Easily Create Cinematic Music Videos WIth Unreal Engine 5 | Free Beginner Course

if you're looking for any plugins presets extensions to save you time and create awesome videos my digital asset store is at the top of the description Unreal Engine 5 is a big deal you've probably heard all the hype around its amazing features but as we all know learning a new software can be tricky so today I'm going to show you how you can easily create a music video or cinematic short film using Unreal Engine 5. we're gonna go over characters lighting cameras environments even full face and body motion capture without the need for an expensive motion capture suit oh and by the way every software and asset shown in this video is 100 free just click the link in the description to get the epic games launcher from there you can download Unreal Engine and you have access to the marketplace so if you guys do enjoy slap like on the video to help boost with the YouTube algorithm subscribe for more content like this and let's hop right in alright guys so let's get started once you've downloaded the epic games launcher you can come over to the Unreal Engine tab you want to go over to library and from here you can download the latest version of Unreal Engine 5. you can see your projects here as well as your Vault these are all of the assets that you download from the Unreal Engine Marketplace you can find that by clicking here now from here it's a good idea to go over to free they have this free for month tab where you guys can pick up some really useful stuff I downloaded this Orca games full animation bundle super useful so make sure you pop in here check for some freebies now other than that you guys should also pick up the metahumans plugin part one of this tutorial is adding in our 3D character for that I'm going to use the in-house metahumans plugin if you guys want to follow along go ahead and click metahumans plugin and click add to engine of course this is optional you guys can use any 3D character from any 3D software so once you've done that let's go ahead and launch Unreal Engine now a lot of people like starting out with a completely blank project creating the environment from complete scratch there's tons of tutorials out there if you guys are brand new I recommend you go over to games and just fire up a blank project here it's going to add the lighting and a basic little environment so go ahead and name your project and click create if it's your first time starting up Unreal Engine this is going to take a while to compile the shaders so don't be thrown off by the fact that it may take 15-20 minutes on your first startup once you've gotten that out of the way the next time you start up Unreal Engine it'll be a lot more Snappy once you've fired up this blank project you're going to see you have your lighting already built in directional lights your height fog and if you really did want to build this from scratch you just have to go up to window Place actors and you can search for any of these things here in your place actors screen so if you wanted a directional light you can find it there now in terms of navigating again for complete beginners hold down right click and you use wasd just like any computer game you can use q and E to move up and down very simple so again ignore all of this for now once we talk about the environment section of this tutorial we'll swing back and go through lighting from scratch for now let's go ahead and add in a 3D character so that we have our subject we can start to build the story of our music video and then work and build from there so like I mentioned at the beginning for my 3D character I'm going to be using the metahumans plugin this is 100 free you just have to open up a browser search for metahumans on Google and then you can open it up and create a custom metahuman I also have another tutorial that I'll link below showing you how to create a meta human in the likeness of somebody else it's not perfect but it is a great step-by-step guide on creating a custom metahuman so if you're interested in that link down below so once you've designed your meta human online to actually bring it into Unreal Engine you need to use the quixel bridge so go up to to edit go over to plugins and search for this quixel bridge plug-in it should be here by default if it's not maybe search the marketplace but make sure this is checked on CE you've done that you can open up your content drawer here you can right click in your content bin you can go up to add qixel content and it'll open up the qixel bridge so this is a free software you have 13 000 of these high quality assets that you guys can use for free as long as you're using it only within Unreal Engine I think it's called the unreal unlimited plan so make sure you go in the top right and sign into your epic games account over these assets if it's your first time instead of seeing download you may see a little link that clicks over to the qixel page so go ahead and Link that up so you guys can use this yourself and in here you're going to see you have tons of 3D assets you have tons of materials and you also have collections of different types of environments that you guys can pick and choose from so super useful so to bring in our character you're going to see this meta-humans tab in your quixel Bridge so click here and once you've done that you should see this my metahumans tab this is all the custom metahumans that you worked on before if you're not seeing this tab again make sure you're signed in to be able to see that select the metahuman that you'd like to import at first it should say download instead of add make sure you click and download that asset to your computer once that's gone through you can go ahead and click add alright so once all your shaders have downloaded here we'll go to content drawer and we're going to go back to that meta-humans folder again right here under content metahumans folder that corresponds to the name of your custom character and here's our blueprint actor I'll go ahead and just drag this in and there I am again first time it may compile a little bit so let's click let's rotate face it like right here and we're going to set up a basic little music video scene just from this if I scroll up in my object bin see we have our landscape can take that away let's just hide all this stuff for now so this is our lighting folder let's just go ahead and hide this folder for now so it's going to go completely black cannot see anything and let's set up our basic music video scene we're going to start off by talking about lighting to add lights into our scene you want to go up to window and you want to click on the place actors window let's go ahead and just search for light so you have a bunch of different lights here we're gonna go with a rectangular light so the thing about 3D softwares it's mimicking real life so the way you would go about lighting a music video scene in real life is the exact same way you would light a cinematic music video scene in your 3D engine so we can take this light this is going to be our key lights we can rotate it so we have a tiny bit of angle going towards the face like this and we can sort of point it at the side of our face and that's super bright here so let's click on that rectangle light I'll rename this to keylight and you guys can go through all of the parameters here for moving things around actor or if you want you can just go to the specific tab so we'll go to rendering you have this intensity meter here set it to four so we'll have it we're going to go ahead and select this we're going to click Ctrl D to duplicate that and we're going to set up our three point light setup very basic little lighting setup in real life that can give us a nice cinematic look so this is going to be our fill light it'll fill in some of the lighting on the other side of our face here and if you're getting this weird glitchiness whenever you're far away or close up just like your meta human and I just scrolled down and unchecked and checked on this net load on clients it should fix this issue now what we want to do is we want to add one more light to our three-point lighting setup so here's our key light this is our fill light which is just filling in light on this side of the face so again if this wasn't here see all the Shadows which may be nice if you're going for like a dramatic look with your music video but if you want nice even lighting turn that on for now let's click Ctrl d and we'll move this in the back and this is going to be our backlight all right so a nice easy three-point lighting setup similar to how you would have it in real life to get your nice even lighting easy music video setup just by controlling your lights again if you want something dramatic maybe hide your fill lights if you want something more creative maybe add in different colors to your light so we'll go to our key light here here's your light color you know you can have blue you can bring back your fill lights get something like that so it's really that simple to get up and running see this sort of setup with your split lighting just a blank background and a ton of different music videos I'll show you later on once we add an animation how we can have our facial performance how we can add some motion to the body so it's not just a static character standing there the next thing we need to talk about to create our cinematic music video is a camera so go up in the top left again for this window you go to window Place actors and we're going to search for camera and we're going to drag in a cine camera actor so let's place that right there go ahead and rotate this and place it here all right so let's go here if you want the straightforward shot you can if you want to make it a bit more cinematic you guys can rotate a bit give it a tiny bit of angle and then let's switch over to our camera view so we can click on this perspective button and we can switch over to this place camera so here's our cine camera and then from here you see everything's out of focus you have your aperture your focal length you can change your lens settings everything just like a real world camera let's open up Focus settings and you can turn on this debug focus and that's going to allow you to see where the focus is on your camera so we can click this dropper click here it's going to automatically put that in focus and you see if we just kind of grab this moving left and right you can select different parts of the face so we're turning up that debug and then our aperture again is set to 2.8 if you really want to blur things in the background or anything that's not out of focus you can lower that usually 1.8 is a good bet you can see that blurring going on if you don't have anything in the background right now it's just blank so right now I'm noticing our fill light is way too bright we want to add some cinematic Shadows onto our face so let's go to fill light and let's take the intensity and maybe make that like 0.5 and that looks a lot more natural and again you guys can play around with the lighting there's no set way to do things this is just complete basics again if you want those creative colors really depends on the story that you're going for the mood that you're going for so that is your basic music video three-point lighting setup and again let's go for like a more creative look here very simple looks great key thing to remember it mimics real life alright so pretty easy so far we have our camera we have our three-point lighting setup let's go ahead and set up a sequencer so that we can actually turn this into a movie so what we're going to do is we're going to go up in the top left we're going to click on this little clipboard and click add Master sequence so you can see here it's going to give you number of shots so you can create multiple shots multiple cameras multiple Cuts very useful for now we'll keep it easy we'll just click create master sequence and you're going to see it's going to give you five different clips here each from this current view that you're looking at so what I'm going to do is delete these five shots we don't need these for now so I'll right click delete and we're going to create our own custom shot so we'll go to our first frame and first off what we want to do we want to make sure that this camera and this camera view is set in our sequencer to do that you want to select the camera that you want in your sequencer go over to this track button go to actor to sequencer and whatever you have selected is automatically going to show up right here pretty easy so we'll click to add that in and now we're looking at our camera perspective if you ever want to pop in and out of that you can click this little button it's going to unlock the view so this is camera perspective that means if we move around it's going to move the camera if you pop out now we can freely move so let's click in here if you guys want to record the scene just click record and you're going to see our sequencer is going to record whatever is in frame of our camera so now we have a little clip pretty easy all right so we have our first shot in there what if you want to add a different type of shot let's go in here pop off our camera view say for example you want the camera back here and you want it to animate and move in towards the actor or follow the actor or have some type of movement now to do that what we're going to do is we're going to create another shot so we'll leave this master sequence how it is we don't want to touch it we're going to go up to our clipboard again and we're going to click add level sequence moving camera shot one save that it's going to open up a fresh slate for us in this scene we can do the same thing we did to set up our camera just select it click track actor to sequence and add in the cinema camera and now you should be seeing what the camera is seeing and we can just change things around so let's open up this transform value under our camera component let's open up location and then let's just take the Y value and move it back for however however far we want and then we'll go ahead and close this and you see all these little buttons next to here these allow you to set keyframes so it's going to lock in this position data for this Frame so for our transform we want our camera to start right here click to create a keyframe let's drag maybe 45 let's open up location zoom in and reposition maybe and then again click to set your keyframes so we've just created a little animation scroll up here and again you can unlock the camera view to visualize this a bit better we have a little camera animation of it moving and zooming in forward so that's how you can keyframe in specific things for your camera if you want to add in motion let's again pop back to our camera view you can do this with any type of value so say for example you don't want it to start out blurry you can scroll down here and at the very first frame where you're blurry right here we can instead of opening up transform we can go over to the manual focus distance now we don't want to mess anything up because at the end here it's already good so let's go to where we're close to the face right there and make sure this make sure our distance is locked in just by clicking to create a keyframe now let's go to the beginning and we can change this so just change it until we're in Focus again to lock that in you want to click to set that keyframe and now it's going to stay in focus from the start to the finish so you guys can keyframe your focus you can keyframe the location and movement of the camera or any other objects any actor that's within this now to add this to your master sequence let's just click here go to your sequence master scroll up to where it says shots click this plus sign and you have this giant drop down where you can select from all the different shots you want so you have here's the moving camera shot one and it's just going to automatically add that in and you guys can piece it together like you're editing a normal video so super useful for working with multiple shots in a specific scene or working with multiple cameras it's easy to switch back and forth between different camera angles and it's easy to keep everything organized within its own sequence you can just double click in there and you see now we're in this sequence and we can go back and forth it's kind of like nesting in Adobe Premiere so other than that you guys can change the frames per second here so if you want like 60 if you want things to be looking modern fast I like the classic 24 frames per second film right here everything looks a lot more realistic with the motion blur and that is our basics of course there's so much more you guys can look into but we're talking about how to make a music video so let's move on to number three we're gonna Circle back to the sequencer at the end to talk about our render settings and actually making this a movie that we can export out but for now we need to talk about building environment we just have a blank black background how do we actually go in and build a nice looking scene so you have three options for creating an environment in unreal option number one you can use basic Primitives you can scale them around to basically block out the scene that you're trying to create once you have the basic blocking of your environment and you're seen Down With The Primitives you guys can use the qixel assets to either add materials to those Primitives or you can just drag in pre-built assets in the shape that you've already designed to build an environment from scratch there's a great tutorial for this I'm going to link it down below he talks about the blocking process with The Primitives he talks about adding materials adding decals to fit the story that you're trying to create so again link to that will be down below now option number two you guys can use a lot of the landscape a lot of the foliage tools that are available within unreal to create an environment from scratch now again like the first method there's a ton of environment tutorials for Unreal Engine 5 already out there it's probably the most prevalent type of tutorial you can find for this so I recommend you guys watch an environment tutorial for the specific environment you're trying to create if you do choose this method and then option number three you guys can use Marketplace content or any 3D objects that you may have modeled or downloaded online to build your environment from scratch so what I did is I downloaded one of those monthly freebies in my case it was this construction site pack again usually in those monthly freebies one of them is one of them is always going to be some type of environment so to add that into your project go back to the epic games launcher go to library and scroll all the way down to Vault this is where all of the free purchase content is at all you have to do is Select it click add to project and then select the project that you're working in so that's the method I'm going to use just because it's a lot faster and easier again if you guys want to take the time to put in those meticulous details follow those two tutorials down below now a secret bonus tip and this is a big one don't be afraid to mix other softwares into your workflows if you can can't pull something off in Unreal Engine then Port it into blender or any other 3D software that you're comfortable with and then Port it back into unreal think of Unreal Engine as your real-time virtual production engine but don't neglect things like blender which in my opinion is an ultimate 3D Swiss Army tool for example if I won a cyclone or my music video I can go into blender use the easy modeling tools there export it out as an fbx and then pop back into Unreal Engine and import it back in so I'm going to create a basic little scene here with that construction site Marketplace content so I'm just going to drag and drop the assets in to create a basic little music video setup you can drag in this piece of the ground click Ctrl D and just move it to both sides to extend it a bit they even have this smoke simulation which is pretty cool gives it a bit more atmospheric feel for the back wall I'm just going to add in a basic Cube and use the scale tool just to extend along the length of our scene and then I can go into my materials section for that construction site project and drag in a wall texture for the cube now that's really about it so we have our basic music video set have fun with that so now let me show you how to add facial and body motion capture to our character that way we can have a full performance of Our Song acted out by our meta human and for this you won't need any fancy expensive equipment we're not going to use a motion capture suit of course you can if you want more control over the performance in my case I'm just going to use some preset animations specifically that Orca games animation bundle that was free for the month I'll be using that for our performance body animation and for the face I'm just going to use the built-in live link plugin which allows you to control the face of your character using an iPhone so let's start out with the facial motion capture you want to go up to edit plugins and you want to search for the live link plugin and make sure that's enabled you may also want to search for AR face kits and make sure that's enabled in your plugins as well once you've done that you need to go on your app store if you're using iPhone I'm not sure if you can do this for Android so I'll download the live link app I'll fire it up we need to click on the gear Cog here and enter in an IP address to find your IP address so you can do that on Windows by just going down and typing in your search bar CMD and clicking enter and then in your command prompt just type in ipconfig and whatever the ip4 address is that's your IP address so just type that IP address into your settings for your live link app so once you have that connected to your IP select your blueprint actor in unreal go down to the live link section and just check on use AR kit face and then for the AR face subject click that little drop down and you should see your iPhone so select it and we should now be linked up so pretty cool you guys can control your facial animations just like that so we're going to move on and talk about body animation for now and then after that we'll talk about how to combine the live link face with the body animations and place them all in our Master sequence so that we can export it together so for your body animation again if you do not have a motion capture suit you guys could stick to using free assets again I mentioned earlier the free for the month is that Orca games animation there's a few basic talking animations in there which will work fine for this so like I did with the construction sites I'm going to go to My Vault and just click add to project the main thing you want to look out for to make sure it's compatible whenever you're on the page in the marketplace scroll down and make sure it says rig to Epic skeleton yes so to add those Unreal Engine preset animations to our metahuman first of all we want to right click on our blueprint actor in our object menu go to browse to asset and it should open up wherever the blueprint is in your content drawer you want to double click on that and you're going to see a bunch of these crazy coding nodes just click over to the viewport tab on the left here you can see the different parts of this blueprint actor so we're going to go over to the body section and then on the right you want to scroll down and find the skeletal mesh it should just look like some creepy floating hands go ahead and click this button to open that up so if we go up to the character Tab and go down to Bones you can click show all hierarchy now you can actually see what we're working with here you also want to click the tab on the left and change from asset details to skeleton tree then we'll click over to the skeleton section here you want to click this little Cog in the top left and you want to click show retargeting options and you want to make sure the root and the pelvis are both set to animation everything else should be set to skeleton so if it's not just shift select everything that isn't set to skeleton right click it and click retarget to skeleton so this is good we're going to save this and we can close this window let's go back to our content drawer make sure we're in the root content folder we're going to right click and we're going to go up to add packages and you want to add in the basic third person setup here that'll give you the necessary mannequin skeleton setup to be able to retarget from our meta human over to our custom animations once you've done that just go in your content drawer again go to the search bar and just search up the letters RTG stands for retargeting and you want to find the RTG ue4 Manny to ue5 go ahead and double click on that now for our Target ik rig asset you want to click the drop down and select ik metahuman or our Target preview mesh you want to select the skeletal mesh that your Unreal Engine character is using so in my case it's m medium narrow body should be easy to find because it's floating hands and feet you want to click over to this chain mapping Tab and there's going to be a small fix that we need to do here so that our retargeting will work correctly so anytime you see a bone that says metacarpal in it so for example left pinky metacarpal left ring metacarpal go ahead and just set all of those to none if you guys don't do that whenever you do the retargeting your hand and your fingers are going to be all jumbled up and crooked because Unreal Engine 5 has that extra bone and we're retargeting from an Unreal Engine for asset so again scroll down make sure the metacarpoles are all set to none make sure you don't miss any of them and we should be ready to retarget so make sure you save this window before you close it let's go back to our content drawer and I'm going to find that Orca animations bundle that we downloaded for free from the marketplace click open the folder of animations that you'd like to add in so I'm going to go for the folder number two it has a bunch of useful ones here just click shift to select all of them right click and we're going to go up to retarget animation so for that ik retargeter we're going to set it to RTG ue4 Manny to ue5 Mani for the source skeletal mesh we're gonna set that to SK mannequin and then for the Target skeletal mesh we're going to set that to the mesh that our meta human is using so again that's the floating hands and feet for me it was male medium narrow body so if you want to check to see if that worked correctly you can go back to your blueprint actor again right click browse to asset and double click go to body and skeletal mesh and then from here you can click on this little preview animation button and you should now see all of the retargeted animations in this drop down now before we apply those retargeted body animations let's go and record some facial animation with that live link so we're going to go up to window cinematics and pop open the take recorder and all you have to do here is select your blueprint actor and just drag that into the source box for your take recorder again make sure live link is enabled like we did before make sure you're ready to perform into your iPhone the full performance of the song and then go ahead and click record and sing your song into your phone so you can get that facial motion capture animation once you guys are done just click the little stop sign so you'll see it says recording complete we now have that performance motion capture saved so we have our face mocap ready we have our body mocap ready let's go ahead and create a new sequencer and then we'll add in together the body and the face motion capture so go up to the clipboard click to add a new level sequence if you want the camera view make sure you guys add the camera into the tracker as well next let's go ahead and grab the blueprint actor from our object bin drag that into our sequencer and you're going to see a body Tab and a face tab each of those are going to have a meta human control rig now what we want to do since we've already captured preset animation you want to right click on those control Rigs and delete them so make sure you guys do that so that our custom animation will load in properly now to add in that custom mocap we're just going to go over to the plus signs for face and body so let's start with face first click track go up to animation and you're going to have a little drop down of all those animations from the take recorder so this BP me scene one is my full performance capture from the take recorder just click that now if we scroll you can see that performance that I recorded with live link so this is super useful say for example you have two artists in a song you can record the facial motion capture all in one take and then you can use the take recorder to apply that facial mocap to separate meta-humans so it saves you a lot of time you don't have to do multiple performances you can just click another metahuman do that same process where you click the Plus on face add in the take record and then just cut it to the point where it's only them singing their part now to add in the body mocap we're going to do the exact same thing we did with the face we're going to click the little plus sign next to body go to track animation and here is all of those retargeted animations that we did before so I'm going to search for a as talking animation there's five of them so I'll just select the first and we'll click play and there you guys go everything working correctly now for any reason if you're getting any errors here with the head detaching from the body or maybe whenever you drag in your blueprint actor you're not seeing the body as a option you guys want to make sure before you do all this you select your blueprint actor and you reset the default values for the animation player I was getting an error from that earlier and that was the fix for me so I figured it's worth a mention so just like that we have our full motion capture performance with our meta human without using any expensive equipment all for free now all we have to do is render this out so let's pop back over to our Master sequence we're going to click the little plus sign next to dots and we're going to add in that performance sequence that we set up earlier so there we go you guys can trim this using that little red bar at the end to set the duration of your exported animation or again you can go in create more level sequences with different shots different performances so normally to export this you just hover over this clipboard button in the sequencer click here and it'll open up the default exporter but if you want a nicer easier little render plugin you guys can go up to edits plugins and search for the movie render queue and just enable that you're gonna have to save your project and restart you guys go up to window cinematics and movie render queue and this gives you a nice easy to use little interface if for any reason your sequence isn't in this job just click the little render drop down select the sequence you want in there if it's in your master sequence it should be there by default so first off you want to set your output folder here this is where your full image sequence or movie sequence is going to be rendered to you see right now by default it's set to a JPEG export if you guys don't don't want that for any reason just select that and click delete you can click your settings here and under exports you see all these different options for your exported formats I'll go with PNG sequence and then I also like to add in the anti-aliasing setting and I like just keeping that at default there's a ton of different render settings videos you guys can search for on the internet that are going to show you all different intricate things you guys can do with this I'm just going to keep everything default so as not to confuse you again if you want to tweak the overall final quality of everything check out some full movie render queue render setting videos so let's go ahead and accept these settings and then just click render local and you guys can see how fast this render really is flying through it nothing sped up here so let's go to the folder that I set as my output open that up and you guys can see each of the frames rendered out as a PNG sequence right here so to get that from a PNG sequence into a actual video clip you guys can use any video editing software DaVinci Resolve Adobe Premiere Final Cut whatever all of those allow you to import image sequences as footage so the way I like doing it I like opening up Adobe Premiere creating a new sequence in my project bin I'll click this little page here and I like creating a transparent video clip to serve as a placeholder I'll just extend that and then I right click and click replace as After Effects composition I like doing it in After Effects of course you guys don't have to fall my way you can import it using only Premiere if you don't want to use After Effects once after effects opens up that linked composition I just right click in my project bin in After Effects import as multiple files and then I select the first frame of my PNG sequence that way as long as that PNG footage is in my linked composition I just have to save this after effects project go back into Premiere and I have this Dynamic link between Premiere and after effects so I can do my color grading and all that in Premiere if I need to add any After Effects masking whatever I can switch over to After Effects make any changes and once I save in After Effects all those changes will show up in Premiere so that is my workflow for creating music videos cinematic animations you guys can do short films whatever you want to do alright guys I hope you did enjoy this tutorial if you make any cool stuff send it to me on Instagram maxnovec underscore so I can check it out if you want to see any more content like this subscribe comment down below whatever you'd like to see and as always thank you so much for watching thank you so much for supporting and I'll see you guys [Music] foreign [Music]

Channel: Max Novak

Views: 145,099

Keywords: unreal, engine, music, video, tutorial, how to, 3d, metahuman, quixel, animate, mocap, cinematic, short, film, character, music video, max novak, blender, mesh, AAA quality, game character, render, unreal animation, juicewrld, bye bye, turn yourself into 3d

Id: Ac8Wrm7Dz5o

Length: 31min 7sec (1867 seconds)

Published: Sun Feb 05 2023