How I Remade Dune in 24 Hours using VFX

I'm going to recreate Dune in just 24 hours the visual effects of Dune took over a thousand different artist and each frame took upwards of 24 hours to render and at 24 frames per second it would take over 591 years to render this out on one computer um now I don't have that kind of time but I believe anyone can make Hollywood level visual effects and films using this secret weapon Unreal Engine 5 my name is Josh tunin and I used onreal engine every day on set for the virtual production of avatar The Last Airbender and I've spent the last 8 years working on Hollywood visual effects as an artist and supervisor but today I want to push Unreal Engine to its limits so in just one day I need to build an entire city animate the flying ornithopters and somehow render out this entire sequence Before Time runs out all without million dooll budgets and just using free software in the computer I have at home so come along with me and let's find out if if I can recreate Dune in just 24 hours the clock starts right now all right to kick things off we're going to recreate this scene of the First Flight of the ornithopters on the planet of oracus and that means we need to build this entire city as fast as possible now DG or double negative was the visual effect Studio behind all of the visual effects on Dune part one and it took them hundreds of artists and over 45 artist years just to complete this now all we have is 24 hours so I'm going to start with what I know and start with a cube using the modeling tools I'm going to build out 10 different buildings that we can clone and populate around our entire city just to get started now at this point I'm just worried about the Silhouettes not final details so we'll stretch and squash and build some unnatural sci-fi buildings that match the look and feel of oracus from the movie now that's a start but I'll be honest it looks pretty basic so we need way to add lots of detail so I want to use a classic trick that I first heard about from the making of Star Wars A New Hope back in 1977 now you probably know the Trench Run of the x-wings flying through the Death Star but how the heck did they make the Death Star look so detailed and complicated well it all starts with one word grible now that's not some alien creature instead of modeling and detailing every last inch of this practical model that they built with their hands they would take pre-made model kits and Bash them together on the surface so that they'd get all this complicated detail without constructing every piece by hand so we're going to steal this classic trick to add detail to our models without spending a lot of time so one of the tricks in my tool bag is using this plug-in called J placement instead of modeling every last detail by hand we can use J placement and displace our model using this texture by displacing and adding all this tiny micro detail to our buildings they're going to start to feel huge up close awesome now we got the detail but there's just one problem everything starting to look gray so we need to add in textures now in real life if you had a 3D model you'd have to paint every last detail by hand and that's usually how it's done in CG but again we literally don't have the time so I want to show you another trick that you can use to create entire cities using one single material and that's by using World align Textures in unreal 5 first I'm going to grab some free concrete sand and rust textures from quickel bridge which is completely free when you use onreal engine but in the material graph instead of mapping these textures to a single object we're going to map these textures across the entire world so we can start by making a concrete base and making sure the scale of our scene looks correct and then we can layer multiple world the line textures on top of one another to add in those layers of sand on top and rust underneath and then we can change the scale and size of all these different textures and start to break them up in natural ways to add Randomness across the entire city and what's even cooler is that these textures will look super high resolution when you look at them up close so now that I have this material I'm going to apply it to all of our different buildings and now we can even preview our displacement with the material on top and now it will automatically update based on all of the new detail and geometry so by mixing displacement and World align materials now we have our first set of buildings but I'm going to be honest now that all the buildings are there I'm not sure that this is enough to build out an entire city so one thing I want to try is taking those gble textures and use those to create entire blocks of this city so I'm going to take a plane and I'm going to subdivide the crap out of it so we have over a million polygons hidden inside this one plane and now when I displace it and I apply that world align material suddenly the single plane can turn into hundreds of buildings all in one go put your right hand in the Box what's in the box pain now look maybe you've used Maya or blender or other 3D software in the past and the biggest restriction is that the more detail and geometry you add into your scene the longer you have to wait around to get your final result but what's so cool about Unreal Engine is you can literally add billions of polygons into your scene and it'll still run smooth even on a laptop all in real time and all you have to do is enable nanite so I made a couple variations and now I think we have all of the buildings we need to start creating the city and time check all right so now we're 3 hours in and we're just getting started because we still don't have any of our landscape we need to somehow make this infinite expanse of mountains and sand to build out the planet of oracus so to create those Landscapes I'm going to use Gaia which you can download for free right now guy is great because we can make these sand dunes and these different Mountain structures all in a really easy procedural way and I want to use the same displacement method here where we'll generate these height maps in Gaia and then import them into unreal and simply displace our mountains into shape so after digging through some tutorials now we have sand dunes and two different mountains that we can use and Bing Bang Boom I think we're finally done and now we have our Lego kit that we can start building out the entire planet of oracus now we're on hour five look you cannot make a movie without having characters so our characters are going to be our ornithopters now look I am not a 3D modeler and honestly we are running out of time so fast so I'm going to go online and find an ornithopter model that we can use to start this off now using that cheat code of world line textures is not going to work for this model because the textures are aligned to the world not to the object itself so when we animate this you can see the textures slide across as it moves so we need to find a different way so if we want to create textures that stick onto our model we have to create the UVS no God please no we need to texture it no and we need to rig it all inside a blender no now uing is a soul crushing boring experience but texturing is by far the most fun so I brought this in a substance painter and now we can add different metal shaders with worn edges and start to detail this with brushes grungesad and then we'll add on Sand and layer it on top of the metal so we get this really shiny metallic base and we have this rough Sandy surface on top now I'm not not planning to see this up close so I'm going to call it quits pretty early here but I'm pretty happy with the result but lastly in order to animate this we need to create a basic rig so I just made eight bones for all eight Wings on the ornithopter so we can rotate them up and down and animate the wings and the flight path all right let's get a time check and it is 16 hours in okay let's pedal to the metal we don't have much time we need to build the planet we need to create the cameras and animate our shots and somehow render this out while still holding feature film quality so let's just jump right into it now that we have our asset Zoo I'm just going to take these models and start building some of these shots based on this scene from Dune so to start somewhere let's create the city wall so on one half we'll build out the rest of the city and on the other half we'll have our desert landscape let's move these mountains into place and mess around with the rotation of the different sand dunes and mountains so we can roughly match that original composition now I'm going to use those grible models for for most of the surface and just use our models to stick out and break up the silhouette of the entire city and then we'll build a little capital building at the very end of our cityscape now let's just build this Valley and duplicate a couple mountains into the background so it feels like we have this distant landscape and I think we got a pretty good base okay let's add in some fog clouds and atmosphere and now we're talking now we've got depth and this environment starts to feel huge because we can see those mountains up close and super far away into the distance so now we only have 4 hours left and we still haven't animated a single thing so let's do that next so I need to do a little bit of a flight test to make sure These Wings work and the motion blur looks correct just like in the original movie so I'm just going to animate these up and down super fast until we get about three different up and down motions for every single second okay that's going to be good enough our wings are flapping now let's take these ornithopters and have them fly through our scene and plot out a couple different [Music] cameras a lot of people think that you need to watch movies to get better at film making but it's simply not true you get better at film making by making your own films whether you're a complete beginner or you're trying to take your unreal renders to the next level by recreating shots from your favorite movies youd start to break down the filmmaking decisions that your favorite directors made and start to understand why these movies work in the first place by the way if you want to start making your own films in unreal 5 check out our free unreal crash course over at unreal forv fx.com crashcourse okay so we only have 1 hour left and like I said on the original Dune a single frame would definitely take more than 1 hour so how are we supposed to render out this entire sequence and bring it to that Hollywood level well that's why I love using Unreal Engine 5 our viewport is in real time which means our renders can be in real time so I'm going to use some of my Lightning Fast render presets to give us some high quality renders but a 30second clip here will just take 30 seconds to render out so it's done finally no we're still going let's finish this up all right so we have these rendered out but how can we take these to the next level and get rid of that video game stink that can come with some Unreal Engine renders well the last step that you can't skip over is compositing this is the step that will take our CG looking renders from looking like a video game to making them look like they were shot through a real life camera lens now I love working in real time but when you get to the compositing stage all of that work slows down to a crawl so I don't want to do that but I want to take all of the lens effects and those photo Real Techniques that I use on Hollywood films and apply those to these renders so that's why I made the oneclick compositing template this will add a lens flares lens effects and Imperfections all the things I would add every day working on a Hollywood film and it'll apply it with just a couple sliders so I'm just going to dial this in right here and render this out so we just have a couple seconds left as we wait for these renders let's take a look at the final [Music] result so it's finally done we created a racus completely from scratch and made our own action scene in just 24 hours now you don't need a ton of visual effects experience to create Hollywood level visual effects using Unreal Engine 5 I believe anyone can start making their own films using these tools and I will help you do the same exact thing so if you're a visual effects artist or filmmaker and you have these big Hollywood level ideas and you want to make them on a0 budget then join me in the live Dune masterclass this Saturday at 1:00 p.m. Eastern I'm going to share all the secrets and make this nighttime war on a racus and show you everything I did step by step and you don't need to know how to animate how to model or how to code then sign up for a free dude masterclass at unreal forv fx.com Dune and if you show up I'll give you this entire project for free but if you want to jump in right now and start learning onreal we have a free crash course over at unreal forv fx.com crashcourse I'm going to give you the entire road map to start as a complete beginner to start working at these visual effect Studios or working on set in Virtual production so check out those links below make sure to subscribe let me know what you think and I'll see you in the next video peace

Channel: Josh Toonen

Views: 470,182

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Id: -syj6kFf6e4

Length: 14min 10sec (850 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 29 2024