Inception Totem (Spinner) Animation in Unreal engine 5 Tutorial

in this tutorial I'll be teaching you how to make this Inception spinning animation in Unreal Engine 5 I'll also be going over how to model this spinner in blender but if you want to skip that part you can find the model I make in the description below you can also find all the files I'll be using the hdis and everything in the description also if you want uh the project files for this scene you can get that from my P linked below and that's also a way to support me all right let's get started so first thing I'm going to do is I'm going to search for a reference image so just go to Google and search for Inception totem and I'll be using this image so I've downloaded this image also I want an hdri so I'll go to poly haven.com I'm going to go into hdis and click on indoor and I'll use this one brown photo studio you can download this just change the format to HDR and you can download it in any resolution you want once we we have these two files we can get started now I will open up blender once in blender I'll select everything and delete it and I'll add a cube and then press n and go into the transforms properties and click on this X Dimension and drag it down so anything I put here will be set to all of them so I'll put in 0.026 and this is the scale we are working at so going to front view and I will bring our reference image and I'll drag this in once we have a reference image I'll scale this down to match our size there we have it so let's get started on modeling our totem there are many ways we can model this we could use a cylinder or we could use a circle but I'll be using a cube since these top Parts won't have proper geometry if we use another way so how I will model this is is I'll select the cube and add a subdivision modifier at level one and apply this and then I'll add a cast modifier set the factor to one to make this more spherical and I'll apply this as well now in edit mode I'll select the middle Edge and I'll contrl B to Bevel it and just bevel it slightly now I'm going to select the bottom half half this sphere and position it at the bottom scale it down and position it so it aligns with the bottom and I'll do the same with the top now I will add a subdivision modifier to this and I will uncheck optimal display so I can see the effects now I'll just hit controlr and add Loop cuts and just position everything by scaling the loops and moving them around so one Loop here one Loop over here one Loop over here now I'll just scale these if I'm selecting all three of them what I can do is when I'm scaling I can hit shift Z and this will not scale these in the Zed axis so something like this I'll select these top ones move them up select these move them down we just want to trace this our reference image so I'll select this scale this in I'll add another one over here I'll actually add another one here so we are just tracing these and making sure it matches our reference image so I'll move this down I'll select this entire part and scale it down a bit for so with this we're pretty much done with the modeling so this was an easy model to make so in object mode I'll right click on this and set it to shade smooth and there we have it so let's UV unwrap this now so before unwrapping this model I'm going to hide the reference image select this and position this like this just above our X and we can see that our model isn't very high polygon so I'll bump up the subdivision one more level or you can bump this up as much as you want since we're going to have a closeup of this we want this to be very high poly so I'll put this at four okay so now let's go into edit mode and the way I'm going to unwrap this is I'm going to select I'm going to go into top view and I'm going to select all four of these and from the back what I'm going to do is I'm going to select the entire Loop half of it at least I'll go all the way down and I'll do the same by selecting all four of these and I'm going to right click and I'm going to set this to Mark seam okay so we have this done now I'll click over here in UV editing and I'll go I'll press a to select everything and then press U and click on unwrap so now we have this so what I'm going to do is first I'm going to select everything and rotate this to straighten this up now I'm going to select any c Square I can see here so I I'll select these two vertices and I'll scale them in the Y AIS and then I'll press zero I'll do the same with these s y0 then I'll select these two s x0 and then also these two s x0 now I'm going to select this face and then press a to select everything and right click follow active quads now we have this to preview this better I'll make a new texture I'll make this uh color grid press okay now let's add this material onto our model so we can see how it affects everything so I'll go into texture texture View and go into materials create a new material click on this Dot do next to base color add a image texture and then we can select our texture here so this is how it looks so in UV editing I'll press a to select everything I'll scale it down and basically try to fit this into our image texture here so move this around then scale it on the X we just have to get close enough so I think this is good enough and we're done with the modeling and U and wrapping part of this tutorial now we want to export this model so before I export it I'm going to select the spinner and I'm going to go into object and I'm going to apply the scale and location so I'll just set apply all transform so this is good now okay so next thing I'll rename this to spinner and now I want to export this so uh with the object selected I'll go into export and I'll export this as an fpx and find wherever you want to export this and now what I'll do is I'll click on limited to selected objects and object types to mesh and I'll just name this spinner and I'll click on export now let's open up Unreal Engine so I'll launch Unreal Engine I'll go into games blank and I'll turn on rate tracing you don't have to if you don't have a rate tracing graphics card and I'll name this project and I'll hit create okay let's set up our project now so I'll go into project settings and I'll scroll down into rendering and here I'll go down and we can see that we have support Hardware rate tracing enabled because we checked rate tracing when creating our project next I'll turn on use Hardware rate tracing when available and that's about it and now let's go into our plugins and I'll search for HD I'll enable this and all I'll also enable movie render Q There we have it and I'll click on restart so now let's import all of our files we'll go into our content drawer and I'll create a new folder I'll call this assets go inside this I'll create a folder called models and another one called HD and in our hdri what we want is we want to bring in the HD we downloaded so make sure it's in HDR format and I'll drag this in and next I'll go into our models and I'll find the model we exported here it is and I'll drag this in I'll click on reset to defaults so one thing we want to do is we want to increase the import scale because we made this model so small in blender if you if we don't increase the scale it will have artifacts I'll just show you I'll just show you that right now so if we open up our we bring our model in you can see if we increase the scale you can see that there's parts missing from the top and the bottom so I'll delete this I'll delete all of this and I'll bring this in again and I'll increase the import scale to 10 and then I'll hit import now if we look at our model we can see everything is working fine we have the entire model intact without any issues now I'll create a new level uh I'll create an empty level and over here what I want to do is I want to bring in an HD so I'll click on this and search for hdri and click on HD backdrop now we have this HD backdrop in I'll go into our content drawer and drag our own HD into this Cube map and we have set up our h hdri in this new level so we want to change a few things in our hdri the first thing we want to change is the size because if I bring in our model let me reset the position and I'll move this hdri down a bit you can see our model is black we don't get any Lighting on it so I'll bring in plane as well you can see the lighting is very bad so the first thing I'm going to I'm going to do is in our HD I'm going to add two zeros and I'll make this 15,000 and now you can see we have lighting also I'll change the projection Center to 30,000 and I'll move I'll reset the position and I'll move this to minus 30,000 in the Z AIS and also I'll change the intensity to 0.5 and now we can start working on our lighting and set up our materials and our camera just make sure you save everything so you can go into file and save all and it will ask you to save your level so in assets I'll create a new folder called maps and I'll just name this map 01 and click on enter and there we have it just make sure you keep saving your file once in a while let's set up our postprocess volume now so I'll go and bring in a postprocess volume and first thing I'm going to do is scroll all the way down and enable infinite extent and now we want to set our exposure so in exposure I'll change our metering mode to manual and I'll uncheck apply physical camera Expos exposure and I'll set this to minus 1.76 and now we can go down and we can you can either change your Lumen settings now or you can change them right before you are rendering your uh animation so I'll just bump this up and also in the reflections I'll change the mode to hit lighting for Reflections okay so now let's start setting up our lighting and materials so I'm going to set the scale for our spinner I'm going to make this smaller I'll set this to 0.2 we don't want to go very small if you go to the accurate scales Lumen isn't very good at lighting very small objects so we'll make this slightly bigger and now what I'll do is I'll set up our camera so I'll go into cinematics and bring in a cinematic camera actor and I'll change the film back to DSLR also I'll change the focal length to 80 and for now I'll increase the aperture so I can see what I'm doing now I'll right click on the camera and select pilot and now I can set up the position for the camera so I'll set it up something I'll go into perspective into cinematic View and pilot our camera again if it isn't piloting you can go down into perspective and select your camera over here and now what I can do is I can enable these grids if you scroll down while moving your camera you can change the speed at which it moves so I'll make this slower and I'll position this somewhere like this maybe looking down a bit for now I'll position this somewhere around here so now I'll go back into the default view and what we can do is while we're working if we go down over here into layouts we can split this and over here change this one to perspective and and pilot the camera and now we will always have this view of our camera over here a a good position I found for the camera is if we set it manually we can set the x to - 18 and the Y to 38 and the Z to 11 we can set our rotation on the y-axis to minus 13.4 and we can set it set our Zed rotation to minus 69 so I think this positioning is a lot better now I'll change the focus setting I'll click on draw debug F Focus plane and I'll position this around here you can just click and drag inside of here to move this so we want this to be touching right under the totem also I'll change the aperture to 7.7 and I'll uncheck draw debug Focus plane let's bring in some materials for our spinner and our for the table that the spinner is on so I'll go into quickel bridge and I'll go into surfaces we want a metal for our spinner so in metals I'll go into gun metal and the one I'm use using is this one the brushed aluminium so what you want to do is you can select the quality here I selected high quality and you can click on download Once you have this downloaded you can click on ADD and if we go back in our project you can see in our content draw we have this material over here so let's also get the material we want for our table so I'll go into wood and I'll go to veneer and the one I'm using is this one Walnut veneer do the same thing you can download this on whichever quality you want and then add this to your project so let's find our material I'll go into our content draw and I'll drag this onto our spinner and also I'll drag this wood material onto our plane if if it's not updating you can check this real time off and then it should update also if you click G if you press G on the keyboard you can hide the gizmos so one thing we want to do is we want to rotate this 90° Also let's adjust these materials a bit so I'll open up the metal material and I'll change the tiling I'll go into tiling and I'll set this to0 2 and2 also I'll go into the normal map and I'll increase the strength to five and I'll click on Save now let's adjust our wood material so I'll open up our wood material I'll change the tiling to 0.7 and also I'll go into albo and I'll change this the saturation a bit I'll make this around something like this 1.4 and I'll increase the brightness to like this and I'll change a contrast as well also in normal I'm going to increase the normal strength to 10 you can see how it makes it look like uh it's on a smaller scales since we can see more of the details you can see how it's affecting the material now let's add a light so we aren't only relying on the hdri so I'll add a wck light bring this in and I'll right click on this and pilot this and let's position this somewhere nice also I'll turn on R Trace Shadows now let's position this we want to see how we can see the highlights this is too bright so let's set the intensity to four and now we can position this if you move this over here you can see how it's changing the look so we want this to match our light in the window somewhat if you move this up and down you can also see the effects of that so I'll position this something like this you can copy the location and rotation if you want or you can just position this however you want yourself so let's get out of here and now let's set up the background a little bit let's add a few objects in here so we want some vases we can put over here so let's go into bridge and and search for vase so the one I'm using is this one the wooden vase you can download this like you did the textures and materials and add this to your project also we want to change the material to a marble material so let's search for cremma and I'm using the first one we have over here so add this to your project as well and now we can go back to our project so let's bring in our vase if we go into our 3D assets we can drag this in let's scale this up and position this you can see that it's very low po it doesn't look very good so what we can do is we can go into our modeling tools and we can click go into our model Tab and subdivide it right here inside of Unreal Engine and I'll leave the subdivision levels to three and then I can just click on accept so there we have it we subdivided it now we can go back and let's position this I will uncheck our snapping tools for moving and what I will do is I'll move this somewhere around here like this you can see over here how it's framed maybe bring this a bit closer also I'll duplicate this by by holding down alt and moving this and I'll change the scale of this one to three and move this down as well if you hit end on your keyboard it will automatically snap to the table so let's position this something like this okay so now let's change this to a marble so we can go into our marble m material and we can just drag this onto here okay that looks great so now we can start with animating our scene before that I'll save everything so let's create our sequence so I'll go into assets and create a new folder I'll name this seq come in here right click and go into cinematics level sequence and I'll name this sq0 one and I'll open this up and now what I want to do is I want to drag in our camera from here and we want to drag in our spinner as well I want this to be a 10sec animation you can set it to whatever you want also I want this at 24 frames per second that's more cinematic look a more film look so I'll set this to 24 frames per second also I'll go here here and set show time as to seconds so we can see how many seconds there are and if I drag this up we can extend our timeline so I'll set this to 15 and I'll drag this up so we can see 10 seconds I want to drag this red bar this is our end time and move it to 10 seconds and also I want to extend this all the way to 10 seconds now what I want to do is I want to select our spinner and in our rotation at our zero frames we want to set a key frame and at 10 10 seconds I want to change this to 18,000 and set another rotation key frame you can either click on this button here or you can click here and now our spinner should spin well it's not spinning so I guess it didn't set that so change this again now it's spinning you can see the spinner is spinning now let's add in a little bit of a wobble so you can either add this at the end if you just want this to slowly start wobbling or since I'm creating a loop looping animation I want the starting position and the ending position to be the same so what I'm going to do is I'm going to make it slowly wobble and then by the end it's going to stabilize again so around here at 8 seconds what you can do is if we remove the snapping for our rotation and I slightly rotate this on the y- AIS just slightly like 2° and then I set a key frame now what this is going to do is if you play this you can see that it slowly starts to wobble and then it stabilizes again so that's what we want also what I'm going to do is I want this to be spinning before the animation starts so it doesn't start up as we're spinning and the spinning isn't correct since it's ramping up and ramping down so what I will do is I will select all of these and I will right click and I'll make them linear so what that makes it it makes it spin at a constant rate also I'm going to extend this backwards I'll set this to minus5 and here at - 10 seconds I'll set the rotation to - 18,000 and I'll set a key frame so what that allows is when the animation starts it's it's it's already spinning so you can see it's already spinning from before we move this behind zero is still spinning so now let's render this out so if we click on this the movie render que will open what you want to do is you want to click on this unsaved config to change the settings and let's add in a few modules let's add in the game overrides what this does it forces your engine scalability settings to be set to cinematic Also let's add in uh anti lising so this is the most important module for this render since this spinner is rotating and has motion blur it won't look good if you don't have antialising in it so let's set the temporal sample counts to something like 16 or 32 or 64 the more samples you have the longer it will take to render so just be careful with that you can set this to 16 if you want it to render quickly I'm going to set this to 64 and also click on override Anta listing and leave the method to none now if you go into output you can change the resolution here I'm going to leave it at 1080P and just click on accept and render local that should start up the rendering now that the rendering is complete if you browse to the project files directory and go into saved and in movie renders you can see out the rendered sequence but if you want to convert this into a video file what we can do is we can open up blender and over here click on video editing now we want to set up our settings first set up the correct resolution what you rendered at also select the right frame rate and select the frame range we rendered out 240 frames so I'll set that to the end frame and now over here if I copy this location if I hit conf contrl a or shift a and go into image sequence and now if I click on the first one and hit a on the keyboard I can add image strip and now we have this in our blender file so to export this you can set an export directory over here where wherever you want you can select wherever you want to save this also in in encoding you can go in and you can set this to no audio if there isn't any audio here and you can set the output quality so the the the lower the quality the lower the file size and I'm going to set this to perceptually lossless and then you can just hit render animation and with this done you'll have your final rendered video if this tutorial was useful to you please consider liking the video also if you want to watch more content like this you can subscribe to my channel and if you want the project files for this tutorial or you just want to support me you can check out my patreon linked below if you are interested in learning how to light scenes in unreal engines like products and Interiors you can check out the course linked below as well

Channel: Xtricate Studios

Views: 2,429

Keywords: Unreal engine 5, UE5, Inception, Totem, Spinner, Spinning top, Cobbs, Animation, Blender, Lighting, Rendering, Photorealistic, Unreal, Engine, cenimatic, cinematic

Id: XQrsr6CkkNU

Length: 35min 58sec (2158 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 19 2024