Creating C4D Live Title Sequence in Unreal Engine & Cinema 4D NAB 2020

so first off i wanted to thank maxon for having me here for c4d live i'm excited to be with you guys here for today for those that don't know my name is jonathan winbush i'm a motion graphics artist i've been working out here on the west coast since about like i mainly work in television movies i've done some stuff in virtual reality basically if it has a screen on it i'm designing and animating for it and within the past year i've actually started up a youtube channel just kind of sharing like the knowledge that i've acquired over the past decade or so and most recently i've been really working with cinema 40 and unreal coming up with a workflow and how to integrate the two together and so that's what my presentation is going to be on today but first let me show you guys my body of work so i'm gonna kick this off with my demo reel [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] so [Music] [Music] so [Music] all right so before we get started it wouldn't be an official winbush tutorial without a what up what up wimbush here and today i'm excited to show you guys how i made this now if i bring my desktop up and we scrub through this video here i'm going to show you guys a couple of things here so this tutorial is all about how to bring cinema 4d into unreal and so for this first scene here i have this water sphere going off inside of there so in particular i'm going to show you guys how to do this part right here how to bring x particles into unreal and then if i scroll forward we have this scene here which is my favorite part is sequence is this neon synth wave city scene so i'm going to show you guys exactly how i took a kick bash from pixel labs brought that into cinema 4d use mograph cloner to build this whole city scene out and then i brought everything into unreal so i'll show you guys how to do that but first i'm going to show you guys how to build out this scene right here this is the easiest one and the most simplest one to kind of show you guys like get your feet wet on how to bring cinema 4d into unreal it's a real simple like neon space tunnel that we fly through until we get to the end and so i'm going to start off with this scene here let's get everything kicked off with cinema 4d so i have this opened up i'm using version r21.2 which is the latest version as of now so i'm going to start off by opening up that scene there and what i have right here is i have a kit bash model from a sci-fi kit that i got off of art station and so just to break it down it's real simple i have a center piece here i have two end pieces here and then i have two light panels here that when we um put our materials on here it's actually going to shine through these holes here and so the first steps we want to do is i'm going to show you guys how i textured this so that the textures could properly be imported into unreal engine and so down here in the left hand corner lower left hand corner i'm going to just double click with my mouse and then i'm gonna make this first material let's make this one sci-fi blue so i just named this scifly blue if i double click on it open it up here i'm gonna first start off by picking my blue color so i'm going to come over to rgb i already have my attributes written down that i used but usually if i'm picking colors i just come over here to spectrum and i'll start picking them on here i like using the gradient tool over here to pick my colors but like i said i already have my colors already written down so for my blue for my red i'm going to go zero for my green i'm going to do 122 and for my blue i'm going to do 114 there we go and that's the blue color that i picked and then i'm going to come down to reflectance and what i'm going to do here is i'm actually going to click remove so the default specular i don't want that and what i found is whenever i come in add like a ggc or wizard ggx it imports better into unreal i found if i use the default specular it doesn't always give me the uh desired results in there and so i usually come in do ggx and then for right here where it says layer one i'll bring it down to like one or two percent and that usually gives me enough gloss for whenever i bring it into unreal it looks pretty decent in there and that's all i have to do for that one is so i'm just going to make a duplicate of this material here so i'm going to hold down left control my keyboard i'm on pc by the way so hold down left control then left click and drag over let me double click this so i've just made a copy of my material here and i'm going to name this one sci-fi white even though we're just going to pick an off-white color so since this is a copy i don't have to do anything to the reflectance channel here i'm going to come up to color and i'm actually going to type in my rgb attributes here so i did kind of like uh off-white i did like 118 all the way down there we go so it's a little bit of off-white i guess a grayish color and so now i'm gonna just click and drag these where i want these to be materialized and there we go that's my outer shell of my sci-fi panel so now i'm going to work on my light panels here so i'm going to just double click make another material and i'm going to name this one neon blue and then i'm actually going to turn off my color and my reflectance channel and i'm going to turn on my luminance channel so the one cool thing about the luminous channel is it does gets translated into unreal as an immersive channel in which i'll show you how to um how to work that out when we get into unreal and so we don't want to miss with our brightness inside of cinema 4d because unreal gives us complete control over this functionality and it turns out looking really cool and so all i'm going to do here is pick the color that i want so again i'm just going to go to rgb and for my neon blue for the red i'm gonna go zero for green i'm gonna do 183 and for blue i'm gonna leave it at 255. then i'm just going to drag these onto my light panels here like so so the next step from here is i want to add a mograph cloner to make a clone of this object and then we'll be able to turn the scene out with another cloner so we're going to have a cloner within a cloner that kind of built our tunnel up so i'll show you guys exactly what i mean here so first i'm gonna come under mograph come under cloner and then i'm gonna drag my panel under here under my cloner and you can see now it's making the linear stack here which we don't want first we want to make this into a radial image and then we'll make our linear stack on our second cloner so let me show you exactly what i mean i'm going to click on cloner here and under object if i look at mode right now it's on linear if i click on radial it actually radials it out make it into like a circular motion but i don't want it pointing that way so i'm going to come under coordinates let's make this one 90. so now we're getting the starter of our panel here or of our tunnel here so i'm gonna click back on object i'm gonna leave my cone at five let me expand this out a little bit maybe around there maybe like 79 and then i want to make these panels a little bit larger so i'm going to come under transform and then under my xyz i'm going to just add 0.5 to each one of these so they're going to end up being a 1.5 something like that and now the next step is i want to make a clone of this to extend out into our scene so actually let me name this one cloner panel 12 so i'm just naming this so i know exactly what this cloner is and then let me come back under mograph make another cloner and i'm going to drag this cloner under this one and again it made a linear stack of it and so what i'm going to do is come under objects i'm gonna leave it at linear but let me come under here where it says y i'm gonna bring that down to zero and then under coordinates here we go i'm gonna make this 90 somewhere around there then come back under object and i believe it's on the y let me see yeah somewhere around there so i want to extend this out maybe to about there so you can see that we made a clone of our clone and if i make this count up to like 16 you can see that it's really going to go across the field here which i'm not sure what happened to my scene there you go so if you ever lose yourself in the viewport if you click h that should bring you back into a good position just if you get lost like that cool so you can see that we have our tunnel built out now so now i'm going to build like the outside shell which is pretty much just a tube so if i click on this and then i'm going to come down to orientation make it positive z so now you can see my tube is facing in the same direction here so i'm going to go inner radius just make that 90 so it's not extruding our tunnel here at all or our panels here at all and then i'm going to extend the height maybe by like 5 5000 there we go somewhere around there then i'm going to click on my cloner and i'm just going to drag this to the beginning of my tube here like so there we go somewhere around there is looking pretty good so if i look down my tunnel you can see now we have like our our sci-fi panels inside of our tunnel here and if we want to offset this a little bit so it doesn't look just linear going all the way down if i come under my object tag and i no that's not the right one there you go so right here under h if i move this you can see it's starting to twist and turn it a little bit just to kind of offset it so it's not so linear going down the tube there you can see it's not exactly circular so i'm gonna have to add some more segments in here so i believe it's my height segments all right cool so the next step from here is let's start building out our material for our tunnel so i made a new material i'm gonna name this one tunnel outside let me double click on this to bring it up so for my color i come under rgb i'm going to do like a a blackish color here so let's do maybe i'll click on rgb let's do 46 somewhere around there then again i'm gonna come to remove before i remove the default specular come to add added gdc or jdx sorry then come down make this like two percent and then on this one i'm actually going to add a normal channel here it kind of give it some textures in here let me click and drag this normal map over here click no then i'm going to drag this onto my tunnel and then i click on my material over here and you can see where it says projection i'm actually going to make it cubic and then for my length i'm going to do 25 and 25 for the u and the v like so and there is our basic tunnel there and then one last thing is we need to add some type of end cap here so that we can go into the white light so i'm gonna come back under here under where my primitives are click on disk let me drag this out over here so i have my disk here and for orientation i'm going to go positive z and make it upright i don't really need to add any segments i'm just going to cap it off here but i do need to make a material for it so i'm going to make a copy of my neon blue just name this one white and just add neon white double click on that click on my luminance channel then i'm just going to make this one pure white click and drag it onto here and there we go so now we have that capped off there and i already have my camera put into my scene here but basically this is just the default cinema 4d camera nothing fancy going on i just have a key frame at the start in the beginning i mean at the start and the end so this scene is around 90 frames at 24 fps so if i click play you can see we're going to the end of the tunnel here and you can see that we're doing a little rotation here as well so if you look on my rotation keyframe in here if i scroll through this you can see i just have it rotating at like 180 degrees there so if i click back at the beginning and click play then boom and so if i want to bring this into unreal what i'm going to do is let me stop this so you want to come up the file and then come down to save for or save your project for cineware and so this is something that's new in version r21 if i was using version r20 and i believe 19 it's called save formal launch but it has the same principles behind it so we want to click here where it says save project for cineware and then i'm going to find my ue4 folder and so this is um actually let me go back so i have my scene here called nab tunnel underscore cinema 4d and the way that i usually organize my project when i'm going to be working in unreal is i like to label it at the end on that particular program that i'm using so i usually build everything out in cinema and so that would be underscore c4d and then when i'm ready to export it out for cineware i would do ue4 for unreal engine 4. like so and i'll show you exactly why now so if i click on save i'm going to let this save out here so let me find where i save that out at right there so you see nab tunnel underscore ue4 but if you look at the type it's a c4d file and so next i'm going to open up my epic launcher so we have two ways to actually get into unreal if you made a shortcut for unreal engine you could just click on so but i want to show you guys the epic launcher because this is what you'll first see whenever you get into unreal and in the upper right hand corner you'll see launch unreal engine let me click on this and now it's going to start up unreal engine and the first thing you're going to see is going to pop up with some templates here and then i'll kind of walk through these templates for you guys just so you kind of see what's going on okay so this is what pops up whenever you launch unreal and down here this is something that's actually new a version of 4.24 they have these these new project categories before when you open up unreal like it's basically a game engine so this was the only um this is the only category that they had previously so if you click on next you can see that we have a whole bunch of different templates to get you started off like if you wanted to make like a first person shooter or if you wanted to make like some type of driving game like these are the templates that you would use to get you started off they even have one for vr or usually for like most of graphics artists like myself we would just usually start off with a blank slate but it still gave us like a bunch of stuff that we didn't really need like if i click next it gives us a whole bunch of different project settings like if you wanted to use blueprint or if you actually want the code by hand we have a ray tracing option here i want to go back and show you guys that they actually added this category in here too and this is for artists like us so it's called film television and live events so if i click on this you can see that they really simplified it we're just going to start off with a blank slate so let me click next and then same thing here it's it's simplified it down to just two options here so do you want starter content or don't you want starter content oh and um if you have a video card or a graphics card excuse me that could use raytracing you can actually enable it straight from the start so you don't have to mess around with any menus like you've had in the past and then down here all you have to do is select where you want to save it at and so i already have a folder here called ue4 double click on that select folder and then for project name i'm going to just do nab underscore tunnel and you don't um you always have to have something in there like i usually use underscore like if you try to hit spacebar you can see it says projects names may not contain any space so i usually just get away with doing an underscore like so and then we're good to go so we're just going to click on create project and we're going to get started up in the royal engine okay so now we have unreal engine open you can see over here we have some things that get us started off we have a floor we have player start which is actually if we click play here this is where we're going to start at in the scene so if you're doing like your interactive experience it works just like if you're playing a video game with your keyboard or mouse so wasd you move around like that but we don't need that because we're making a cinematic experience so i could delete my player start and then i'm going to actually delete my floor as well and then over here let's see down here in the lower right hand corner this is usually something that pops up here like it says project file is out of date we recommend that you update it just click update and then over here where it says new plugins are available that's because i have some third party plugins in here and so i have like the azure media player blackmagic player and then mega scans which if you have an epic account you get the mega scans library completely free let me show you guys how you would import stuff so you want to click on built-in like i already have it permanently installed right here but it's called the data smith plug-in and this is what you're going to need to bring your stuff from cinema 40 into unreal but if you don't see this here like usually when you first start off you're not going to have this here all you have to do is go to built-in come over to search and type in c4d and then you'll see data smith c for the importer and all you have to do is enable it and once you hit enable a little box down here will say that you have to restart your scene and so every time you do that all you do is hit restart it's pretty fast it's going to enable it it's going to open it up to our default setting like so so to kick this off let me get you started by clicking data smith and then i just have to find that cineware file that i saved out before so i'm going to go under my project files ue4 there we go click open and then this is going to ask us what folder we want to save it in i usually just save it in the content folder and if you come down here in the lower right hand corner where it says content browser this is where everything's going to show up at you can see that we have the content folder right here so i'm going to click ok and then depending on how big your file size is sometimes this is going to take a little bit to process everything but this usually is the next menu that pops up it's the data smith import options and so i'm going to bring everything in my geometry my materials my lights my camera and my animation and then if i click on this down button we have some static mesh options but i never mess around with these at all i just leave these at default so let me click import and now it's going to start importing our files and like i said before depending on your file size sometimes this could take a few minutes and so you definitely want to try to keep your file sizes small and so what i like to do is like with the city scene i'll show you here in a minute so like i built out my um i put out my scene and then i added some pieces in later just so i didn't have like a completely huge file whenever i'm importing okay so now we have the tunnel scene opened up here in unreal engine let me click down here where it says content and so you see it made a folder here and it's just named what we named our cineware file so nab underscore tunnel underscore ue4 so if i double click on this you can kind of see everything is separated into these different folders so we have our texture file which is just the normal file for our tunnel and then if i click usually nothing comes under temp at least not that i've seen and then materials this is our materials that we had from cinema 4d and i can actually do this now if i double click on this neon blue you can see that if i scroll this out so you guys can see a little bit better right under here it says emissive glow strength so let me pull this over here so you guys can see what's going to happen so if i start pulling it over to the right you can see in our tunnel you can see that starting to get brighter in here and it's all happening in real time let me click save here cool and then you'll notice too whenever you import a scene it says that lighting needs to be rebuilt i'm going to show you guys how to do that here in a second but let me go through the content folder and so down here we have our geometry as well and so you notice that each piece of our um our kit bash model here is all brought in separately so let me pull this down so you guys could kind of see side by side with cinema 4d so if i pull this over and look in our world outliner let me pull this up you can see that whenever we take stuff from cinema 4d especially if we're using the mograph cloner there's no mograph module inside of unreal engine so what it does is basically everything that was in the mograph cloner like we only have one object here and it's being cloned several times inside of cinema 4d but inside of unreal it's actually whenever it's translating it has to take each one of those clones that makes it its own geometry so you have to be careful about that as well whenever you're using a mograph cloner because as you can see over here in a world outliner it's actually bringing everything in as its own individual piece so say like you had a thousand objects in here that you used inside your cloner it's actually going to make a thousand individual pieces here in a row outliner if that makes sense so you're seeing it get pretty crazy pretty quickly if you're not careful with that ahead of time so if i scroll these all down like so you can see that these are all from that original cloner there so if we count these out there's actually 16 of them and remember in our cloner here we had 16. and so just showing you guys that and then what else do we got here let me show you the sequencer so if i come over to my animation tab this right here that has the clipboard this is called the sequencer so if i double click on this it brings me over to my sequencer window which is pretty much like a nle built inside of unreal engine so if i come over to perspective let's do a cinematic viewport and then come down to my camera so we're looking through the eyes of our camera if i start scrolling this is our animation that we had from in cinema 4d so once you do a cinematic viewport it'll actually bring up your timeline animation cues down here so you have the play button and it's starting to play through like so and that's um that's basically how easy and fast it is to bring your stuff from cinema 4d into unreal and so we um the one thing that you notice that it's not really bright in here so i just added a couple of point lights in here like so so we brought in a point light like this and actually let me get off my camera here so i don't mess that up so i'm just going to start moving our lights in here like that then let me go back to my camera there you go and then if i hold down let me actually click out of here again so if i hold down the alt key and left click it would actually make a duplicate so i just kept duplicating these lights like so if you look at my raw outliner you can see that it's duplicating the light there see now i have a third light and i just kept doing that all the way through and i'm not going to go through the render process on this scene i kind of just wanted to use this scene as just a disclaimer to kind of show you guys how easy it is to bring your files in but i'm going to get into the real fun stuff in the next scene which is the city scene so i'm going to show you how to bring in the atmospheric fog how to bring up the cool shadows the cool lighting and all that stuff and how to render everything out so let me get this scene set up here i'm gonna close this scene out here we'll get everything started okay so i have a blank slate again here at cinema 4d let me actually go over and show you my original kit bastion that i bought from pixel labs and so i have these six buildings that i kind of took from the pixel lab city kit the kit bash kit that they have on their site and i just went in and i made my own materials for them and so if i pull up my material window here you can see the material is real simple kind of like how i did with the tunnel so this material is just kind of like a dark purple i just have a reflectance of uh one percent in there and then i have like a a medium gray no reflectance at all just a straight up gray material and then i have a light gray in there which i'm using for some of the accents parts so i'm using like the the dark gray and the light gray just for the piping and some of the antennas in there and stuff like that i'm going real simple no real textures at all and then i have these um these neon lights in here pretty similar how i built the other scenes out and so i have neon blue neon orange and neon purple and if i scroll through my buildings here you can see that i pretty much just replaced all the windows and the glass and everything with these neon lights even the billboards on here because i really wanted to try to give it like this synthwave nighttime cyberpunk-ish type feel to it and so i wanted to have like the actual windows illuminate our scene because i think it looks really cool when it's reflecting like off this um reflectance material here even though it's only at one percent we still get that little bit of rustic detail in there which i think turned out pretty cool and so let me show you really quick how you can build out a city scene within a matter of minutes and so i'm going to come over to mograph cloner and i think my first three buildings here yeah so these three are my top buildings so i'm gonna hold down the alt key and actually double click to turn these off because i'm going to start off with these little buildings here and then build my way out and so i'm going to take these three buildings here bring them into my cloner if i look at my cloner you can see the buildings are all stacked on top of each other so if i come under my objects tag on my y-axis zero this out and then i'm gonna start moving this in a negative direction on my x or my x let's try like x um negative twenty thousand yeah so it's giving us a pretty decent distance in here and then under count i can actually make this 30. so now we have 30 buildings going way off into the horizon there and if i want to like kind of scoot these buildings together a little bit so they're not so far apart if i come down under a mount i could just drag this over to the left start squeezing my buildings in here a little bit and as you can see the pattern of the buildings are pretty linear and so i have this building that building the short one and then the pattern just repeats so if i come under clones and click on random i can kind of randomize these out and under seed here let's say if i click um like one just pick a random number it will kind of randomize them so if i click like 25 you can see that the buildings are just randomizing in there and the more buildings that i have in there the more um i guess detail you can have in there but only built out these three short ones but just depends on the level of detail that you want in there and so you can see i have all these buildings going off into the horizon there and i'm going to add like a back layer to here so another building row so if i hold down the control key make a duplicate of this cloner just drag this out like so and then all i have to do is come down to my seed pick another random number and now we have buildings behind those buildings and i can actually let's say we reduce the count of this one and then just drag it out so it's not exactly the same and so we're just kind of offsetting them there a little bit just to kind of give it the illusion of a little bit of randomness in there and then if i want now so that we don't really um so we don't see any like blank spaces over here i'm going to make another duplicate of this one and just delete out these buildings and then this is where i'm going to add my tall buildings so actually let me zero out my coordinate on this cloner so it's in exact zero here then i'm going to drag these three buildings into this cloner and as you can see it's already cloning these top buildings out so this is just quick and dirty just kind of building out our city block here and i can actually duplicate that again there we go and then let's say maybe for clone on this one let's make it like 18 and then seated at like 400 so you guys could kind of see the pattern that i'm doing here and so whenever i roll really close to the ground you can't really tell that they're really replicated especially for how fast we're going through our scene there and then once you start adding stuff in there like the street lights and the glow and the rain and all that different stuff and especially with motion blur it really looks like you're just going down a city block and you can't really tell the repeated pattern and so this is pretty much just for the background noise there our main focus and our sequence was actually the road and the um the the ship that we're following behind and so let me build out my other side here so i'm gonna grab these two rows here hold down control duplicate just drag these over here to my right there you go so just wide enough that we can have our street there in the middle i can actually change these seeds out as well so it's not exactly the same and i can actually take one of my top buildings take another duplicate there so you guys can kind of see what i'm going for stuff like that and so we have like a a good blocked out city block in here and then if you want to start adding like hero buildings and stuff like that like stuff that you really want to focus on say if i take my cloner let's say this building 7 here i'm gonna hold down control just make a copy of it and drag it out here and let's say this is the building that we kind of want to fly into so i'll just take this building bring it down here so i have it at the end of my scene there we want to make it a little bit more prominent so i'm gonna come to my coordinates and let's do our x y and z scale of two so now we have the big building in the middle there and we don't want to have blank spaces here so just for example sake let's make it a duplicate of this but i'm actually not going to duplicate this building per se i'm actually going to make a clone of it so if i come over here and click on instance while i still have this selected it's going to make a clone of it so if you look here it's just like what's inside of our cloner so where it says instance mode you can actually do like a multi instance or render instance but remember that um unreal engine only recognizes the instance mode here it doesn't recognize these other two so if you do these other two it's not going to be able to translate that so make sure you just have it on instance and i drag this over and if i want to i can actually rotate this maybe like 90 degrees make it look like it's a little bit different let's change the scaling on it a little bit so 2.3 instead not too much larger something like that then i can actually just hold down control make a copy of this one put this on this side as well so you can kind of see that we're starting to build out our hero buildings that we're going to be flying into and you just start adding little attention to details like that in there and then um yeah so that's basically a breakdown of how fast you could build out the city scene and of course this will all translate into unreal but i just want to show you how you can quickly bro block out your city scene and then just start adding your fine details in from here and so let me actually close this one out because i'm going to show you my actual final project and exactly how i had that all broken down so i'm going to close this project out i don't need to save it cool so i'm gonna go back over here click open project and let me see it was city scene there alright cool so this is actually my final project so i'm just going to give you guys a quick run through of what this looks like and then i'm going to show you how to export this scene and bring it into unreal to finally render it out in real time so if i play through this scene here you see it's going a little bit slow probably because of the stream let me see if i could just scrub through this so if i scrub through you can see i have this city here that's built with the kit bash like i was saying so that's just the mograph cloner that's over here i have a couple of lamps in the scene as well i have a couple of wires that are dangling which is just the um topper wire by merkel and so i use that in here as well and then you can see it's just a real simple setup i have two cubes just on each side of the city and then i have this connected with top of wire and that translated pretty well into unreal which i was surprised about i didn't have to do any bacon out or anything and yeah i have these neon railings and nothing too crazy going on it's a pretty simple scene here and so to build out my city bring it over to unreal same thing as before save project first anywhere come over to project files actually let me there we go city scene ue4 and we're going to do underscore ue4 and click on and this is going to take a few moments to save out this is actually a larger file than what the other one is but this shouldn't take too long i think this one equaled out to be about like three gigs when it comes down to it okay so our scene is saved out and so now let me go over and open up unreal okay same thing as before gonna go under um file television live events click next do a blank then i'm gonna save my projects under ue4 i'm just going to name this one nab city underscore live since we're going live now then click save on create project all right same process as before click update i'm gonna dismiss my plugins already have my data smith in here i'm gonna delete the floor plan i'm gonna delete the player start click on data smith then i'm gonna bring in my cinema 4d project there you go city scene click open i'm going to do a default content browser window right there under that folder open this up and then it should pop up asking me what i want to import which i'm going to be importing everything so data smith import options let's click import here so everything is importing right now it's going to take a few moments here but once we get started i think you guys are going to really be amazed to see how fast i'm working in real time and everything is going to be what the final sequence looks like so whatever we're seeing on the screen that's exactly what our final render is going to end up looking like okay so now we have our cnl here and unreal engine over here on the right hand side this should look familiar with you along with everything that's here in the content browser so i'm going to get started by deleting this reflection capture i'm actually going to use a rectangular one here later on and then for my light source i like to zero it out so let me hit 0 tab 0 tab 0 and i have my light source here in direct center and then i'm going to make this almost like a night time scene and i kind of wanted to have these buildings here on the left cascade shadows over on my right and so i have some um attributes already have written down that i used for my scene so it's like negative let me see i think it was 112. 0.5 like so so now you see that we um have some shadows casting on these buildings and it's like my camera right now is moving kind of slow so if i wanted to speed this up all i had to do is come up the camera speed and actually to zoom this all the way up to the right and now i can move a lot faster around my scene here and what's cool is if i hold down the right um the right bumper on my mouse on that bumper my right whatever you call this thing the clicker the right clicker on my mouse and i use the first person shooter controls wasd i can move around as if i'm moving around inside a video game and so i'm not using the scroll wheel or anything at all i'm just holding down the w right now to move forward and it's going super fast and super smooth then a to move to the left and d to move to the right so i thought that's pretty cool as well then if i wanted to pan around just hold in the middle mouse button like so and everything is really reactive and really fast cool so enough playing around i'm going to come down let's start off with our materials so i'm going to come down to my neon material neon blue just like before crank up the emission on here click save and once i add some fog and everything into here you'll start to really see these emissions pop so every time you make a change to your material just make sure you click on save up here and i believe that's everything in there so now you can really see the neon lights and everything in our city start to glow and then i'm gonna come up here to my screen percentage i'm gonna work at 200 that just kind of helps with the flickering a little bit and so let me come over and let's change our sky so i'm gonna click on skysphere and over here in the lower right hand corner i'm gonna do these override settings and so for my zenith using this is exact north so if i click on this actually let me look up north so if i pan my camera up north let me make this like a purplish color so the whole theme was like your synth wave type theme horizon same thing make this purple and as you can see the color is not changing and that's because i forgot to change this right here where it says colors determined by some position we don't want the sun position uh determine what we're doing here we want to use something more abstract so i'm gonna click this off and now you can see that it changed our environment to what we have down here under our override settings so for my clouds i'm gonna make them a little bit darker also maybe like a darker blue somewhere around there and then overall color let's see what it looks like if i bring it down yeah maybe around there somewhere around there click okay cool and then um see if we have anything else in here we want to mess around with i think everything is cool for that and then our skylight here i'm actually going to bring up the cube map resolution you have to work in powers of two and that will tell you whenever you scroll over it maximum resolution very pr for the very top process cube map must be powers of two so i'm just going to multiply this by four so everything that's in your scene is kind of being reflected off each other um i don't know the science behind it but at least that's why i have it figured out and then we have a bunch of flickering coming off in the hair and so i'm going to actually come over to my visual effects tab and i'm going to add a box reflection capture so if i add this in here and then let me zero out the location and i'm just going to have it engulf my entire scene so let me come up to my viewport here double click on my box to kind of zoom it out a little bit and so what this does it's going to give us more precise reflections in our scene so for scale here let me just go into my viewport so i can see what i have going on i should have wrote down my parameters here but let's see let's do this live here on the screen all right cool so it looks like that's good there so i'm gonna have it just for my let's see that's gonna do for the main street there so you zoom this up here then coming to my right view let's see two zeros so there we go that's good there so now we have our reflection capture engulfing a whole scene here let me find an item here let me find my camera so if i double click on my camera it's going to zoom me out to where the object is so that's another cool thing about unreal if you find something in your scene that you want to zoom in on like you just double click on it and it's going to take you right there so now let me zoom in a little bit to the ground so you can see what happens with a reflection tab okay so now i have to build my reflections so if i come under build come under build reflection captures just click on that and it's actually going to build our reflections so it's almost like it's baking it in there so now we should be pretty good when it comes to reflections and everything so let me see what else we need to do so we have atmospheric fog in here but i'm going to add some exponential fog and this is my favorite part of unreal so if i drag this in here you can see we have some cool fog happening right away we don't have to play with any attributes or anything to get a cool effect so if i just wanted to rock with this i mean that already looks pretty cool but let's play around with it a little bit so i'm gonna zero this out like so and then for my scattering color again probably do something around purplish somewhere around there and i could drag this up here somewhere like that so we're getting like a cool foggy haze in here see if there's any other options down here that i want to play with you have volumetric fog click that on you can see is that some volumetric fog in there then let's go through our um let's go through our sequencer let's just play through a scene and see what it's looking like so if i come to my content browser come down to animation click on a city scene and then i should be able to pull this up into my sequencer here like so then come back up to perspective come down to cinematic viewport and let's click on our camera let's click play you can see we're just riding through our scene like so and i can get smoother playback if i build my lights you can see right here in the red it says the lights need rebuilt so rebuilding the lights is basically for each structure in here like if i click on this and you see in the lower right hand corner under mobility we have these different options here so if it was under static that means that each object is going to be static in our scene and we don't have to worry about it moving at all and so again if we were doing like an interactive experience we know that this lamp is always going to be here so we can make it static and then whenever whenever we build our lighting it's always going to know that that lamp is there so these shadows are always going to be doing this the reflection is always going to be doing this and the light's always going to be bouncing off it if that makes any sense and then stationary it's kind of what you want to do if you have something that might be moving but you can still bake it out and so that gives you the best of both worlds for static and movability because movability is say that you have something that's going to be moving around your scene and it's unpredictable and again this is going all in the interactive so if you have something in your scene that's unpredictable then you want to have this mobility clicked on and that way it will know that okay we have to calculate the lighting and reflections and the shadows on this object here and again it comes down to processing power but since everything is pre-rendered here we don't have to really worry about that so for the most part everything can be static and that will allow us to bake our lighting to be able to move our scene a lot faster so let me come up to build and if we come under where we see lighting quality right now everything looks a little bit janky because we're under preview and so we have four different levels of our lighting that we could do and so if i bring it up to medium quality high quality or production usually when i'm ready to render out i'll go on production because this was what calculates the slowest but once you hit everything calculate it it's all going to render in row time and it's going to actually play through in real time so let's actually just click on production then i'm going to come back over here and click build lighting and let this build out usually depending on your scene size and everything and how much stuff you have going on just to take a few minutes here yeah so i'm on a pretty beefy machine here i have the throat ripper three and you can see it's calculating everything pretty fast on here see my lighting's already built out so let me click play again all right let me click play again and actually i need to change my frame rate down here my scene was originally built in 24 fps so let me make sure i'm at a correct frame rate cool so everything's playing through pretty good now let me scroll through here because i want to show you guys my other favorite effect in unreal which is the post effects so this is the post effects volume it's under the visual effects tab if i bring this over here oops i actually have to drag it into my scene so i drag it into my scene i'm going to zero it out and if we have any unreal user i'm not unreal if we have any redshift users out in the audience this post effects um processing stack kind of works a lot like grid shift how you have your fx panel so you can add like your bloom and your lens flares and things of that nature so it works exactly like that and so it's kind of like when i have my um my box reflection in there how i had to make it really large to engulf the whole scene same thing with your post stack usually you could put it in individual places that you want stuff to happen in but if you come under here under search and if i click on unb and look for unbound if i click this then that means that this post processing stack is actually going to control everything that's in my scene here so now i can x this out and i can just start rolling down this list here seeing what i want to turn on and don't want to turn on so i'm going to scroll up for mobile depth of field we don't want any of that but i do want some bloom effects so let me click on method intensity actually i'm going to do 0.1 and then over on back under method i want to lose this convolution click on that and convolution i guess this is um for better blooms it's more it's for like cinematic so not really for gameplay stuff but more cinematic let me click back on standard there we go so yeah your intensity for some reason when i turn on convolution it blanks this out but so i have to go back to standard and then come back down to convolution and then it you know it goes as so not sure why it does that but that's something that i picked up on so now we have our neon lights looking pretty cool in here somebody click on our next stack here which is exposure so what exposure does is whenever um like in real life whenever you're in the house and you go outside and you know how your eyes have to adjust to the sunlight outside so you might get like that that glittery white look for a minute until your eyes adjust so unreal by default it kind of simulates that so if you have a character inside of a house and he moves outside it simulates that glittery you know that stuff that happens to your eyes while it's adjusting outside and for stuff like this we don't really want to have that happening and so they give you control of that inside of the processing stack so if you come under exposure you can actually adjust your your min and your max here and so i usually keep the numbers pretty close to each other just so it doesn't have any variables in there so probably want to move this down a little bit more so maybe 0.3 there you go somewhere around there and this way whenever our stuff is traveling through the scene we don't have to worry about the lighting changing or any variables we're kind of nailing everything down so it's going to be consistent throughout our scene so let me close this up now we have chromatic aberration you can turn up the intensity on here usually this is something that i would do on post and after effects but since we have the option here i think it's cool that we can control as many things as we want in unreal so we can do less stuff in post so i've seen a lot of people actually do all their posts and unreal and then just render out not have to worry about doing any stuff in after effects at all so if i drag this up you can see we're getting a cool chromatic apparition effect but we don't want to go too crazy on it maybe somewhere around one then if you want to have like a dirt mask on your lens there you have that option too you can actually make your own and bring in your own grunge mat then um we have camera settings too so if you want to mess with the iso and the shutter speed things of that nature you have that flexibility let's add some lens flares to it let me um let's see what happens i click on five so now we're adding some lens flares to here turn on bokeh size somewhere around there maybe let's bump this up like 15. something around that looks pretty cool okay so now we have our depth of field options here as well so we want to go high let me go extreme all right there we go so i had to come down to my death blur radius to really get this kicked off but you can see we have some cool depth of field going on here something like that looks pretty neat so if i actually go back start playing through this there you go so cool and then we have some color grading stuff down here as well you have saturation contrast all that fun stuff i'm not going to mess with any of that stuff at all and actually let me come up and i'm going to knock down my depth of field a little bit so we're not too crazy with it then come down to here we have these rendering options as well so we can add ambient occlusion which we can actually export our own ambient occlusion um exr file for if we wanted to do stuff in after effects with it or whatever your post-processing program is that you want to do i'm going to leave this stuff alone here again we have ray tracing options as well so if you want to have raytracing ambient occlusion you have that option you could turn on global illumination here um see what else we have motion blur is pretty cool so if i turn on motion blur and actually so now you can see we actually have built in motion blur inside of our sequence which is real cool so you don't have to worry about doing any of this stuff in post anymore let me crank it up a little bit say like one so now yeah you can see we have some really cool motion blur playing through our scene makes it look like we're really speeding through our city here actually i'm gonna turn this off and then what else we i know we had some reflections yeah so we have reflection types down here too we have screen space we have ray tracing so if you want better if you have a graphics card that has ray tracing you could turn that on as well and then i think that's it for our post processing stack so now let me get into my um oh under lighting cast shadows definitely want that turned on and so now let me get into the rendering of the sequencer so if i pull this up so say that we have our scene done this is exactly how we want it you come down into your sequencer and this is where you're going to render everything out so let me yeah so i'm not going to worry about the spaceship more importantly i'm just going to show you guys how to render this part out so if i come under where we at let me scroll all the way up if i come under track here under green i'm going to add the um sequencer no i want to come down to camera cut track so basically if i get camera cut track this is going to add this file up here and this is where we can actually start adding our cameras into it and so what's cool about unreal is you can actually have your animation play out but then you can also set up several different cameras inside of your scene and this um the sequencer acts as like an nle and so if we want to have camera 1 play for 10 frames the camera 2 play for 20 frames you can actually set that up and do separate camera tracks here in unreal so if i come to the front of my sequencer they click on camera cuts come under camera click on here where the plus sign is come up the new binding and click camera then we can see that we added an actual camera track to our sequencer here which is really cool all right so now if i want to render this out you just click on the clipboard here or your slate this little slate button here where it says render options so now we have this option for render movie settings so if i come under capture settings here image output format we have all these different formats in here like i said now we can render out in apple prores i usually render out as an exr sequence and then um yeah if you want to have like um different outputs like if you wanted to have ambient occlusion we have that option under where we at custom render passes so if i click on custom render passes and they come down here where it says include render passes these are all the different render passes that we have available to us so we have ambient occlusion you could do depth of field you could do um opacity channels you have a whole bunch of different stuff in here that you can actually render out separately so if you wanted to do any compositing stuff in like unreal or not unreal in after effects or nuke whatever you're using you have that flexibility as well but i'm just going to do an apple prores for this demonstration resolution i'm just going to do 1920 by 1080. now i could do 422 hq then let me see what other settings i need to set so under here this is just where i'm going to be rendering my stuff out so i'm actually going to make a folder called render double click on this is select folder and then i believe there's one other option that i was missing here one really important one here we go so under general you want to come down to use separate process so you want to click on that and this is going to give you everything at full resolution whenever you render out and then let me see under animation here so this is interesting down here so you have the option to have a couple of warm-up frames so think about um so say you have like some particles or some type of effects in here that you need to have warm up before you want to start rendering so say you want to have your sequence start maybe after like 100 frames you can actually type that in here so say okay after 20 frames then i want it to start rendering that means that you're going to let your sequence you know warm up for those 25 frames and then it's going to be able to export from there and you can also do it by seconds here as well so you can have it delay before warm up if you want to add a delay to it delay before shot warm up you have all types of flexibility down here which is really cool so i think we're ready to hit render i think you guys are going to be amazed at how fast this renders out so i'm going to click capture movie hit save selected and it's just going to save out our scene and everything before it starts rendering out but once it starts rendering it's actually going to come up with a viewport that you can kind of see exactly what's going on all right so now you see it has our city name come up here and now this is the viewport it's going to give it a 25 frame warm up like we had set up and then it's going to move it to our camera now everything is rendering in real time for the most part it's just going to play through the sequence here you can see everything happening as it's playing and then down here in the lower right hand corner you can see it says capture and video so once it's done all right so now we should be able to open our capture folder and then let me open this up in quicktime and click play and there we go we have our rendered sequence all ready to go right out of unreal so that literally took me what a few seconds to render out i mean it's pretty crazy how fast this it could render out and then like i said i'd use exe force or exr files to bring into after effects to add stuff like deep glow and red giant looks just to kind of spice it up a little bit more which i can show you guys just real quick but first i kind of wanted to show you guys how you can bring x particles into unreal as well so i'm going to bring up the scene the opening sequence and then i'm going to show you guys how to export from cinema 4d and let me get this started up right now all right so let me close out of this scene and cinema close projects let me find my x-particle scene here let me go or is it at water sphere liquid so i actually did a tutorial on my youtube channel on how to do this so i'm not going to break it down completely if you want to see exactly how i did it just go to my youtube channel youtube slash jonathan winbush but if i click play here you can see i have this sphere with a whole bunch of liquid kind of playing around in it is so basically it's real simple i just have a fluid effects i have a wave formatter in here and i have that cache or i have the mesh cached out here so real simple setup so if i want to export this out for unreal it doesn't it's not going to be able to take the particles from cinema into unreal and so i figured out a hack here basically if i come up to file and export as an alembic file i can bring that alembic file into unreal engine so if i come over to my olympic settings under my export settings you want to come to file format you want to use the top one here not the legacy and then this is a real important part here where it says start frame usually it will start at zero but you want to make sure you're starting at frame one for some reason when we bring it into unreal and we have it at start frame zero it's not going to import correctly so you definitely want to make sure that you have it on frame one and then also want to make sure that you have your odv or ovdb measure you want to have this selected whenever you um go to export this out so let's click ok export selections here and everything else looks fine click ok and then i'm just going to export it to my ue ue4 folder and put abc at the end of this one all right so now let me open up unreal again and instead of starting from scratch i can actually show you guys right here so i'm just going to open up my original file that i worked on whenever i was doing this okay so i have my file opened up here so if i come over to my animation folder open up my sequencer you can see exactly what we have going on so what i'm going to do is let's see let me um alright cool so i'm going to come in here delete my olympic file here said we don't see it all right so i'm gonna show you guys how to import this from scratch so if i come over to let's see my content folder i want to click on actually i could delete this too just so we're starting from scratch actually let me just make a new folder so i made a folder called alembic i'm going to import it into here and then i'm going to look for my file that i made so let me project files ue4 there we go nab abc so abc stands for alembic click open so this is our olympic um importer here so under import type we want to come under geometry cache which is experimental but that works perfectly fine for my frame rate start i'm going to click one and i believe everything else should be fine actually i think for this i did autodesk so yeah the autodesk here for my preset my 3d max and then let me click import and everything should play back exactly as we need all right cool so i have my liquid sphere here i just drag it into my scene let me zero everything out for my location let me actually play through here because i think i might have to move it up yeah so let me move it up to the center here there we go so now when we click play on it you notice that it's not moving at all in here and that's because we have to actually add our olympic file into our sequencer so if i click on track let me see over here add the sequencer so after the sequencer let me click on this olympic file okay so once i have this in here i'm gonna um click on my track button and then come up to geometry cache click that and actually i should have did this at the beginning of my sequencer so let me move this all the way over now if i click play you can see we actually have our alembic file playing in our scene so that's a quick and easy way that we can bring our fluids into unreal as well and then i actually did have like a neon material on here so if i come to my content browser let me go under look for my material that i had put on there let me scroll all the way down i think it was this neon purple one click and drag that there there we go so if i click play you can see that's exactly how i did this scene here if i come over to my camera there we go that's exactly how i added x particles into unreal so hopefully this helped you guys out get started and inside of using cinema 4d to unreal i'm going to answer some questions for you guys if you have anything hopefully this is a good starting point to get you guys moving forward but thank you guys for watching my presentation and i hope you guys learned a lot and make sure you go to my youtube channel as well youtube.com jonathanwinbush i actually have a lot of tutorials on there on how i work from cinema 4d into unreal so if you want to see some more in-depth stuff go there as well you

Channel: WINBUSH

Views: 9,344

Rating: 4.9601989 out of 5

Keywords: motion graphics, winbush, tutorial, immersive, school of motion, mograph, c4d live, 3d motion show, maxon, epic games, cinema 4d, after effects, adobe, red giant, magic bullet looks, c4d, unreal engine, ue4, ue5, unreal engine 5, nab2020, virtual event, pixel lab, epic, plugins, datasmith, how to

Id: gEpMjUawgWo

Length: 70min 0sec (4200 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 05 2020