How to Export with Cinema 4D and Unreal Engine - Featuring Jonathan Winbush

real-time rendering has the potential to change the landscape of motion design in this tutorial i'm going to show you how to export your scene from cinema 4d into unreal engine so that you can utilize the power of real-time rendering let's go what up what up wimbush here and today i'm excited to show you guys how to make this in part one of this video series it gave you a glimpse into the power of unreal engines real-time rendering and explain how studios like capacity and stargate are using it to create incredible content beyond video games in part two i'm going to get a little bit more granular and demonstrate how easy it is to get a basic scene exported out of cinema 4d and brought over into an unreal engine so that we could take care of lighting texturing and final polish in this tutorial i will be covering the following how to prep and export your scene out of cinema 4d how to import your scene into unreal engine how to start bringing your scene to life by adding lights and volumetrics how to work with keyframes inside of unreal engine how to use free assets from the epic games marketplace and lastly i will show you how to add that final polish with luts and color correction make sure you download the project files in the description below so that you can follow along with me now let's get started [Music] as you can see here i'm starting off with cinema 4d right here and this is the basic animation that we're going to be going through so i have this building here we scaled down it and then the scroll of motion logo locks into place as we start to pull back here in the scene a little bit i got inspiration from the teenage mutant ninja turtles i used to watch a lot when i was young that's kind of where this opening came in from and then if i pull back in my scene here i'll just show you a real basic breakdown of what we have going on here so starting with the school of motion logo so if i look at the fracture here you can see that i have extruded each one of these triangles in here and the reason that i'm using a fracture is because if you come over to mograph most of the stuff in here we can use effectors with it so it's not just cloners we can actually use effectors but fractures as well so if i click on fracture here and i come over to effectors you can see that i have the random effector in here and that's how i'm able to get my logo to turn like that so if i click on my random effector you can see that i have my rotation it's just two keyframes really simple and that's going into place then the building here this building was actually donated from pixel labs so shout out to those guys for allowing us to use this and actually i'll be able to give it to you guys absolutely free for this project so you can kind of go around and manipulate it and use it for your own needs but what i did was i just manipulated the building a little bit got rid of some stuff that i didn't want in there um i redid the uvs a little bit on the building on here as well so whenever we bring it into unreal engine it's going to texture properly and then if i pull back a little bit you can see i have two cubes here and these are going to just represent like the brick buildings that are going to be on the side here we don't really need them fully detailed because if i go through my animation here you can see that we're only really seeing the sides of them just to give it a little bit more of that realism depth that i'm going for in there and this is going to add some nice shadows and have some nice light bounces off it and things of that nature then if i pull back again if we come down here you can see that i have a curb in here and i actually pulled this curb in from mega scans which i'll get into in a little bit here but the reason i use mega scans inside of cinema 4d here and not an unreal engine is because of the mograph cloner so if i pull out my mograph cloner you can see that i have two different curves in here and i'm able to just have these go all along my street here and the cool thing about the cloner is that translates into unreal pretty good and so all i have to do is block out my scene and cinema 4d bring in the stuff that i know want to bring in like my cloners and things of that nature and then once we jump into unreal engine that's where the world fun begins and we really start piecing everything together so this is basically my scene here one last thing that i want to show you guys is my light down here so if i double click on my light you can see it's just a simple cinema for the material with just the luminance on here so the reason i do it this way is because like i don't really want to mess around with like the blueprints or anything once we're in unreal i want to make everything as simple as possible i'm an artist so i just want to get into it and start creating and so one of the things that i figured out was if i bring in like this luminous material into unreal engine i don't have to go into unreal and start making like my own light materials and things like this translates really well and it gives us a ton of options that we can play around with in there and so even if i don't have anything connected to it i always bring over just the light material just in case because you never really know and then another caveat is whenever we bring over materials from cinema 4d over to unreal it has to be the standard materials like we can't use any pbrs we can't use any third parties it just has to be standard cinema 4d materials and those will come over to unreal engine no problem at all so once we're ready to bring our project into unreal engine it's as simple as making sure we hit ctrl d on our project here because we want to come over to the centerware tab and i'm using version s22 by the way but what we want to do is we want to make sure that we look right here where it says save polygon cache we want to click that and then save animation cache then we can also say material cache so we want to make sure everything on here is clicked on and then moving on from there once we have everything set there you want to come over to file and then you want to scroll down here where it says save project for cineware or if you use some previous versions of cinnamon40 it's going to be called say project from a launch but it's the same exact principles in here so what i'm going to do is click save project for cineware and then i'm just going to find a folder where i want to save it which i usually save it in where i have my original cinema 4d project file what i like to do is i like to click on it and that gives me my naming convention here already that i have for my original file and then what i'll do from here is i'll go underscore ue4 so once i'm happy with my naming convention i'm going to click save and then depending on your file size and your computer specs usually you'll see a loading bar down here but our scene is fairly simple here so it loaded out fast now that we have everything set up inside of cinema 4d we are ready to take it over into unreal engine [Music] so once you have everything open the unreal project browser will pop open here and then you'll have a couple of templates down here like if i click on games and click next you see we have a whole bunch of different templates for like gaming platforms like a first person shooter we have vr templates we have third party templates but most recently since unreal is really trying to get into like broadcast and vfx they put in this film television and live events tab right here as well and then we also have automotive and architectural design stuff here but we're going to stick with film television and live events so i'm going to click next and then i'm just going to click on blank we just want a blank slate here and then now this is where we want to kind of pick if you have like a ray tracing enabled card you can actually enable it from the start so i always like to enable it because i'm working with a 2080 ti card but and then down here you'll just kind of want to pick a folder where you want to save your project and then you'll want to name your project here as well so i'm just going to make this som for school of motion and then underscore breakdown but once you're happy with everything just click create project now we have unreal engine open and the first thing i want to do is i want to come up here to settings so i'm going to click on this and then come down to plugins because i want to activate the data smith plugin and that's what it allows us to bring in our c4d files so if i click right here where it says built in all i have to do is come over to the search panel and type in c4d and right here it says data smith c4d importer we just want to enable it and then you want to click yes right here versus the plugin is in beta version but it's been pretty stable so we just want to click yes and then right here you're just going to have to restart which doesn't take too long so i'm going to click restart now and here we are we're back in unreal engine so i'm going to close this down and now you see we have a tablet here called the dad smith plugin but before i click on this and import our c4d file what i'm going to do is i'm going to come over here on the right hand side and i'm actually just going to delete everything just because i like starting from scratch so i'm going to say yes to all now i have a totally blank scene and then from here i'm going to come down here to where it says content browser make sure i have this selected because this is where all our files and everything are going to be at then once i have everything set up here i'm going to click on data smith and then from here i just need to find where i had that cinema 4d file so i'm going to come over scroll of motion c4d and remember it's this one here that has underscore ue4 so i'm going to click open and then this is going to pop up here so i'm going to click content and click ok and then right here i want to bring everything over so i'm just going to leave the check marks on that already on these are usually on by default so your geometry materials lights cameras and animation we want to bring everything over from cinema so i'm going to click import here and then you'll notice down the lower right hand corner down here it says project file is out of date you just want to click update and then that gets rid of that there but then you notice that we have our scene in here so if i hold down the alt key left click and just swing around here you can see we have our building and everything in here and the one thing you might notice right off the top is our materials right here for our triangle now this is the weird thing i know they're in this but sometimes when you bring stuff over like in fractures or the mograph cloner the materials don't always come over on the actual objects but the materials do come into our scene so if i look down here where we have our materials folder i'm going to double click on this and you can see that we actually have our materials in from cinema 4d still from here it's just a matter of putting the materials back onto the object which is not hard at all so i know the colors here like the first one is going to be red and you can see once you click and drag it there it actually put it like on the cap and then also when i have this geometry selected if i come over here this is called our details panel i'll move this up you can see that it added these elements and these elements represent like this one that we just put on as the cap one of these would be for the extrude the side and the back it doesn't tell us what is what so all i usually do is just click and drag onto here and usually whatever it pops up on that's what it represents so i'll just go through and get everything set up back to the way it was when i exported out a cinema 4d [Music] so now that we have our logo and everything textured in here the next step is the lighting so we're going to bring in the light and we're also going to bring in the hdr to lighter cena so if i look over here on my left hand side this is called the place actors panel and over here we have lights if you look under cinematics we have cameras we have vfx geometry etc etc so what i'm going to do is i'm going to click on lights and i'm going to come over to direction or light and i'm just going to drag this into my scene then if i look over here on my details panel right here you can see under transform we have location rotation and scale and so if i want to bring everything to zero here on my location you see that we have like this little yellow arrow right here if i hover over it it says reset the default so if i click on this it's going to bring our light into direct zero and then from here we kind of just play with the rotation to get our lighting the way that we want it to be so from here on my y so negative 31 looks pretty good and then for my z i think maybe around i think it was around 88 because they gave us like this nice lighting in between the alley hair and everything and then one thing that you'll notice is right here in the red it says lighting needs to be rebuilt and so this is basically an old-school method like if you have a lower spec system you might need to bake your lighting out but i've been using this on a laptop with like a 1070 on it and i've had no problem using dynamic lighting so we don't really have to bake anything out at all but if you are working on like a really old system sometimes the viewport might get slow if you don't bake your lighting because with dynamic lighting everything is running in real time so if i look over here in my transform panel you can see that we actually have three options and if you hover over it it tells you exactly what it is so if i have static on here that means it's going to 100 percent bake the lighting in our scene which means whatever the lighting is that's what it's going to be so even if objects are moving so the light's not really going to act accordingly and then if we have stationary this gives us like a good mixture between like dynamic lighting and baked lighting so objects that don't move at all the lighting is going to be static there but say like our triangles here these do move and so that's going to be based off of dynamic lighting so whenever those rotate the light's going to reflect off of them accordingly and have the shadows accordingly as well and then movable means our light is 100 dynamic so whatever is going on in the scene is all going to be running in real time which i always use movable i never bake anything out and so you notice whenever i clicked on movable it doesn't ask me to bake anything out anymore so from here i'm just going to back out a little bit because i want to add in the hdr so if i look over here in lighting we have hdr backdrop which this is pretty new so if i click and drag it into my scene you can see that it adds this huge hdr in here and if i double click on it right here in my raw outliner you can see it zooms out so you can kind of see what it's doing it's a giant dome and you can just place your hdrs on here and it's going to light your scene accordingly so first thing i'm going to do is zero this out and then i'm going to come down here to my content browser click on content and then i'm just going to right click and make a new folder just to organize everything so i'm going to name this one hdr and i'm actually going to bring in an hdr in here so if i look in my adobe bridge i like using bridge to look at my hdrs because all the thumbnails come up accordingly so if i look in here i actually have one called moonless golf 4k and i actually got this off a free website called hdrhaven.com where you can get like up to 16k hdr zone are absolutely free and you can use them for any of your project as you can see here i've downloaded a few of them here so it's as easy as just clicking and dragging it into unreal here and then i can close this out so now we have a hdr in our scene so i want to make sure that hdr backdrop is selected just click and drag this into our scene and boom there we go now we have a new hdr in our scene and if i scroll in here a little bit and here's a tip if you hold the right click on your mouse and then you use the wasd just like you're using a first person shooter that's how you control your camera and unreal and if it's moving too slow you just come over here and you can just move up the camera speed a little bit so now it's really zooming around our scene so maybe get on to about five somewhere around there so that feels pretty nice there and what i'm going to do is i'm going to click on this little purple triangle here and this is a part of the hdr backdrop and what this does is you see if i scroll this up just makes everything a little bit more clear in our scene so that hdr is not a stretch you can see if i move down it stretches it out we're not really going to see our hdr anyway but i still just like make it clear as possible if i can so from here i'm going to zoom back in so if i double click on it it brings us into our object and i can just navigate from here so i'm going to click back on hdr let me pull my roll outliner down i'm going to click on my hdr just to make a few adjustments in here so if i scroll this up for my intensity i'm probably just going to do something like 0.2 something like that because we do want to make like a nighttime scene in here and then for my size i'm just going to stretch it out a little bit like 300 you can see that we have some nice reflections in our windows now and everything so everything is looking pretty nice here so the next thing i'm going to do remember that light material that we had in cinema 4d i'm going to show you how we can use that to start lighting our scene a little bit and then we're going to add some exponential height fog in here just to really make this night scene really drive home so i'm going to come back to my content folder here and this folder right here is the one that comes over from cinema 4d it's usually named the same thing as your c4d file so it's easy to find so if i double click on this i'm going to double click on materials and now you can see we have all of our materials again from cinema and what i like to do is i'll left click and drag this down here and then you'll come up with this little menu down here and what i'm going to do is make a copy just so i don't mess up my original file here so i'm going to double click on my copy one right here the light underscore 2. and then from here i can really start missing with my settings and everything so let's say like for my glow strength i'm just going to really bring this up to like maybe 15 and then for my color let's say maybe like a bluish color somewhere around here click ok then i'm going to click save and then let's say i want to have it like in these doorways here to make it look like these have like lights on at night so i have my windows selected here so i'm just going to click and drag it right here where it says materials and boom now we have our lights in here and they're not as bright and bloomy as we think we should have them and that's because we have to add like a post effects in here so if i come back over to visual effects at the very top we have something called post process volume and all you do is click and drag this into our scene and then from here i'm going to zero it out and then i'm going to come over to search and i'm going to type in unb now what this is going to do is once we activate this everything that we do in our post process is going to be engulfed in our entire scene like right now it just has a bounding box which means like if anything is within this bounding box is going to be affected by this post-process volume but we want our entire scene to be affected by what we're going to do here so once we click this check mark here now everything that we do from here forth is going to affect our entire scene is which is what we want so if i click this x off here now we can start going through some of these menus here so from here i'm going to move this up i don't need this depth of field but i want to look at this bloom effect so if i turn on method for hair and intensity i'm not going to mess with the intensity but already you can see the glow and everything just really highlighted so again let me turn off intensity you can see that's how our glow normally looks and then once you turn it on it really just kick starts it and starts making it look really cool instead of standard i'm actually going to click and go down to convolution and this should give us a more realistic effect on our bloom effect here so if i actually scroll over it it's saying that this is like too expensive for games which this is a game engine so that makes sense but it's intended for cinematics which we're going to be using is for rendering and everything so it makes no difference to us we want the best of the best so we want to use convolution here so now you can see that we're really starting to get like some lens flares and some nice glows and everything out of here and so i don't like the way that it's reflecting off our actual camera though i don't like these little light lens hitting the camera so there's a real easy way to smooth this out if i keep scrolling down here and my post process volume i should come down to where it says lens flare and there we go so right here where it says lens flare i'm actually going to turn on bokeh size and then if i start scrolling this up you can see that we're kind of feathering it out and it gives us a nice highlight in the middle and if we don't want it to be that intense i can always click on intensity maybe turn this down to like 0.6 something like that maybe 0.7 there we go and then from there it's just kind of like going back and forth between post process and then your actual light material so if i double click on my light material again and let me move this over here and if i just kick up the glow you can see in our windows how we're getting this really cool glow effect which once we bring in the fog this is really going to look cool so maybe like for now let's keep this at like 25 i'm gonna click save and i'm gonna exit this out so if i come back over to my visual effects tab i have exponential height fog right here which is what we want i'm just going to click and drag it into our scene which you can already see our scene is starting to get foggy here and if i scroll up to the top here i'm going to scroll down transform i'm just going to zero it out and now we just start playing with these attributes in which i usually like to go to fog density just bring it up to one somewhere around there our scene's really getting foggy here and then if i come down a little bit if i click down and scroll down until i see volumetric fog i want to turn this on and there we go we're getting some real realistic fog in here and we might want to kick it back but before that i usually like changing up the color in here so where it says fog and scattering color i usually like to click here then i like to find a nice color in here which i already have one written down so i'm just going to show you my hex number here which is six four seven one seven nine ff there we go so it has like this nice turquoise color click okay so i know you're looking at this is saying like hey this fog effect is really cool but it's a little bit too heavy what exactly are you doing and so the cool thing about unreal is it likes to try to simulate the way that the real world light works and so think of it as you know like when you're in the house and you walk outside and you know how your eyes have to adjust to the light unreal engine tries to simulate that and so a lot of times our lighting settings as we're working on them they're not going to be 100 correct because it's going to try to compensate for that because this is a game engine and so it tries to simulate whenever someone's in the house and they walk out and it has all these weird lighting effects because eyes adjustments and so we want to turn that off and then we'll start to really see how our scene is supposed to look so if i come over to post process volume and then if i scroll down here we're going to turn off that effect right here where it says exposure min ev 100 and then max ev 100 we want to turn both of these on and then i want to put both of these at one so now we're starting to see our scene a little bit better and for what it is and everything we do from here should adjust the scene accordingly and so from here if we start adding in like some lights and stuff we're going to really start seeing our scene pop through a lot more so if i add in this light here because that's the whole thing that we want to do with this fog is we really want to see how to like these lights scatter and everything with the fog so i'm just going to drag this simple light over here just point light and again you see where it says lighting needs to be rebuilt so if i scroll up here make it movable now everything's good and then i'm going to change the color because i like using like purple just like the synth wave color so click ok on this so now we have some purple light in here so if i hold down the alt key and click and drag on the axis of my light you can see it makes a copy it just makes a duplicate so it's real easy to just kind of go in here and start really manipulating our scene and then maybe i want to add a light here on the front because this is still really hard to see so i'm going to come over and actually use this rectangle light click and drag this into my scene then make this movable and i'm just going to rotate this around on the z-axis so we're pointing that a scrolling motion logo maybe i'll pull this back a little bit like so there we go somewhere around there i'm just going to drag it up a little bit then i'm going to mess around with the width so i want to engulf like the entire logo then our height somewhere around there there we go so just playing around with the light then if i want to change up the color a little bit maybe add just like a hint of something like a purple or something that nature there we go something like that starting to look really cool so from here it's just about really adding your lights over to your scene and adjusting it the way that you want like i could click back on this light material maybe start to drag this up so this starts to come through the fog here a little bit click on save and there we go this is just about where we need it to be but the power of real time rendering would allow us to come back in and make any changes on the fly [Music] then the next step from here is we want to see how our animations and our camera moves and everything came over from cinema 4d which is really easy to find as well so if i come over to my content folder here click back on the folder scroll a motion city scene that we brought over from cinema then we should have a tab here for animation so if i double click on this you can see like this red box with a clipboard in here and this is called the sequencer which is basically like a timeline so if i double click on this you can see it brought over a tab called sequencer which if it doesn't pop this up all you have to do is come over to window come down to cinematics and you can find it right here then you can just take the tab and drag it down here but our sequencer basically anything that has keyframes in it from cinema 4d and translate those keyframes and bring them into unreal engine so you can see that we have our camera here and then we also have each extrusion that brought over a key frame for each of these so if i scroll through these now you can see they're locking into place but you see our camera is not moving with it so if we want to see through the lens of our camera we need to come up to here where it says perspective left click on this then come down here to where it says cinematic viewport and this will give us a better perspective of how everything's going to look in our scene and you can see that it's sideways because we're still not looking through our camera so again we want to click on perspective come down here where it says camera click that and now we have our camera from cinema 4d so if i just click play here you can see we have our camera move and everything is moving in our scene accordingly [Music] so whenever you have an epic games account they acquired quicksort not too long ago so otter photogrammetry assets are 100 yours to use for free so if you get a quick sell.com all you have to do is sign in with your epic games account and then you have access to the mega scans library then you have access to bridge which allows you to use that mega scans library and bring that into your different applications and then you have mixer as well which is kind of like substance painter but it's quick so his own version of it which is really cool too and all these are 100 free with your account so all you have to do is go to quixote.com start downloading this stuff and you'll be ready to go so this is actually quick so bridge and this is how we get our mega scans assets over to unreal engine so if i come down to maybe like this one right here where it says industrial barrels just to give you a quick overview like these are all photogrammetry assets which means like the quixote team traveled the world just taking like millions of photos of all these different objects like barrels or cliffs or grass and all these different textures then they use their own software to make 3d objects based off all those photos which you get like these really realistic 3d objects so if i click on like barrel then if i click on 3d you can actually see what the 3d object is going to look like and they have like 4k materials and ak materials but that's something i could totally get into in its own video so i'm just going to give you a quick overview of how we could use this stuff in unreal engine so if i click back on collections to pour this up over here where it says favorites i favorite some of the stuff that i used in my scene just so i could quickly access it and so let's say like i want to bring over this asphalt material all you do is click on it and then if you don't already have it downloaded you'll just have a download button right here you'll have to go to your download settings kind of pick out what you want to use like material preset i usually just use unreal i use 4k textures and then everything else at default whatever it has selected so once you download your material you just come over here to the export settings and right here where it says export to we have a whole plethora of different programs that we can actually export to so of course unreal 3d max unity blender cinema 4d and the cool thing about cinema 4d is it actually brings over like octane and redshift materials as well so if you're working at cinema they say like you have red shift activated once you export like a material or 3d object to cinema 4d it's automatically going to bring over those redshift materials which gets you in a really good position and not really full around with you know like linking things up you're just ready to just drag and drop and be creative so from here what i'm going to do is i'm going to export to unroll engine i'm just going to click export here and then we're going to wait for the top right where it says exporting it should say successful once it's done just like so so i'm going to close this window come back into unreal you'll see like this importing bar so once that's done it will actually open up the content browser for us and it will show us where our assets at so there we go now we have our material here and if i come over here to the eject button just because i'm going to eject my camera so i can look over here a little bit and then actually i'm going to turn off my fog for now just so we can see how the street's going to look so there we go so now i have my street here and everything and i'm just going to click on it and scroll down and i'm just going to click and drag this onto this geometry and there you go now we have our street material on here and you can see that it looks really stretched out so if i double click on my material here we actually have all these options with quicksort they programmed it to be able to make this as friendly as possible so if i look under my uv controls we can actually tile it right here so if i click on tile and maybe do like 10 now you can see our asphalt looks a lot better in here so all i have to do now is click save and there we go so next let's texture up this building so if i scroll into this building here i should have some concrete down here so yeah let's use this damaged concrete again i'm just going to click export wait for it to stay successful up here there we go so i can make this smaller all right there we go so now we have our concrete in here so if i click on my building it's as easy as just clicking dragging it onto my building and again it's really stretched out so if i double click on my concrete come down to tiling let's maybe make this like 10. there you go maybe we can even make it like 15. there you go something like that i'm just going to click save and then say like you wanted to use like this concrete for something else you know whenever you have your tiling here it's going to be on 15 so anything that uses this material is always going to have that tiling there so what i like to do sometimes is like i'll click on this with my left mouse button then just drag it over and then i'll just make a copy of it so that way i don't mess up my original texture here and i always have that there and i could just make copies from there to put it on any objects that i want but if i come over here you can see that we have just some repeating patterns here i mean we are tiling it and so the cool thing about unreal is we can actually bring in decals which are kind of like stickers that we could just post up on here so if i come over to bridge so if i look over here under my favorites we actually have a section here for decals so if i click on this these are the different decals that i downloaded but if i click on damaged concrete click on export here now we have our damaged concrete inside of unreal so it's as easy as clicking and dragging into our scene it looks a little bit funky here but if i click g on my keyboard and scroll in a little bit you see once i hit g i brought up this purple arrow and this means this is where our decal is going to be pointing at so right now it's pointing at the ground but i want to kind of have it pointing at the wall here so if i come over to my transform tools and maybe even if i just scale this down maybe like 0.5 all around and then i'm just going to rotate this around and actually instead of rotating it that way i'm going to click on my tool up here for rotation and it brings up like this sundial so i'm just going to make sure like my purple is pointing at the wall here like so and then you see we have a bounding box here as well so anything that's within this bounding box is going to have this decal attached to it so if i click back here on my translate tool it brings up my axes if i push this into my wall now you can see that our decal is attached to our wall and it still looks a little bit funky so again think of this as like a projection or a sticker so anything that is just kind of engulfing is going to be affected by it so i'm going to scroll this around then maybe just scale accordingly there you go something like that so okay now i have my damage on my wall here and it looks a little bit faded and that's because we don't have anything really light in the scene over here so if i go to my point light right here just click and drag it in here now it's really starting to look like something so i'm going to make this movable maybe move this over a little bit here and now the wall looks like it's being damaged by this decal which isn't even affecting the geometry like if i click on my decal here i can actually just move this around however i want which i think is really cool so i mean megascans has a whole bunch of these different type of decals it makes the wall look like it's busted out i mean it's just an illusion but it's a really nice way to kind of break up like any type of repeating patterns i mean if you go through the library there you can see we have like thousands of thousands of decals that we can pick from and it's just a very powerful tool so if you really want to get down and be detailed in it you can always use those decals they kind of just juice up your scene a little bit so the next step from here i want to take you over to the epic stores marketplace where we can start downloading some free assets that we can use in our scene so if i come over here to my epic games launcher just click on this so once we have this open up i'm going to go directly to the marketplace here so i want to show you guys this because there's a whole bunch of stuff that we can actually download for free like to actually have a free tabs here so like free for the month if you click on this epic games gives away at least like five to eight different things from the marketplace for free and once you own them you own them 100 forever so once you have your epic scam account i suggest this is like the first thing that you do the first week of every month i believe it's like the first tuesday of every month that they make this stuff available but i mean you get some really cool stuff in here textures lighting effects you know like particle effects things of that nature but then we also have like the permanently free stuff so if i click on this you get this stuff 100 free no matter what so we have like a whole bunch of cool vegetation stuff down here so i just wanted to make you aware of this because usually if you have an idea all you do is come over to the marketplace type it in and more than likely they'll have like a free asset that you can use for that so if i come over to my library i have some stuff that i've actually downloaded for free so the first thing that i want right here is the amplified lug pack which this is something that was free remember i said like every month epic give something out for free but only for that month but once you download it it's always yours a couple of months ago they actually gave away this lip pack which unreal is really cool because we can actually use latin unreal and it has a color grading system which i'll show you but this is no longer free and but the cool thing is right here where it says amplified lut pack they still give away four free luts in there so if you click on the download tab at least that's something you have some luts that you can play around with and then if you like it you can always purchase it i'm not sure how much this one cost in particular but i thought that was something cool because i use this a lot so if i come back over to my library tab there's another free thing that i want to show you guys as well it's actually from the infinity blade game so i don't know if you guys remember affinity blade it was an ios game that was actually developed by epic games but i believe a couple of years ago they actually gave away the entire game for free so like all the assets in there all the game models all the levels even auto particle effects are 100 yours to use for free for your projects and this is one of the things i actually used on my project here it's called infinity blade effects and this is how i got like the fog and the smoke in my scene and everything so once you get this all you have to do is actually click add project and if you scroll down you just find a project that you want to add it to so let's say like this one right here i want to add it to that project you just click add the project and then once it downloads it's going to automatically show up in your content browser and then there's one last one that i want to show you guys so if i scroll down here there's actually a really cool material pack down here and that's this one here the automotive materials so if i click on this i know it says automotive materials but it has some really nice shiny materials in here in which i'm an artist i don't really want to fool around with making my own materials a lot of times i just like to click and drag and be on my way you know get getting a really good place click add the project and this will give you a great library of materials that we can use to get started and texture in any composition [Music] so now that i showed you guys all the different tricks and everything that i used to bring my stuff from cinema into unreal and even showed you some of the free stuff that i got from the marketplace i'm going to show you the final scene i'm going to show you how we could get in there use the luts and also use some color grading to really drive this thing home all right so this is my final scene you can see that we have some smoke we have some atmospheric fog we have lights i brought in some more stuff from mega stands just to really juice this thing up so if i click through and play through here there we go so that's our final animation here but what i need to do now is i really need to color grade it but before i do that let me actually hit g on my keyboard just to bring all the icons up and everything and so these green icons right here this is actually the fog that we see in our scene here so if i get rid of my camera so i could move in here a little bit more freely you can see behind like the garbage can i actually have like some smoke and fog and everything and this is what i brought over from the infinity blade pack so if i look down here in my content browser let me find infinity blade effects i'm going to double click on this then double click on the effects folder and then i'm going to come over here where it says fx underscore ambient double click on that and you can see we have some really cool effects in here so i'm just going to go to the fog one but i would say explore everything in here i mean they have snow they have steam actually this is the steam on here so if i double click on this you see we have all these different particle systems in here already pre-built so if i double click on this this is going to bring this up which is called niagara you can see we have like some really cool smoke effects in here and so all i have to do from here is just kind of click and drag it into my scene and if i drag up wherever the green arrow is pointing that's where our effect is going to go so if i come up here select rotate and just move this over like so there we go so now you can see that we have some nice cool smoke effects coming up in here and that's how i added all the atmospheric fog and everything just to kind of go with our exponential height fog because it's moving smoke in here just really makes the scene feel like it's come to life so anywhere you see these green arrows that's all i did was just drag these different smoke elements then if i click back here come over to fog i drag some of these fog elements in here as well so if i click and drag this fog in here this one might be a little bit harder to see yeah now we can see it in there but this is just really adding some really cool life to our scene and everything but our scene is still kind of dull so what i'm going to do is i'm going to go into the color grading panels add a luts and then just really add some contrast and things of that nature just to really make this scene look nice and juicy so if i come back over to my row outliner over here i'm gonna scroll up till i find my post processing volume there we go so if i click on this then i find the color grading tab here the first thing i'm going to do is come down to misc and down here we actually have a tab for color grading so i'm going to turn this on then i'm going to come to my content folder and then i'm going to look for my luts right here so remember i brought this in from the marketplace so if i click on my let's folder these are the three four ones that we have in here so i'm going to use this one called max2 so watch when i click and drag you can see it totally changes the dynamic of the scene and everything and of course if you have the full lush pack you'll have a whole bunch more luts in there but let's work on what we have so i'm going to manipulate this a little bit so for like my color grading light intensity i'm going to activate this and i'm going to take this down to maybe like 0.3 so it's not so overwhelming and then i'm also going to change the color tint so i use like a red tent in here let me drag this over somewhere around there looks pretty cool so i'm going to click ok it looks better but it still looks a little bit dull in here and actually let me click something and if i click g on my keyboard gets rid of all the icons so our scene is clean and we can see how it really looks so if i come back to the post process volume there we go so from here i'm going to click on global and then i'm going to click on contrast and i'm actually just going to move up my contrast a little bit so i find something that i like so i think about like 1.7 somewhere around there i think that looks really good there and then of course we can also mess with like our shadows or our mid tones so this is just really up to your like artistic vision how you want this to look so i could bring up the contrast on my shadows then i could also come over here if i come over to edit come down to project settings i should be able to turn on global illumination which i think already have it turned on but this is a good way for me to show you where it's at so again if i come over to edit project settings if i scroll down here i'm going to actually look for render so there we go rendering i'm going to click on this and then the search tab i'm just going to type in global and this is called screen space global illumination so really look especially in like the dark areas on the screen once i activate it it's going to click on the real time so watch this boom there you go you can see it right there we have global illumination activated so if i turn it off you can see how it's really affecting our scene it's making it look a lot more dynamic and look more realistic so i'm going to click out of that so that's a good tip to find there because that's actually in beta right now so not a lot of people know about that but i think our scene is looking pretty good there if i say so myself so from here we're going to get to the fun part we're going to do real time rendering which is real easy to set up so if i come up to window come down to cinematics you want to come right here where it says movie render queue now this is brand new for this version of unreal engine so what they're trying to do is they're making a new movie render queue to be able to allow us to render out in a better fashion with the old school method is especially since they're trying to get into like the motion graphics and broadcast and vfx field they're really trying to hone this in so this is really new for unreal engine so i know a lot more features are going to be coming in the next version of unreal but for now we're able to render out like render sequences so if i click on this green button here where it says render and then i'm going to find my sequencer which is called scholar motion underscore animation so click on that and then under settings i want to click on unsave config and then you can see like we can save out a jpeg but if i hit delete on this then click on settings we have some other options down here like we can render out a bmp and it tells you how many bit it is as well we could do an exr a jpeg or a png so i just click on maybe like an exr sequence and then we have the capability of rendering out an alpha channel if we want which i'm just going to leave this off because we don't need it then if i click on output this is where we're going to save it out to so if i click on these three dots here maybe i could just save it to my desktop i'll just make a new folder i'll name this render double click on it select folder then from here i could leave everything else at default 1920 1080. we'll just do that right there then click accept and then before i render it i just want to make sure my frame rate is correct so if i come down to sequencer you can see i'm working in 60 frames per second here and then before i hit the render local button there's one more very important step that we have to take so i do need to come into my sequencer here let me move this out the way and we need to add something called a camera catch track so let me actually delete this one and i'm going to go all the way to the beginning because we need to add this to be able to tell unreal like hey this is our cut that we actually want to render out we want to come over to track click on this and then we want to come down here to where it says camera cut track and we want to make sure we're on frame 0 so we're going to add this in and then right here where it says camera we're just going to click on this and then we're going to add our camera from our scene and now you can see we have this track here this is called a camera cuts track and then if i click render on here now you can see everything's rendering the real time you can see the frames just flying through our scene here and everything i think it started at like 40 seconds or something crazy but you can see our frame count over here on the right hand side we have 661 frames but you're watching it render in real time i mean you see the frame flying and everything this is pretty crazy and pretty exciting at the same time because what you're seeing is what you're getting this is exactly how our scene is looking right before our eyes and it looks like everything's done so if i go to my desktop there we go so there's our image sequence right there so from there you know you could bring it into after effects if you need some type of like quicktime or you could go to media encoder render this out and you'll be good to go but there's your image sequence rendered out in real time right before your eyes and it couldn't be any easier and it's a lot of fun to play around with so hopefully this breakdown helped you guys out and just kind of show you the power of unreal engine especially for us motion graphics artists how we can utilize this game engine to get real-time rendering and also do other cool things too like utilize mega scans bring in all those assets from the marketplace that we usually don't have access to and kind of just go wild i mean as creatives it's really cool how we could just pull from all these different things bring it into our own scene and just watch it all like unfold in front of our eyes if you like what you saw here hit that subscribe button as well as the bell icon so that you can be notified when we drop more content and don't forget to subscribe to my channel that is linked in the description and if you're really looking to step up your 3d game then you should definitely check out cinema 4d base camp and cinema 4d ascent taught by my homie ej hasset [Music] france [Music] you

Channel: School of Motion

Views: 13,336

Rating: 4.9646797 out of 5

Keywords: Motion Design, Motion Graphics, After Effects, Tutorial, Tips, Tricks, Technique, Learn, Basics, Design, MoGraph

Id: QmuLH4yyepU

Length: 46min 20sec (2780 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 28 2020