How Unreal 5.4 Changes Filmmaking

unreal 5.4 just came out with huge updates for filmmakers and visual effects artists now you can make music videos commercials and freelance work using Unreal 5 for free now you don't need Cinema 4D After Effects and Photoshop now you've got motion design and text tools that render all in real time and rendering just got a huge upgrade that gives your Indie VFX workflows all the tools and power of a big budget visual effect studio and lastly you can use this new nanite update to immediately improve your environment if you don't know me what's up my name is Josh tun in and for the last 8 years I've worked in Hollywood visual effects as a visual effects artist and supervisor on movies like Star Wars Dungeons and Dragons and across the spiderverse and I started using Unreal Engine every day on set for the virtual production of Netflix's avatar The Last Airbender so let's break down my top three updates that you can start using in unreal 5.4 now you can add text and titles and create motion graphics for TVs documentaries and logos and there's easy animation tools and presets to add to anything in your scene working with text and vectors used to be a pain in unreal 5 and a lot of people would flip-flop between Cinema 4D and onreal but now it's super easy using the motion design plugin just enable the motion design plugin and you'll have access to this new motion design tab now you can create 2D or 3D text by selecting your fonts directly in onreal and you can add Vector logos by importing SBG files it's never been easier to create movie titles logo reveals or any type of Motion Graphics work easily and all in real time you can even create custom graphics using their shape tools and rulers to create title slides just like this but to create 3D Graphics all you need to know are the cloner and affector tools cloners are an easy way to take a collection of objects and clone them into new groups or shapes cloners create these 3D shapes but effectors allow you to animate and modify these so now you can create realtime procedural animation by dragging these effectors around or animating them through your scene I'm also in love with the new animation tools like the animation presets and modifiers that help you create transition bounces and wiggles without key framing anything yourself now you can add in title slams zooms and other common motion graphic presets all ready for you in onreal so try out these new animation presets to add Motion Graphics into your next project I absolutely love this new motion design toolkit and I'm going to make more tutorials covering it in depth so make sure to subscribe if you want to see more now with unreal 5.4 unreal now has Photoshop or should I say material designer for you Adobe users now you can edit any material using layers just like in Photoshop instead of using the material node graph now you can build out materials by adding in new layers gradients and masks that you can edit Allin engine and bring your Motion Graphics to life just like in After Effects but once you learn the tools you'll render faster inside of unreal and you can add 3D Into Your Arsenal so you can design and create all in real time as a friendly reminder if you want to import logos and Graphics into onreal make sure unlit mode is checked if you want that logo to be unaffected by the lighting otherwise if you want that logo to react to lighting just like it's in that real 3D scene then just uncheck on lit mode so now you can design and animate your own Motion Graphics saving you more time to be creative the next update you have to start using is nanite specifically nanite tessellation nanite allows you to put billions of polygons in your scene at the same time but nanite got a huge improvement with unreal 5.4 with nanite tessellation now you can dynamically change your displacement in real time in the viewport displacement takes a 2D image and adds 3D detail so your objects look good up close using this method you can create better looking terrains just like in this demo from Marvel 1943 rise of Hydra I tried this out in my Dune project file and now I can modify and control this displacement in real time and change it per shot so to enable this feature you just need to follow these four steps first go to your plugins and enable nanite displaced mesh next go into your config folder and open up default engine.ini I'll leave this text in the description but just copy and paste these two command variables into your renderer settings and then press save and make sure to close down and reopen your project and then the last two steps for your 3D object in your scene just make sure to right click on this mesh and enable nanite in your content browser and in your material make sure to plug in a displacement texture and enable tessellation and now you can dynamically add detail and displacement to any object inside of unreal lastly I want to cover the huge update they made to rendering in unreal but before that I want to share some other highlights that you don't want to miss inside of unreal 5.4 this first update will let you add animation to any character even if you're not an animator yourself using the new oneclick retargeting update now you can just rightclick on any animation inside of unreal and it'll automatically transfer this animation to any other character in your project so now you can download any animation from mixim mo.com rightclick it inside of unreal and transfer it over to any character the next update is motion matching which will give you AAA level animations and transitions so your characters have realistic weight and physics this project file isn't available yet but it'll be free in the upcoming months so you can deconstruct this and apply these techniques to your own films and projects for you visual effects artists and filmmakers rendering just got a huge upgrade with the new movie render graph you can turn your complicated render settings into easy customizable menus this will give you all the power of a big budget visual effect studio all from your home computer so to switch over to the movie render graph it's really easy inside a sequencer you're going to do the same thing and press on this little movie Clapper board to launch your render but instead of clicking here to change our movie render CU settings let's click on this little arrow and replace this with a graph instead now when we click on our settings we have a new menu which is the default render graph now all of our render settings are in this top graph here in our warm-up settings Global game overrides and Global output all the defaults you're used to are exactly the same and to change your file path and resolution we just go to our Global output settings and change the directory or final resolution now if you want to add an extra layer into our outputs tab all we have to do is go on the left hand side and press on the plus icon to add another output now we can rename this to data passes and now let's create another layer so now I'll just drag off a branch from our default layer let's create a new deferred render which is just our viewport in Onre and then let's pull off an exr sequence create a new render layer we'll call this data passes and just plug this in and then to enable our data passes just click on your deferred render tab then we'll expand all of our details let's add an additional postprocess material and let's include our world depth and our world position then just press save and we're going to render out the same exact way we'll go back to movie render queue and press on render local now if you want to make those customizable menus all you need to know is you need need to create some user variables and here's how you do it on the left hand side all you do is press on the plus icon next to variables and now we have all the data types that we're used to but the really fast way to modify any setting and turn it into a variable can be done by right clicking so if I wanted to make my output directory customizable all I'd have to do is rightclick on our Global output settings expose the output directory as a new pin and then just right click on here and promote this to a variable just like that now the biggest reason everyone's upgrading to the movie render graph is all the tools around isolating different objects in your scene but personally I like to use crypto mats or object IDs which work in Nuke or after effects as a way to isolate any object inside of your scene this way you're not restricting yourself and baking it down you can change up these mats and grab an ID for any object in your entire scene but there are some huge caveats with the movie render graph that you have to to know the first is that Landscapes are not fully supported spawnable actors aren't supported as well so any object that has that little lightning bolt icon X to it won't render out using the movie render graph you should also know most people aren't talking about unreal 5.3 is free forever but unreal 5.4 you'll have to start paying for licenses if your company makes over a million bucks in Revenue so overall My First Impressions for unreal 5.4 are mixed there's a lot of potential a lot of new features but if you don't plan on taking advantage of these new features right away I wouldn't recommend upgrading to Unreal 5.4 just yet personally I'll just be upgrading to take advantage of the motion design tools and make sure to subscribe if you want more tutorials on how to use it but for everything else I'll be sticking with unreal 5.3 let me know in the comments what you think is the most exciting feature and I might cover it in the next video otherwise if you're new to Unreal check out our free unreal 5 crash course over at unreal forv fx.com crash course and make sure to subscribe to the channel for more unreal film making and visual effects breakdowns just like this thanks for watching and I'll see you next time peace

Channel: Josh Toonen

Views: 28,199

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Id: NiOgmvMBcxk

Length: 9min 38sec (578 seconds)

Published: Tue May 07 2024