interesting that way and because this now changed the sound position let's reselect the skysphere and click the refresh material checkbox to update this guy to match and then I might also select the floor press R to get into scale mode and then select the handles between the X and Y axes to select both of those dimensions and drag and scale up the floor to stretch out a whole lot further cool I'm happy for now let's hit play and that looks pretty neat for 15 minutes of work finally if you bought that by these two round Mobile touch interface overlays that you can see when you play back your level you can simply disable them except play mode by pressing escape then come into the main menu select edit project settings at the very top search for Mobile in the search bar and then disable always show touch interface now when you play back your level those controller overlays are gone and you can see your first Unreal Engine project in its full Glory and that's all there is to it I really hope you enjoyed this video and if you do want to support me absolutely for free give this video a like subscribe it really makes a big difference all comments questions or suggestions that leave them down below the video and with that thank you very much for watching and until next time I will see you later [Music]

Channel: Surfaced Studio

Views: 8,077

Keywords: Unreal Engine, Cinematic Movies, Filmmaking, Tutorial, Beginner, How to create cinematic movies, Unreal Engine Filmmaking, Tutorial Series, How to use Unreal Engine, Help, Unreal Engine 5, Surfaced Studio, Basic Filmmaking, Visual Storytelling, How to create videos, Materials, How to create objects in Unreal Engine, Unreal Engine Interface, Epic Games, Unreal Engine for Beginners, Basics, Instructions, How to, Cinematic, Animations, Movie Sequence, Animation, Animated Sequence

Id: cvfz2WK4CUI

Length: 18min 29sec (1109 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 25 2023