Filmmaking in Unreal Engine - The (non-technical) basics. #unrealengine #reallusion #iclone

[Music] now you may be tempted to skip over this episode which is mostly about the theory of film making but I suggest you stick with me for just a few more minutes some of the hard one knowledge provided here may really help you further down the line not just with storytelling but also the whole look and feel of your production I know what it's like to just want to forge ah head and start making something oh trust me I know but take the time to lay a little groundwork before you get started and you may thank yourself later and if like myself you come from a film making background already you may be surprised to learn how many of your existing skills translate neatly across to the digital world there are a few things to keep in mind right from the get-go you may have this epic scene in your head with hundreds of assets hundreds of extras spaceships flying overhead dinosaurs driving tanks Avengers ingame levels of epicness and oh look your graphics card just exploded that's not to say that these things aren't possible but let's just say they will be limited not only by your imagination but also your Hardware unreal is an amazing piece of software but it's also very intensive I'm running the specs listed on the screen at the moment and I still get the occasional slowdown especially in my more ambitious scenes not only that but the average unreal project file takes up a lot of space with 30 GB being on the small side the more assets you pack into those scenes the bigger those file are going to get look I get it I come from a film making background give a director access to an almost infinite variety of locations costumes props vehicles and lighting setups and they're going to want to use them all that's where we have to learn the concept of expense now when I say expense I don't mean a monetary cost although you can certainly pay a lot for assets and a lot of them are free in this sense expense is about how much drain any particular asset or collection of assets is putting on your system some types of lights for example are very cheap and system friendly others are very expensive and will put more of a drain on your graphics card some assets like stylized scenery or props have a very low number of polygons that make them up and they're cheap others such as hair Grooms with built-in physics are expensive and may slow down or even crash the program yes get used to this window this happens a lot learning the difference between cheap and expensive assets is a very useful skill it becomes a balancing act of your computer's budget between appearance and performance but I think you'll be pleasantly surprised with what you can get away with think of Unreal Engine as your own personal Film Studio but like any Film Studio when you first walk in the door it's dark and the stage is bare it's up to you to move everything in But first you have to decide exactly what kind of film you want to make the good news is it's your studio and like a digital Stanley kubric you can take as long as you want you may be watching this lesson and have a pretty good idea of what you want to make and you're impatiently waiting for me to get to the good stuff but first ask yourself some questions how long is my production how many cast members does it have how many locations does it have is there dialogue or is it silent if there is dialogue is there onscreen lip sync and finally what do I want it to look like when I first started playing with unreal I had so many ideas for what I wanted to make with it and I still do but I was quickly struck with the practicalities of creating those ideas for example every cast member that you create for your production represents an investment of hours of work even with labor saving software such as character creator if your production is more complicated than two people talking in a room then that's more time you need to allow for if you have multiple locations then you need to build every single one of those or buy pre-built location packs on a good day when I'm working on a short I can knock off between two to four shots maybe 10 to 15 seconds of a finished production and that's just if it's two characters talking moving around fighting or interacting with the environment all takes longer to build and get looking right and if they are talking do we see them talk or are they wearing helmets onscreen lip sync is hard and I still very much getting the hang of it did I get it right old boy spot on all CH this is in no way intended to discourage anyone from being as ambitious as they want to be I just want you to go into any production pre- armed with the knowledge of exactly what's involved rather than becoming overwhelmed and discouraged at a later date because trust me I've been there I spent my first few weeks even months on unreal basically just playing testing lighting setups importing characters moving them around in locations moving the camera around them Framing and rendering shots Etc I highly encourage you to do the same on top of everything else unreal is just a fun piece of software to use and it's absolutely okay for just to play with it for a while this should be an enjoyable freeing experience for you and the lessons that you learn while playing will definitely help you to improve your planed production when you feel you're ready to move to that stage let's get out of here my first fully animated short was first day the story of a stormtrooper first day on the job I chose this idea for a few different reasons number one I'm a big Star Wars fan number two I just discovered the range of free animations available from mixim mo.com and my mind started to build a story around them number three you can't see Stormtroopers faces and I hadn't figured out lip sync yet and so first day was born after only using Unreal for a couple of months I don't say this to brag but to emphasize how strong streamlined and dare I say simple the process became after I'd figured out the basics hopefully you will get to that point even sooner even so apart from lipsync I also hadn't figured out how to edit or customize animations from within unreal so I had to write the story entirely around the movements that were available from mio.com and time the dialogue to them it was kind of a backwards way of working but that was the limit of my knowledge at the time and that's where the whatever works Spirit of film making kicks in cool cool cool cool and so the takeaways from this lesson figure out what you want to make write a proper script and from that script do a breakdown of characters locations of props do a rough estimate of how long your film may be a good rule of thumb is about a minute per page of properly formatted script then allow for the fact that you can maybe complete 10 seconds of footage on a really good day and 2 to 3 seconds on any the other day this is assuming you are creating your Productions initially as a hobby maybe around a full-time job once again special effects action scenes complicated scenes with multiple characters interacting will all take longer and that doesn't even allow for the days when unreal doesn't want to play ball and crashes a lot which I want to emphasize again will happen do you want your films to be super realistic AAA studio quality metahumans by epic games are absolutely incredible and also absolutely free but in terms of cost your system they can be super expensive and it can be tricky to get results with them that don't fall deep into the uncanny valley have a look at my first attempt tunish or stylized characters are also an option which are less expensive for the system but can be hard to Designed from scratch this is where the playing comes in experiment for as long as you need before you find a look you're happy with do as much prep as you can then move on to the next step

Channel: AFK Academy

Views: 5,786

Keywords: #unrealengine, Reallusion, Iclone, Charactercreator, Filmmaking, film, howto, 3d animation

Id: uqxQ1S0A2Xg

Length: 8min 5sec (485 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 23 2024