Four Reasons to Learn Unreal for Motion Design (even if you know After Effects)

there are so many design programs that are on must learn lists ride figma canva Cavalry Fusion that one that no one remembers blender Houdini Ai and now Unreal Engine has released its motion design tools previously project Avalanche as part of its 5.4 preview but with all of that the big question is why bother if you already know after effects in Cinema 4D why take time away from the latest binge series to try and hack away at a new skill The non- Click bity reasonable resp is of course it depends everyone's different but I'm making a YouTube video and I'm someone who used to use after effects in Z 4 date and I switched over to mostly unreal but I still use After Effects so to make this a real YouTube video I've compressed my learning into a an easy to digest list a succulent Chinese me this list will go through the good and the bad why you might want to learn Unreal Engine or not let's start off with the [Music] good watch this I have a 3D scene full Reflections Global illumination and I'm moving about like it's nothing look at the frame rate think about what a 3D scene is like in After Effects or even in Cinema 4D when you have too many viewport settings turned on plus now I'm going to drop in some footage and it's playing back in real time in 3D with Reflections and everything to contrast I'm going to drop some footage into an After Effects project just to see what the respons time is blank project blank timeline one piece of [Music] footage get used to the phrase one eternity later because a lot of things take time in Unreal Engine the installer is large so you've got to download it and wait every project it's going to take up a fair amount of room and whenever you start up a new project for the first time compiling shaders will be part of your recurring nightmares then once you open a project you have to enable a bunch of plugins that you're going to need including the motion design plugin yes it it does all get better like once you've opened it the first time it doesn't take that long to open at all and I found ways to make things smoother including going as far as making my own project template which I'll tell you about later but the weit times just become part of your life I still haven't found any approaching the Fidelity of Unreal Engine in real time I'm just going to show you what sold me the first time soft Shadows they are notoriously hard to do in real time generally you'd have to bake them and try not to touch them but unreal has found a way to figure them out on the Fly and they store them in Virtual Shadow maps with some kind of voodoo so you can have Dynamic lights which move the shadows and they stay amazing I I don't know how it works but it's good there is a lot that you have to learn about games and Unreal Engine to debug anything stuff that you wouldn't have to deal with in other programs other renderers a whole bunch of toggles and switches are going to be new to you not only because they're in unreal but because they are games Centric and they have different names for things some things are only accessible through the commands that you type into the console terminal these are called console variables and we are very lucky that we have people like William foucher who tends to be the person I turn to when things go badly and of course I'm biased but fellow Aussie Dylan Brown is also an absolute Legend when it comes to Unreal [Music] Engine we have shadows but we also have multiple 4K frames of full 3d rendered per second at final quality if you spend a bunch of time optimizing your octane scenes you might be lucky to get a frame every 2 seconds this is an order of magnitude f fter the engine is designed to give you the best looking visuals in the smallest amount of time once you've got those gorgeous visuals it is a little bit hard to get it out you have to set up your render presets for each new project and when you're setting up these render presets do you remember how I was talking about debugging visual problems with console variables those same console variables need to be included in your render presets I got around this by developing my own project template which includes render presets I've called it the Motion Graphics default template and I've organized a few things that I use all the time all of the plugins that I used are turned on you can just choose it in the projects menu when you start a new project if you're interested it's up on gumroad it's linked in the description I'm sure you've heard about the motion design mode by now it's released in its first form in 5.4 preview and I have been using a bunch more than I expected to set up things that I would normally do in After Effects like 2D 2.5 5D layouts and there's even funky stuff like from cinma 4D you've got cloners and affectors and some ideas that I've seen in other plugins like key frameless animators and there's a material system that feels more like Photoshop than other 3D programs it's honestly great you can have an engaging animated scene set up in minutes for someone coming from After Effects or adobe products unreal is a lot motion design mode is fair understandable but It suffers from the same thing as Unreal Engine it's a general sense of overwhelming scale unreal has been used to make games as large as Final Fantasy in Harry Potter so it's it's going to have the layers that we don't understand with so many switches and dials and unfamiliar terminology it's very understandable why a lot of people turn away I don't really have a solution but I do hear you and this channel will always hopefully take people who are familiar with the world of motion design and take them along into Unreal Engine in a way that is at least comprehendable from my own experience it just takes a while of existing in the world of unreal for the terminology and expectations of various objects to become a bit clearer like what we as designers want from a timeline is sometimes quite different from what a game cinematic needs so learning how unreal developers do things has been really important to helping me achieve what I need to do we've talked a lot about unreal and why you may or may not want to go there but what about after effects what what keeps me there what is indispensable about after effects I mean as I said to be honest less and less as unreal keeps adding more stuff and I get more used to it but there are two things that I always come back for simple compositing and Vector animation compositing is a large field but for me it includes a lot of simple VFX tasks that I do for clients and a big reason why I stay with After Effects is yes because I'm familiar and experienced with it but also mocha AE it's objectively a fantastic player tracker and mocha import plus makes it a silver bullet a whole bunch of VFX revolves around tracking and replacing Things Track using mocha and then using mocha import plus gives you a stabilized pre-m and if you've done any V effects you know how much that is gold for raising things out of shots unreal can manage simple green screen stuff but it's I mean let's just say it's more complex than it needs to be Vector animation isn't in unreal either like you can't animate splines you can't bring vectors in in an editable State yes in the in the new motion design mode there is a fun SVG import and it's kind of like blender where you can bring it in and extrude them but then you can't edit the points or change them in any meanful way to come back to the original question that I posed at the start why bother learning yet another thing truthfully the reasonable answer is closest it is something that you'll have to decide for yourself for me I just felt like I was stuck in a rut with After Effects and the challenge of learning unreal helped me break out of it if you're interested in breaking into the world of unreal my next video will definitely be much more of a deep dive tutorial so I'll see you there

Channel: fastchaos

Views: 36,677

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Id: km954-pu154

Length: 8min 25sec (505 seconds)

Published: Sun Apr 14 2024