How to Make a Cinematic with Unreal Engine 5 and Blender!

in this video i'm going to show you how to make a cinematic using unreal engine 5 while also showing you how to import content from blender now when it comes to importing content into unreal engine there are so many ways to do it and the exact method that you choose will really depend on your workflow and the kind of pipeline you're going for because there's a whole range of different 3d model formats to importing content and animations and different types of packed content like textures but alongside that there's a bunch of other add-ons and tools to speed up that process such as send to unreal which is the official add-on by epic for connecting blender to unreal and then there's also the data smith add-on which i've been recommended by some people but when doing some experimentation there were so many pros and cons to different tools and techniques that i thought it would be wrong for me to say okay that's the definitive method to use so in this video for the sake of just doing the cinematic demonstration i'm just going to use the basic fbx format for moving content from blender to unreal so i'm here in blender where i have this male human model from my rigged bass characters pack he's been animated into a pose and the armature has been removed so i'm just going to be using him as a static mesh as well as this there's a basic material that's been applied in blender called pbr body and if we go up to file then export and then fbx it's going to open a familiar window for moving content in and out of blender on the right you can see all the different parameters for the fbx export and just as a side note you can make these panels appear and disappear by pressing n and t for the left side respectively this is something that's consistent with all of blender so if you click on the viewport and press t and n you can see the different panels opening and closing on the side in the export settings here there are some important things to keep in mind so if you've selected your object as you can tell by my kind of yellow highlight here by the way the colors will be different because i'm using a different blender theme if this is the only object you want to export you need to make sure the selected objects is ticked because otherwise it will export every single thing in your scene well every compatible object type that can be exported into an fbx file so i want to make sure that's selected and then another thing to keep in mind is if we go under geometry by default the smoothing option will be set to normals only but when importing static meshes like this into unreal you may encounter some warnings that say that no smoothing groups are available so a way to get around this warning is just to make sure that all of the face moving data is included instead everything else is okay it would be a good thing to keep in mind applying the scale for the object before exporting but you can always adjust the scale afterwards when you bring the object into the scene so i'm going to press export fbx and this is going straight into my unreal project workspace and when we come back over to unreal engine 5 you'll notice that it's brought up an import window now it might not do this by default you may actually end up with a prompt in the bottom right which asks you if you do want to import but you have the option to tick to say to never show that message again and in doing that you can make sure that it brings up this import window automatically whenever you add a new object to the workspace so before it adds the object to our project we need to make sure that these settings are accurate now for unreal engine 5 keep in mind that we have the nanite system which lets us have crazy amounts of geometry in the scene and if you don't know about that then i recommend my previous video on unreal engine we can make sure that when importing objects it builds for nanite automatically so we don't need to go in manually and change that afterwards as you can see here at the top there's a build nanite tick box and we want to make sure that's ticked so it's true and i think everything else is okay so we can press import if everything goes okay then there will not be any warning window that pops up and you have your object in the content browser now my ui will look a bit different because i've customized mine but the content drawer is available in the bottom left and you can also dock this to the layout if you like so i've made sure that i've stuck mine to the user interface here and i can see that it's properly imported the content so i can now click my human mail static mesh and drag that in and maybe i'm going to make him a bit bigger one note to make here is that you can change the transform gizmo by pressing the q w e and r hotkeys this is something that's very familiar to other game engines as well so w will give you the move gizmo e will give you rotation and r will give you scale so i make sure that my cursor is in the middle of this gizmo so we're doing all of the axes at the same time and then dragging from side to side to make it larger another thing i want to do just for a little bit of extra visual variety because i don't have any textures for this object is double click on the material so it brings up the nodes now the reason why it's generated this material for us is because it was packaged in with the fbx file because if you remember in my blend file the object had the pbr body material applied to it and this is just a basic plain material with a principal bsdf shader so what i'm going to do is i'm just going to click on this parameter and change the default value to maybe some kind of orange let me move this other way so i can see maybe something like that and then for a bit of fun i'm going to grab a noise node and plug that into the roughness and this is just going to give us a bit of like a high frequency change in reflection so what they'll do is it will just start to reflect some of the scene for us and this is just because i don't have any textures i think it would just make it a bit more interesting when we're doing our cinematic okay so now that we have our object in the scene how do we make it cinematic but when learning how to do this i was very surprised at how easy it was to actually make a cinematic in unreal it seems like they've made it very familiar for artists and photographers and anyone that's done camera work in the past the first thing we want to do is go up to window then cinematics and make sure that we have the sequencer window open i have mine docked down the bottom here so i'm just going to expand that so basically the sequencer will contain our timeline for our animation and when it comes to making animated cinematics like this in unreal the data is stored inside of an object called a level sequence so you can see down here in the content browser i have a folder called cinematics i'm going to make this object now by right clicking going to animation and then choosing level sequence i'm going to name this cinematic one and then i'm going to double click on it to make sure that that's what we're editing now in the sequencer so you can see now that we have a timeline where we can make changes to anything that we want to edit in the scene but now how can we preview what we're looking at through a camera well if you click up in the top left here it's got perspective in the 3d view we can change the viewport from the default viewport to the cinematic viewport and in doing this you can see that unreal is actually starting to look like a video editing program we have our buttons down the bottom here for our playback we can play and pause and move to different frames and keyframes and snap to the start and end so it's all very familiar a quick note to make about this window is that when you're editing sequences it's quite easy to get confused when you're zoomed in so if you hold ctrl and scroll out you can zoom out of the sequence and if you right click and drag you can pan along but okay how do we animate a camera well if you have a camera in your scene like i do up here you can click and drag that into the sequencer window and it will add it to the timeline so we now have the camera on the timeline ready to be animated but we're not really looking for it in the viewport so how do we make that happen well if you take a look down at the actual camera object here in the sequencer there's an icon to the right of it that says lock the camera to selected viewport so if i click on that we are now looking through the camera and a key point about this is that we can move it around so that's fantastic now what about adding keyframes and actually making the camera move well on the left down here we can see that there are different parameters for the camera which we can change but when you're animating the camera movement there's only two things we need to care about which are the location and the rotation so if i collapse this camera component and open the transform you can see them here so location and rotation the way that we add keyframes for this is by pressing the circle button here in the middle where it says add a new key at the current time now before doing this i'm just making sure that the timeline is set at time zero so we can do this by pressing the to front button and then i'm gonna press to add those keyframes now and in doing so you will see these two small dots appear on the timeline so that's great the position has been recorded for the start of the animation but how do we add more we can move the timeline forward and move the camera around in the 3d view and add those again manually but if you paid close attention then you'll see that they were added automatically for me when i moved the camera and the reason this happened is because i had the auto keying option enabled by pressing this button here you can see by hovering over this it says create a key when channel slash properties change only automatically adds a key when there's already a track with at least one key so this is useful for if you wanted to do animations where the camera's flying around you can just scrub the timeline forward to move the camera a bit and then keep doing that and then if we went to play it back you can see that it will move the camera for us you do want to be careful though because if you wanted to look around your scene like fly around see for any cool opportunities for more cinematic shots and you left that option enabled then when you go back to play the animation you might find that the camera starts moving around all over the environment so you want to make sure that's disabled when you don't need it now another thing to keep in mind about these keyframes is that you can change the interpolation mode so you can see that as we're moving from keyframe to keyframe it's quite smooth because it's easing in and out of those positions but if we select these and right click you can see that there's a section called key interpolation and we can change the interpolation mode here so if you wanted you could set it to linear where instead of easing in and out of those positions it's just going to reach the point and then immediately change direction so it's not a smooth change anymore and we can see this more clearly when i play this back now you would use cubic and linear for different reasons linear is quite useful for if you just wanted to do like a turntable or a very simple kind of dolly movement of a camera and you didn't know exactly where you were going to cut it when doing like an animated short so you want a consistent speed of the camera moving throughout the entire scene so you can easily change where you're cutting it without it looking like it's ramping up or slowing down in speed so that's quite useful but another useful tip is that if you have these keyframes selected you can change the interpolation mode they're using by pressing one two three four and five so we have one two three being the different types of cubic four being linear and five being constant and if you're wondering what constant is it basically just snaps to the next point so for the sake of having a smooth animation i'm going to leave it on cubic for now so what i want to do is enable the auto keying and move these keyframes into a more appropriate position so i've got auto keying on i'm set at position zero i want my camera to start here and because there are keyframes already at this point it's going to override them then i can press this button here to jump to the next keyframe in the section let me get a bit more of a close-up so if i check this by scrubbing back you see that the camera comes up and then let me grab this next one and do it so it kind of comes over the shoulder maybe looking at this giant head okay so i feel like at the moment the speed goes a bit too quickly we're moving from keyframe two to keyframe three so what we can do is we can click on this and then move it along so yes you're perfectly free to move the keyframes along the timeline wherever you like but maybe i feel like the entire animation is going a bit too quickly so i want to make it a bit longer if i drag this red bar over to the right we can increase the overall length of the timeline and similarly we need to increase the length of this camera clip as well to match that and then i can click to drag out these keyframes to make them play over a longer period of time so if i press space to play this back you can see the camera moves up over the shoulder of our static mesh and then over to look at the other face so this is a very basic but perfectly fine animation so now that we've made it how do we export it to a video file so if you come over to the top left of the sequencer window you'll see that there's a bunch of buttons and one of them will let you export to a video so you can see it's the one here with the clapboard it says render this movie to video or image frame sequence so you have those both options available so if i click on this it will bring up a new window so you can change the image output format i have mine set to the video sequence.avi you can change the audio output format if that's something you needed you can also change the frame rate i think it's on 60 by default but i'm only going to be using 30 for this you can then change the resolution i recommend having it a bit higher than you need so i'm going to go for the free 40x216 but if you like you can set a custom resolution as well that would probably be useful for if you wanted to do any kind of like ultra wide recordings and then you have basic options for the compression and the quality and where to export the file format and what to name it so when you're happy with that you can just press capture movie it will then prompt you to save the scene and then it will begin when you do this you will see a small window appear and this basically gives you a preview for what's being rendered and it won't show you the entire frame but it's just enough to see that something's actually going on so i'm going to skip ahead now to the point where this is done so i can play the cinematic back and you can immediately see that there's something a bit weird about the lighting and that's to do with the lumen global illumination because it takes a second to calculate exactly what the lighting should look like so is there a way we can get around this and yeah there are a few options you could have a few seconds at the beginning of your timeline down here where nothing happens and then the camera starts moving just to give it a moment to start calculating the lighting but there's another thing you can do which is if you go down to the animation settings you can set a warm-up frame counter now the warm-up frame counter is good for particle systems so if you wanted particle effects to kind of get to a more mature state before you start recording that's handy so i've just given this a little buffer of about 60 frames which isn't much if we're recording at 30 frames a second we can say that's about two seconds of warm-up time so even though there aren't any particles in the scene i'm just doing it just in case but if i expand this you can also see that there are options for delaying time before a warm-up and before shots and this is measured in seconds so say i want to add maybe three seconds of time for the lighting to calculate we can give that a try so if i press capture movie again it's going to do a re-render and now when i play this back you can see the lighting has been pre-calculated because we've given it those extra seconds to get the lighting right before actually starting the recording so this is important if you have any kind of post processing effects or lighting or anything else it needs to adjust just before capturing those frames so now at the end of all of this you have your video which you can take away and do whatever you like with so basically that's how you import content from blender to unreal and that's how you make cinematics now of course there are a lot of other caveats and options and settings and tips and tricks which you can play around with in here but hopefully this is giving you a bit of a basic introduction to how to get kind of animated sequences and export them from unreal so thanks for watching everyone i hope you enjoyed the video if you did then feel free to like subscribe comment maybe sign up to the patreon to get your name at the end of videos and maybe even check out my resources so thanks for watching stay safe and i will see you next time

Channel: Curtis Holt

Views: 34,769

Keywords: unreal, engine, ue5, blender, cinematic, animation, export, recording, record, camera, keyframe, nanite, lumen

Id: 8EypDQXmplA

Length: 14min 1sec (841 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 16 2021