How I get UNREAL ENGINE to look like a movie | FULL BREAKDOWN

for a year and a half i've been trying to figure out unreal engine ever since i saw the qixel rebirth trailer that blew everyone's minds i knew i had to figure out this program and over the last year and a half i dabbled in unreal engine but yielded just okay results i wasn't happy with the progress i made and ultimately just stuck to my go to 3d program left wondering how people got beautiful results like this but recently i felt something click with my latest project so i'm here to fast track your unreal engine progress by breaking down my latest project and sharing everything i know in this one video to help my past self and everyone else asking how do i just make awesome art in unreal engine now before we begin i have to mention there's no way i would have gotten this far in my unreal engine journey if it weren't for the help of great teachers and friends starting with steve begin who took a couple hours out of every friday morning to answer my questions jonathan winbush who somehow has a tutorial ready for every unreal question i ask sam at rococo who picked up the phone every time i called to help troubleshoot and recently william foshea whose tutorials have been a godsend during this project i've linked these artist pages below because if you're trying to dive deep into unreal engine or even just understand what this hype's all about they got you covered and finally to epic games for sponsoring this video which is about the coolest freaking thing to happen to a video like this unreal engine is free to download so if you want to follow along click the link in the description to get your download going right now waste no time then watch this video again to test all this stuff out it's a blast so without further ado let's make some awesome art these images were made as a tribute to the late ambient artist mount shrine for his posthumous collab album with musician sky too high the full 10 minute music video will drop later this month in honor of caesar whose work skyrocketed the bar for ambient music for me personally now music is actually my number one way to generate visuals so the first thing i did was listen to their album imaginary pathways which i've linked below it inspired images of nightlife flashing lights and even old 90s video games so i gathered references compiled them in pref and use them to create this custom concept frame i love this workflow because it efficiently guides me towards my project specific goals so let's hop into unreal engine and turn this rough concept into a cinematic scene optimizing your unreal engine project to look as good as possible actually starts from this point the new project window each one of these templates toggles certain in-engine settings on or off depending on what you're trying to do they can be switched back on later so no worries i'll walk you through everything starting with enabling rage tracing and if you have an rtx card that supports ray tracing and your computer can handle it then this is a no-brainer it's the best way to ensure you're getting the nicest results from unreal engine let's enable starter content too which starts us off with some objects and materials to make life easier let's open our project and ensure that ray tracing is set up properly by navigating to edit project settings type ray tracing into the search bar and confirm the ray tracing box is checked halfway there if you go to platform windows you must ensure directx 12 is chosen with the directx 11 and 12 box checked you'll be wondering why ray tracing isn't working properly like i was if these steps aren't followed in order for us to optimize our settings and yield the best cinematic results we need to begin with a lit scene to point a camera at so let's start building drag out a floor object from our starter content folder navigate your space by holding right click and pressing either w a s or d just like you're in a pc game q and e will raise and lower the camera while pressing f snaps your viewport to any selected object now this slider at the top right of your viewport that controls your movement sensitivity while the options to the left toggle snapping for position scale and rotation let's grab some more walls and basic shapes from the place actors window hold alt to duplicate things until you have what you're going for and be sure to organize everything in your world outliner it can get really messy really quick it's very important you organize your stuff now i always use a human sized figure for scale when building things out at first you can grab that for free along with a ton of other assets and full demo scenes from the unreal marketplace it's a great way to reverse engineer beautiful scenes and learn through experimentation once you check out you can add the asset to your scene and bam we got a character for size reference at this point things are getting a little dark so let's grab a couple spotlights to backlight our standing djs with now color and intensity pretty self-explanatory but attenuation radius that's used to control how far the light travels you can change the inner and outer cone length for different looks as well but i want to add a custom light fixture so i made this in cinema 4d brought it into unreal engine and used an emissive material on the bulbs to give a techie look to the scene and since i'm using a handful of emissive materials in this scene let me show you how to set up a simple light emitting material with color and intensity sliders let's right-click in the content browser and create a new materials folder inside we'll right-click to make a new master material which i'll name mm emissive light right click that and create a material instance titled mi emissive light so the material instance is what will apply to objects in our scene to keep performance up and load times during adjustments down as opposed to applying the master material to everything which takes way longer to process make changes to ultimately slowing down your scene but we got to build the master material first in order to easily edit material instances so let's double click the emissive light master material to hop in and already this window might look familiar to anyone who's made a material before in blender or octane or redshift we're going to plug different nodes into their respective channels starting with a color value so hold three and left click in the empty space to create a constant three vector which is just an rgb value now in order for this node to show up in our material instance we need to promote it to a parameter parameters are the things you can adjust in the material instance if i don't promote this to a parameter i'll have to open this master material up every time hit save and it'll take like five seconds which is way too long so let's name it color to control intensity let's hold m on your keyboard and left-click to create a multiply node and hold s and left-click to make a new scalar parameter which we'll call intensity to control our intensity in the material instance pipe it into multiply b the color into multiply a and all that into emissive color don't forget to save and done let's apply our material instance to the custom light bulb we created and double click the instance to open it up you'll notice the color and intensity parameters on the right based on the parameters we created in our master material choose an intensity choose a color and have fun now the scene is looking and needs some atmosphere so look at the difference this is about to make in the place actors window type exponential height fog and get it all up in your scene scroll down to the volumetric fog checkbox and slap it on film sets they usually add a bit of fog or atmosphere to achieve this subtle look both indoors and out so it's no different in our 3d scenes let's scroll back up and adjust the fog density slider oh but it caps out at .05 we want more so type in a bigger number and break the rules it looks nice and lastly we're getting weird results in the corner over here so set the fog in scattering color to black perfect fixed now this is a live show setting we're creating and what live show doesn't have awesome visuals to accompany the music so let me show you how i set up an emissive video screen to play any video you want let's make a videos folder and drag an mp4 video file inside right click navigate to media and click new media player check the video output media texture asset box let's open it up and double click on the video we just dragged in save and close now you'll notice an underscore video asset was created if we drag that out onto say a flat plane that can act as a screen a new master material will be created and automatically apply itself to our plane let's double click the master material to make a couple adjustments you can see that the texture sample node is referencing the media player video we just created and is piped in to the base color now if you want a challenge pause the video here and set up an intensity parameter for this texture and pipe it into the emissive color otherwise let's create a multiply node by holding m and left clicking and a scalar parameter with s plus left click we can name that screen brightness and pipe it into multiply b the texture into multiply a and then multiply into a miss of color and hey if you got something close congratulations let's go ahead and save and close create a material instance by right our master material and clicking on create material instance double-click the instance and notice the screen brightness parameter we just set up but how do we get this video screen to play in our viewport because right now it's not and even if we hit the big play button on the right and hop into our level we still get nothing and plus i'm not trying to make a playable level i want to render some nice cinematics now if you're familiar with davinci resolve adobe premiere final cut unreal engine has something similar built in that allows you to add layers clips and anything else you want to edit or animate it's called the sequencer and it's crucial for not only exporting sequences but being able to playback what you're working on so let's make a sequence right click and make a sequence folder inside we'll right click go to animation and create a new level sequence double click it and let's hop in together since our movie screen is the first thing that needs to be queued up and played in our scene let's right click in our sequence window and make a media track so we can add our media player asset now by default this doesn't fill the entire timeline so you'll need to drag it out to the end now if you scrub the timeline you'll notice it's still not playing so right click your media track go to properties and choose your media texture video now if you scrub or hit play things should be working nicely open your material instance and adjust the screen brightness too now if you're trying to get this video to play in your real time level the process is a bit different there's a tutorial in the description if that's what you need but to make playback easier let's toggle the cinematic viewport by clicking perspective in the viewport and choosing cinematic viewport right at the bottom so now that we have a small scene to work with let's lock in our camera settings ever since i started this channel back in 2006 i've been making live action short films and making my short films look like real movies was and always will be the goal and i've found that my knowledge of real world cameras actually translates to 3d art so if you're a 3d or vfx artist and have access to a cheap dslr or even a cheap 35 millimeter film camera definitely grab one start shooting and i promise you're gonna learn a lot you have a lot of fun and all that knowledge will translate into 3d as well so let's start breaking down these cinematic camera settings in unreal engine in the place actors window let's search for cine camera actor drag it out and right click it to pilot the camera nowadays movies are usually filmed in a two three five to one or two three nine to one aspect ratio in other words they're super wide screen that specific aspect ratio is usually always wider than the tv screen or computer monitor it's being displayed on which is why you get empty space above and below the image these black bars are so crucial to the cinematic look people are slapping them over anything to look legit while it's not the end-all be-all to make your janky iphone shot cinematic it can certainly help so these cinematic bars are achieved by setting your aspect ratio to somewhere between 235 and 239 so with your camera selected come down to the film back settings make sure it's set to custom and enter 64 for the width 27 for the height and you'll notice the axe width ratio is set to 237 which is perfectly between our two filmic aspect ratio options but what about depth of field let's lock that in so think of these lens settings here as the boundaries in which our camera can operate if you're trying to zoom out to a 16 millimeter but can't it's because you chose a 24 millimeter to 70 millimeter lens to attach to your virtual camera for the most freedom go with universal zoom which gives us the ability to play between four millimeters and a thousand millimeters and stop all the way down to a 1.2 now if you know real world lenses the aperture or f-stop same thing is essentially the amount of light that's let into the lens the more light that's let in the blurrier out of focus elements are so to get that nice blurry background i keep my minimum f-stop at 1.2 though you can set it to like .95 or below if you want to crank it just depends on the shot to focus on something specific leave your focus method on manual check the draw debug focus plane box and work the manual focus distance to find your subject or you can set your focus method to tracking open the tracking focus settings and eye drop anything you want to focus on regardless of where the camera is so now that we decided our min max camera settings let's pick something that looks nice like 50 millimeters with a 1.2 aperture nice but let's improve your depth of field quality with a cheat code yes unreal engine has cheat codes to make things a little bit more confusing just pull your escape key on the top left of your keyboard is the tilde key hit that to open up your console command menu type r dot temporal a a dot up sampling zero shout outs to william faulchey for this one he made a whole video going into how and why this looks better which you can find in the description next up we have frame rate which is super important to getting that filmic look movies operate at a standard 24 frames per second since we're making movies hit the tilde key and type t dot max fps 24 this locks your viewport frame rate at 24 frames per second so you can get a feel for your final export the last thing we'll control in camera is exposure because unreal defaults to auto exposure and we want manual control over what our exposure does so to turn off auto exposure let's click settings project settings type exposure and uncheck auto exposure let's change auto exposure histogram to manual then in our camera settings under post process let's open exposure and toggle metering mode as well as exposure compensation and regardless of your metering mode setting you should now be able to adjust the exposure to your liking unreal engine is a deep program and i have thrown a lot at you so far and we're not done yet we still got to talk about export settings but if y'all are still with me i just want to say thank you y'all are the ones who really care about this stuff if you really enjoy this content consider subscribing i do a lot of deep dive content like this in the world of 3d vfx and storytelling and if you want to get your hands on all of my assets project files and more check out my patreon to see if that's for you but let's dive back into unreal engine because there's still settings we gotta tweak to get the most out of this program earlier we enabled ray tracing but how do we fine tune its settings to get the cleanest results one thing you need to know that took me forever to figure out is that your viewport view is just a low res sample of what you'll really be exporting so no worries if you're like why doesn't this look 100 well one reason is because you don't have a post-processing volume in your scene where we can control bloom bokeh shape color correction film grain and most importantly tweak our graphical settings let's drag out a post process volume from the place actors window now by default is restricted to this little box but we want to tweak the global settings not just settings for this tiny little area so with the post process volume selected let's search for unbound and toggle infinite extent by the way you can hit g to toggle icons on and off if that's helpful for you all right so let's drop down lens and work on our bloom settings you can take method intensity and threshold to fine-tune them bloom is important because it's a real world camera attribute that occurs when things get really bright in dark areas the scene would be lame without bloom and using bloom convolution actually allows you to choose custom bloom shapes by switching out the kernel but personally i didn't go that far with this scene next under image effects i like to add a little vignette to simulate real world lens vignette which is actually something you'll see removed from photographs or footage but i think it can help draw the eye to the center of the frame but be subtle with this grain is another one that you can toggle to dirty up your super clean footage this is so important so important that i'll actually render without grain so i can add super specific film grain from a pack or something in davinci but if you don't have that option this is way better than not having any so add it but again be subtle motion blur is next so if we drop down rendering features we can adjust our motion blur i like to keep mine film standard which is technically double your frame rate in our case it's 24 fps so 1 over 48 or 180 degrees in other words just set your amount to 0.5 and you'll be good in most situations now i love me some crispy reflections and had a heck of a time trying to clean them up i actually had my directx settings on directx 11 and my reflections were looking like booty so sensei steve was like nah man directx 12 if you're trying to enable ray tracing so open up ray traced reflections in your post process volume and make sure you have enough bounces two works for my scene but if you want to see reflections in reflections in reflections you'll need to creep that number up to two three four bounces etc until you're happy the samples per pixel also makes a huge difference i'll usually just keep doubling the number until i'm happy with the result or until my frame rate drops significantly which you can see by the way by going to the top left viewport and checking show fps you can always boost the samples per pixel before export though so pick something that keeps your frame rate up until then now that's all i'm doing as far as post process settings go but if i missed anything please leave a comment down below i learn stuff from you guys all the time now there's two more things i want to talk about before this video wraps all right first is how i captured custom mocap data brought it into unreal engine and cleaned things up and the second thing is my final export settings and all the cheat codes i use to push our render beyond what we're seeing in the viewport so since this is a dance club we need to get some 3d characters dancing so that means it's time to bust out the rococo mocap suit strap on the gloves and crank up the jams y'all i danced i danced my little legs right off we're talking like 10 minute takes i do this over and over and over again until i have enough 10 minute takes to fill a dance club but there's only so much dancing one man can handle so i recorded a few looping animations as well to fill out the crowd so to get this custom mocap data out of rococo and into unreal i'll first reprocess using rococo's awesome filters and export a miximo skeleton because i'm about to pair this data with a miximo mesh so on miximo i'll search for t-pose then download the characters in t-pose that i want to attach to the custom mocap data i just recorded so in order to pair any character to any animation we have to import everything in a specific order drag one character fbx into an appropriate folder which will cue the fbx import options now we can leave everything blank but i got to point out this used t0 as ref pose check box now to my knowledge since the t-pose is the entire pose not just on frame zero we technically don't need to check this box but if your fbx is animated with the t-pose only on frame 0 then you'll definitely want to check this box that way you can pair this character up with other animations i'll check this though because it doesn't hurt to and important in our characters folder we see a skeleton was made this is the asset we'll use for any and all characters and animations we import from here on out so when i drag a new character in we'll make sure the skeleton is set to t-pose james skeleton sharing that skeleton allows us to swap freely between characters and animations otherwise we'd have to do this one by one for like a hundred plus characters and that's just not possible now when we import the custom mocap data which i'll batch drag and drop we again want to ensure we're using that same t-pose james skeleton and import all so far so good but if we compare the base t-pose character to the animated character one looks normal and the other looks like gumby so let's fix this double click the animation data and go to frame one t-pose to fix the long neck syndrome click options just above the bone tree and select show retargeting options select all your bones with ctrl a right click and select recursively set translation retargeting skeleton bam the neck is fixed but now the characters floating and has these football shoulders so to fix the floating just set the hips to animation scaled to fix these shoulders drop the shoulder bones by 30 degrees and raise the arm bones by another 30. that balances things out but if you save and close these arm changes won't stick you need to make a keyframe then hit apply if you want to make more tweaks you certainly can but for my club scene the simple neck and shoulders fix will do just fine and just a final note that you'll need to do this for each unique animation but now you can change out the character by changing the skeletal mesh as well as the animation they're performing by ensuring animation mode is set to use animation asset now wind bush's tutorials on character stuff in unreal engine really helped me figure out some of this stuff so definitely look for his channel in the description if you're trying to dive deeper into all of this and finally we've come to the last bit of this epic tutorial export settings and we're going to use the movie render queue to control those export settings the movie render queue says forget real time let's crank these settings to get the best looking images possible in order to get the movie render queue running we need to enable the plugin by going to settings plugins typing movie render and checking both of these options here once you do so you'll be prompted with a restart then you can go to window cinematics movie render queue let's click the green render button and select our sequence now to tweak the export settings let's click on unsaved config to open up the settings and presets window by default we're exporting a jpeg sequence but if you want as much control over your image for color correction say in davinci resolve or premiere pro i would definitely export an exr sequence and untoggle the jpeg you can check multi-layer if you want to include other render passes in your ear xr as well let's add some anti-aliasing as well which really helps clean up motion blur samples and steppy edges there's two different kinds of anti-aliasing but for this project i'm using 64 temporal samples and checking the override anti-aliasing button so there is a ton to get into like how and why all this stuff works but this video would be two times longer if i dug any deeper than this so if you want to get into this stuff and really understand all of it read the documentation for the movie render queue i got you with a link in the description it's really well written easy to understand and they do a fantastic job of guiding you through each and every detail and finally we have console variables the cheat codes that let you crank your settings on export now i got all of these console variables from that documentation link i just mentioned so check it out so you can copy paste all this stuff into your projects so these top five turn off any denoising that occurs while ray tracing is enabled already things will be a little more crisp the next four commands are recommended to be set at zero when we're running our current anti-aliasing settings and this chunk of console variables are telling the engine to crank motion blur depth of field bloom and tone map settings to their max remember when we adjusted our ray traced reflection samples per pixel in our post process volume well i have that as a console variable as well where we can take this number way higher than it is in our viewport the final console variable i have for you is r dot screen percentage this one is huge because what it's doing is essentially rendering a higher res version of your image than scaling it back down to your output resolution so if we're exporting a 1920 by 817 which by the way is that cinematic aspect ratio we went over r dot screen percentage 100 keeps things at default but if we set r.screen percentage to 200 unreal will render a 3840x1634 image two times the resolution but scale that down to fit your original resolution it improves your sharpness like crazy and is definitely a console variable you don't want to miss out on and with all that we finally find ourselves in the output settings set your directory set your resolution check the box for a custom frame rate of 24 fps hit accept and render your scene you are all champs for making it this far into this video it feels so good to finally get a grasp on this program after a year and a half and i know that you can too click the link in the description and download unreal engine for free whether you're making real-time games or photoreal cinematics unreal engine has something for everybody and subscribe to this channel so you don't miss out on the 10-minute music video that i put together from this project i also got a couple more deep dive videos before the year's end so stay excited stay passionate and i'll catch you all later peace [Music] you

Channel: pwnisher

Views: 417,955

Keywords: pwnisher, 3d, render, challenge, vfx, tutorial, cg, cinema 4d, blender, unreal engine, ue5, training, ue4, raytracing, cinematic, breakdown, epic games, nanite

Id: FdtTthV_sXI

Length: 26min 49sec (1609 seconds)

Published: Sat Oct 16 2021