Learn Unreal Engine 5 by Making a Short Film in Under 60 minutes! No experience needed. #UE5

it's true under 60 minutes you're gonna learn enough unreal engine to make a short film you're gonna go from zero to understanding how to get around in the interface how to bring in an environment how to grab some actors and some animation and assemble them together add some cameras to block out your shots even animate some light values then render it all out to create your short film so let's get started first you'll need to go to unrealengine.com sign up for an account download the software and you'll be ready to go if you open your launcher you want to go to the unreal engine tab you'll see there's a few tabs across the top here generally you're going to go to the library if you want to manage what version you have i think if you just downloaded 5.3 should be the default if you need to add other versions you can click here to add other versions but generally i just go right up here and launch from this top corner at the beginning you don't need to come to this versions tab it's just showing you what's there and your unreal project browser is going to pop up this is your previous recent projects but i'm going to go and start a new one we're going to go with the games template because some of the default settings make it a little easier on our computers for this learning process so go with blank and down here in these defaults make sure you check this box starter content and go ahead and give it a name let's just call it short and that'll create your project if you have these pop-ups you can just close them dismiss or say not now is fine now when your project launches it's going to look a little bit different than what i have set up so let me reverse what i've done and then i'll show you how to build back this so that we have these windows that are a little more common and useful when you're learning i'm going to close right here where it says content browser and i'm going to close where it says place actors and this is what you should see when you first open your project before we add back those tabs let's just talk about how to navigate around here in your viewport first thing we want to talk about is what you can do with just the left mouse so the left mouse if you click and push up on the mouse or pull back on the mouse or as you're pushing forward you kind of veer to the right and veer to the left so this just take a second kind of move around this lets you drive around the scene staying at more or less the same height but you're just kind of walking forward walking backwards and then you can just kind of navigate around here with the left mouse hopefully nobody's nauseous sorry about that then next is middle mouse all by itself now middle mouse if you click and drag you'll say well i get the idea that it's panning but it's a little bit opposite of what i'm used to from my other software so that is a quick fix and you're going to usually want to change that right away so go up to edit editor preferences and up in the search here just type middle it's easier to find it this way than to go searching through all these menus just type middle check this box inverse middle mouse pan and close this window you don't need to save it it saves it when you close the window now in your middle mouse pan it's going to feel much more comfortable like what you were hoping it would do and then right mouse all by itself pivots on the actual camera position so as i'm right mouse clicking and moving my mouse i'm not moving anywhere i'm just rotating around that single position for my camera's point of view so that is left middle and alt mouse all by themselves now for you maya users say for example you want to click a chair and hit f f is the common hotkey for framing anytime in unreal if you alt left mouse you can pivot around or tumble around the object that is in frame that you framed on so that's pretty common workflow for anyone with maya if you are a my user you're going to find unreal nice and easy because it's a lot of stuff's very similar alt middle mouse does pan as well as expected it's really no different than middle mouse without alt key held down and then alt right mouse does what you would expect as far as zooming in and out with your camera view so that is with the alt mouse for all of those options there now there's one other way to navigate around the viewport if you're a gamer you're familiar with wasd keys on the keyboard if you right mouse and hold and do wasd you can get around your scene that way as well if you're savvy working that way then you'll be happy so that's how you navigate around in the viewport let's talk about moving objects so say i select the chair here i get the manipulator for moving here that's just your three axes up here is select move rotate and scale if you hover you'll see the hotkeys are q w e and r again similar to maya if i use the move tool i can move things in a particular axis or i can grab it from the center and move it in arbitrary axes or i can grab it on one of those little planes there that lets you move in just two axes at the same time with the rotate tool it's a little unique as far as a manipulator goes you can sometimes gotta spin around to see which one is which but that lets you do your rotations and then scale is scaling if you could grab it from the middle it's uniform scale if you pull up and down on a particular axis it's just that axis ctrl z to undo and then if you were to hover right over that it's kind of tough to see that little triangle spot there then it's going to scale in just two axes at a time one other handy button here before we get away from manipulators is this one here toggles between your world space and local space for example the rotate tool right now the rotate tool is not oriented to the chair in particular it's oriented to the world space so down here is our world space little gizmo here to show us what way is x y and z but if i want to rotate the chair relative to the chair if i click this button it switches the gizmo over to be in the chairs space so i can tilt it forward directly on the axis of the chair and then if i toggle that it goes back to world space now you may have noticed that as i've been moving my objects around they're a little steppy right so if i click it kind of pops from a to b up here are your snap settings so this is for snapping during moving rotating and scaling these little blue buttons that means they're enabled the numbers next to them represent how much it's going to snap so right now it's set to snap 10 units if i switch you know to 500 now it's only going to snap on increments of 500 and then if i don't want any snapping at all i can just turn that off and then it's nice and smooth all right so that's enough of looking around the viewer and moving objects for now let's look at some other parts of the interface here i have an outliner which again is similar to other software you may be used to anything you have in this what i'm going to very carefully call a level i'm not going to say the word scene even though i'm tempted to from maya's point of view you would call this a scene but in unreal this set of things that we're looking at in the viewport is referred to as a level or also called a map we'll get into that a little bit more but they basically mean the same thing so i got a table here's our table i got a chair here's our chair right and then those are in this folder called static meshes which are a little bit different than maya the folders in unreal don't have any kind of transform attribute it's just for organizing things so it's just basically a folder like it is in windows or a mac you can pick things from the outliner here or you can pick them in the viewer itself and then the eyeball icon will hide your object and underneath the outliner are the details of that particular object so if i pick the chair i come down here here's the transforms this is telling me what mesh it's using this is you go a little bit more down this is the material it's using and right here sometimes this will throw you off there's these are little filters so you'll notice it kind of stops when i get to the bottom here but there's a ton more attributes in the details here i just need to switch from general to all and now it's going to show me all the details for a particular asset so this is a quick way to filter out just the little bits that you might need you know say you just need the lod information on the chair you can click on the lod button but then everything else is hidden so again if you need everything back just hit all also it's really handy to use the search for example hit lod and then you'll see anything that has to do with lod as well back to the idea of this content browser that i hid if i click on this button that says content drawer what's in the content drawer is everything that is in your project you can think of it as a library that you could use in various levels we started this template with starter content so here in the starter content folder i have some blueprints hdri some audio even and some props this one's probably the easiest to start with if we go in the props folder here's the chair here's a couch here's a lamp these are all the things that you could put into your level for example let's put another chair in the way you get a chair in your level is you just drag and drop and now i have another chair in my level now you'll notice the content drawer went back away so that is a feature in unreal 5. if you're coming from 4 that's going to be a little different so if you click on the content drawer it pops it up temporarily but as soon as you click away it goes back hidden which is handy if you want a lot of screen space but for learning purposes we want this up quite a bit so i'm going to click on the content drawer if you come way over here you'll see there's an option to dock in layout so i highly recommend you click that button and then now that becomes a permanent panel and it actually renames to content browser the content drawer is technically still down here as well and it'll be there in all your windows but for now we want the content browser permanently up so that we can browse through and find things to put into our levels so say you want a couch you throw a couch in the level if you want to zero out the position of the couch say you wanted it world zero zero zero you'll come over here to the details for the couch you can hand type zero zero zero which totally works or let's delete this couch and bring in another couch and i'll put it somewhere arbitrary a quick way to do that as well is you'll see there's this little icon any value that's not at its default you can click this little guy and that'll pop it back to the default so that set that to zero zero zero so this is your content browser we'll spend most of our time bringing in assets and importing and managing project here in the content browser now there are some things that are built into the engine itself that you don't need to bring into the project so again all these things here are things that you're bringing into the project but if you go up here to this little box with a plus and click on that you'll see there are some other built-in assets for example lights you have all your light types here cinematics for your camera and camera tools visual effects volumes and a few things that are again just built into the engine like other software has primitive shapes and lights this is handy again that it hides when you're not using it but for our purposes for learning let's go ahead and click on this and choose the option place actors panel that will take most of what's in this drop down and permanently put it in this little place actors tab and you can now click through this little light icon shows you the light section this slate shows you the camera options and such so i'm going to go back to the light tab here and i'm going to pull in a point light so similar to getting things out of the content browser to get things out of this tab out of the engine just drag into your scene that puts a point light in the scene you'll see it's now part of the outliner because it's part of this level and your attributes for it show up here in the details tab if you scroll down you'll see here's your intensity right so you can boost that up and change your light color all the things you would kind of think you could do you can do here if you want to get rid of something just select it and delete it and now it's gone so that's how you add stuff from the place actors panel now one definition to get over early is the word actors in unreal actors applies to things that are not just characters generally coming from vfx or animation when you hear the word actor you might think a character of some kind or something at least rigged nope in unreal basically anything is an actor over here you'll see your floor is an actor it's a static mesh actor if i bring in a camera this is an actor you'll see it says send a camera actor so you can kind of almost not in every case but you can generalize the word actor to mean anything just something to keep in mind for a moment let's talk about that idea of levels and maps so right now as we look in this little setup here this is called the minimal default map or level again just get over the fact that they mean the same thing if i go up to file new level and for cinematics that we're making we're not dealing with games so we're going to stay away from these options for a moment we're going to go all the way here to empty level and we're going to create it because we made changes to the minimal default level again which is this out here it's asking us do we want to save those changes yes we do because i took a lot of effort to put that couch in there so i'm going to say yes save those changes and now we're met with a brand new untitled note up here in the left this is always going to tell you what level you have open it's untitled we haven't saved it yet but it's a blank new level the outliner is completely empty and now it's a empty palette for us to throw anything into for example let's go and while we're on the chair mode let's throw a chair into our empty level and i'm going to come down here to the attributes in the details panel for the chair and i'm going to zero that out just to set it at 0 0 0 i'm going to click f to frame it and there's our chair now one thing that's a little unique here and i'm not sure if it's a bug or a feature but when you drag this in here technically the only thing in this level right now is a chair there's not even any light up here where it says lit if you switch that to unlit so you can see the texture preview but then you switch back to lit which should show you the interaction with lights it will be all black now this is actually what it should look like from the beginning i don't know if they give you like a little starter light in the beginning just so you can see where you placed it but technically it should look like this there should be nothing in there until you i'm going to drag in the point light until you bring a light in your scene now the light will interact with the chair and you'll be able to see it this over here represents what is in our current level and again the level currently is not saved so let's go to file save current level and it wants to keep it somewhere in your content folder so i'm going to make a new folder right here i'm going to right click say new folder i'm going to call it my maps you can call it whatever you want but i'll just call it my map so i know this is one that i made i'm going to go into there down here where it says new map it's just going to be the name i'm going to call it the chair and light and save that so notice up here in the upper left it's saved my new level called chair and light and this is the contents of my level and if you go down and look in your content browser now you'll see you have your my maps folder and here's the icon for a level again or map notice if you look down i can't point to it because my mouse is hovered over it but if you look down in that list of pop-up attributes you'll see that says primary asset type is a map then at the top of that list it says chair and light level in parentheses again they are the same thing that's probably the last time i'll mention it but just it's worth overemphasizing at the very beginning that the word level and the word map mean the same thing in unreal so that's great we made our own map and maybe we want to go back to our other map so where was that other map we started with if you go into the starter content folder in that folder there is a maps folder and here you'll see it looks like six maps but technically there's only three because each of these data files kind of go with the actual map so look for the one with mountains those are your map types and minimal default that's the one we started with so let's double click to reopen that map you can only have one map open at a time so double click it and it's going to open up the other map that we started with if you want to go back to your chair map you can come over here go back to your my maps folder double click and switch back to that map if you ever are unsure where to find a map say you lost it where did my map go just go all the way up to your content level select this little filter button and say just show me all the levels or maps anywhere downstream from the content folder and this will show you here's the three that were together the starter map minimal default and advanced lighting in the starter content folder and then here's our chair and light if you need to know exactly where it is just hover over it and it'll give you a path but otherwise you can just double click from here to load any of those maps as well and then just remember to turn off your filter when you're done using it because sometimes you'll wonder where everything went and it's just because you have a filter still turned on so while this is a fairly exciting scene for our short film i think it's a little limited so let's talk about how to get some free content from the epic marketplace to be able to build your short film so let's pop over to the launcher and go to the marketplace tab in your launcher and let's go straight to the free option here and we want to select that then come over to the search tags and choose environments and here's a bunch of different environments you could use now for example here's a nice bistro and here's a nice northwood abandoned mine i guess so come over here to the search field and type the word assetville because this is a pretty extensive set but it's also very lightweight it's very roblox you know it's not very high resolution but it is kind of a fun there's a lot of little vignettes and it's just a fun place to start with for practicing so what you need to do when you go to asset ville here is you need to kind of buy it you'll see there's an option add to cart or something like that when you get there it's like buying it but it's free so it's no big deal so go ahead and do that when you're done with your purchase you can come back here and choose add to project and then you can find your short and add to project and that's going to add that content into your project so if i minimize this you'll see there is now a folder in your content browser called assetvilletown so let's explore town a bit generally when you grab some sort of asset pack like that you want to look for their maps folder because that's how you're going to load the level so that you can interact with it so let's go into the maps folder for assetville town and there's a demonstration map that's kind of the layout that they chose as an example city we'll land on that eventually let me just jump into the overview map because there's usually an overview as well an overview often is just a inventory of all the things that come with that map without any particular layout right so here we have a bunch of the floors you can use here's a bunch of the cars that you can use so this is more of a go shopping kind of list and just to be able to see what you could build by hand but in our case we want to just load the demonstration map so we don't have to build anything by hand you can still modify the demonstration as much as you want if you want to move this sheriff car you can move it over there and such so you can still modify anything that's in a particular map it just gives you a good starting point so take a minute to poke around here you can just again hit f to move closer i like to alt click myself to pan around but again left mouse all by itself you can kind of walk around town see what they got around here so again take a minute to kind of look around explore so we've loaded our location our environment and now we're ready to start putting in characters that we want to animate and then we'll get some cameras in there and make some shots let's go to a site called mixamo.com it's an adobe owned site with free characters and free animations now you might think hey can i use one of those meta humans yes eventually but let's start easy and understand how this works then you can layer on some a little more complex workflow so once you sign in or create a new profile and sign in it's free if you don't have one just create one scroll through your list of characters here and find a character that you're interested in using in your short you can come back for more but let's just start with one so i'm going to switch over to this uh crash test dummy character and before we deal with the animation let's just start with the character itself so you'll have your character here and you want to choose download so when you download you want it to be an fbx and you want it to be in t-pose and then just hit download moving this aside for a moment back in your content browser you need to import your assets into your content browser so i'm going to go to my content folder i'm going to right click and choose new folder and i'm just going to call this chars for my multiple characters will live in here then going in here i'm going to right click again make another folder because again i'll eventually have more than one character i'll call it dummy and double click and the name of your character is going to be whatever the download name was so if you want you can go change your name before you do an import but from my download button here or your finder or you could even right click go to import and go browse for your asset but for me it's pretty handy since the download icon is right here i'm just going to drag into this empty dummy folder and you're going to get a pop-up dialogue for the import options basically for now leave everything at the defaults you'll see that it has a field here that says skeleton and our character does have a skeleton so leaving this to none might make you think we're not importing the skeleton but that's actually not the case it's kind of backwards from what you would think so trust me for now just leave it set to none make sure these check boxes are here everything should be fine with the default hit reset the default if you're not sure and then hit import import all would be if you're bringing in multiple fbx files but we're just bringing in one so a single import gets the job done you could hit import all there's just one thing you're importing so it really doesn't matter which one you hit here and it's going to bring in your character the skeleton the textures all into this single folder depending which character you grabbed you may have some rigging issues here but it's totally ignorable for what we're doing so just close that and here's your character you'll see it kind of separates it into different asset types here are the individual textures here's the material it's using for that and then here's the actual character the skeleton and the physics asset just grab the one with pink that's your skeletal mesh if you hover you'll see it says skeletal mesh and drag your character into the scene now you might think can i use one of these guys instead eventually yes just like the metahuman idea you can do whatever you want in the future but for now let's just keep it easy and learn how it works so we have our dummy here i'm going to go ahead and put him on the sidewalk all right so if you hover him up and you hit the end key on the keyboard end on the keyboard end key it'll snap them down to the ground that can be handy depends on what collisions are set up for the objects around here but in this case it works out just fine but it doesn't always work but when it does it's pretty handy so here we have our static character in our scene but he doesn't have any animation which is fine that's part two go back to mixmo so i'm going to come back to mixmo here and now go to the animations tab and we're gonna get some animation for our character let's grab a walk eventually you can get whatever else you want here but let's all do the same thing for the moment and understand how it works you can add your own creativity later but let's just go get a walk cycle and pick a walk for your character let's do this one here any walk is fine now one thing that's important to notice here is he is walking away from his starting point the way we're going to want to animate this guy and have him do multiple cycles and hook him up with his other animations we want to click this box in place so that he's walking in place this is going to make extending the cycle much easier there are some properties here for example if you want to you know do overdrive and make them go a little bit faster you can you can tweak some of these settings here if you want but for now i'm just going to leave everything at the default and you want to hit download we do not need the skin because we already downloaded the t-pose character and that has the skeleton and the skin so actually we definitely do not want the skin we just need the animation data my default project was 30 frames per second i'll go ahead and leave it as that and i won't reduce keyframes and we want fbx so this is the settings you want for your animation and download so that grabs the walking cycle i'm going to go in here and also choose a run just do a quick filter and we'll do fast run he's so fast but again he's running away from his starting point so you want to click the in place button for this particular situation and download this so again without skin fbx 30 frames per second and none if you like working in 24 because that's what you're used to in life then go ahead and switch it i'll show you where to switch your project when we get back to animation as well and then download and that downloads the run and then i don't know maybe we'll also have him blend into a drunk run eventually he gets tired and just kind of runs like he's drunk so we'll go ahead and make that in place and download that same settings download so we have three animation clips that we want to use on our character which is fine for now i'm going to move this out of the way for a second and now we want to import those animations to have available for our character so in this same folder with the character i'm going to right click and create another folder and call it anims and go into here and i can bring back my browser and i have my walking so i'm going to drag in walking and this is a little bit different of an import it looks the same but it's slightly different because it is a different type of asset so here it says import this is what we're importing the walking asset this is where it's important to pay attention to this skeleton field so what it wants to know now is what skeleton is this animation for so go to your drop down and i have some other characters in the scene because it's a asset ville so there are some acivil characters and there's even some cars because it doesn't it doesn't know that this is a character per se so you need to tell it this animation is for this character and then the rest of the defaults for now should be fine so they hit import and that brings in that animation clip for this character now you might say wait a minute i thought we didn't bring in the skin we didn't but because we hooked up the animation to the skeleton it's just giving you a preview here of that's the character that it's being used on so let's do that again we're going to grab another of the animations and drag it in here same thing tell it which skeleton it's for and import now you could have done all three of these at once using this the import all option that's what that's for but i'm just doing it kind of the long way here but you could for example bring in 20 animations at once you just drag them all into here or browse and select them all whatever settings you use here it's going to use that for all of them and then you would hit import all and it brings in all 20 for example so here are my three animation sequences that are ready to use on this character so now the most important part to understand about making a short film involves this next asset type it is called the level sequence again the most important part so follow this part really closely i'm going to go to the content browser i'm going to make a new folder and i'm going to call this folder cinematics you can call it whatever you want but cinematics is a good word for it and go into this folder right click in here and go to animation level sequence a level sequence is a record of a bunch of things that happen in a level don't think of the word sequence like we do in animation or visual effects that it's a bunch of shots so put that definition on hold for a minute ignore that and just accept this new word sequence and i'm going to select that and i'm going to call it because i'm not going to call it shot1 oftentimes they're broken into shots but they don't even have to be that specific i'm going to call it bunch of action 01 right because it it could be a shot it could be a sequence it could be anything this is just a container holding animation information so double click to open it and it'll open into this tab called the sequencer so now the sequencer this is just the tab name you can think of it as an editor for your level sequence so over here you'll see what level sequence you have open so we're working with the bunch of action one level sequence and again this looks familiar in the sense of if i hit play here's a timeline and it's playing through a timeline and nothing seems to be happening that's because the purpose of a level sequence is to hold in this area over here to hold information that you want to animate or override or have any record of that's different than this static world sitting here so if you think of the level as a static world then the level sequence is used to add any kind of changes to that static world think of it as this is a stage and a whole bunch of actors and props and backgrounds have all showed up on a stage but they're just going to stand there and do nothing until you have them do something here in a particular level sequence so i want this character to be animated and to accept some of those animations that i made so i'm gonna add a track for this character if he's already selected i'm going to select add a track actor to sequence remember actor can be anything really and then choose this here which is my character if i've pre-selected the character it'll show up here if i didn't pre-select it i'd have to go find them somewhere down here this is one way to add stuff to this level sequence i'll show you another way later so for now choose this and that puts your character in here the movement of this character just the straight xyz location rotation scale you can modify let me first before i set any keys i'm going to make it so he's going down the sidewalk so let's move him into position first so this is still his overall base position so he's standing here in the sidewalk all right so he's just hanging out he's a little crooked here so let me get him a little bit straighter there we go so he's ready to go walking down the sidewalk but again if i play nothing's going to happen because he's just sitting there so i want to add an animation cycle to him for his walk so to do that i'm going to put my playhead at the beginning because the animation is going to get added where the playhead is i'm going to go to animation here and add an animation sample and we have walking nine was the name of it so i'm going to click on that and hit play and you'll see he starts walking but then he stops walking that's because that walking loop is only for this part of the timeline 0 to 31 frames so i'm going to drag this all the way to the end of my just default 150 frames you can change your in and out point by just sliding this here but then i'm going to now hit play and he's walking along walking along until you get to the end of the timeline you could then if you want hit this button here which is looping and then hit play and he's just going to keep walking and walking and walking through the whole timeline and then it'll loop back around so let's say at this point though i want him to switch his motion into the run so what i would do here now we haven't talked about moving him anywhere yet he's just getting his animation set and then we'll adjust his transform to have him move in the right place so i'm going to back the animation back up to here he stops his walk cycle i'm going to click on the add some more animation i'm going to switch to the fast run so now at that point he's going to start his fast run which i'll go ahead and pull out to the end hit play now he's doing a fast run again he's in place so he's doing his walking and then fast run now that looks a little poppy right like if i switch just to look around this area and i hit play watch his animation it's it's not very smooth but you can blend animations really easily by just taking the second animation here so it's just a clip i can drag and push it into the first one so that you have some overlap so it's like a crossfade in video editing right so i'm going to hover there and you can see those little blue lines kind of crisscrossing that's one fading out and the other fading in and now if i come back here and hit play watch his animation it's a little hit and miss you might have to make some fine adjustments to see if it merges well but let's see how it looks it's actually not that bad he's walking i'm going to scrub through here he's walking then he leans forward and starts running so it's a fairly smooth i mean for one shot just a random drag and drop and slam them into each other that's actually pretty smooth so we're going to say that's fine as far as that transition goes and then we wanted him to start doing his little tired walk right so i'm going to back up the animation here add one more bit of animation to his drunk run and then from here hit play again it pops because we don't have any blending going on so i'm going to overlap those just shove them shove the second one into the first one or in this case third into second hit play and then he slows down to his run so he has a smooth transition there then a smooth transition to slow down into his uh drunk run forward so let me just pull that out to the end there so it goes all the way up so you get the idea it's pretty easy to merge these animations now the only thing i have to do since they were all in place is now i have to determine which is going to take a little finesse which i'm not going to spend too much time on but you'll get the idea and you can spend as much time as you need on it i need to have a start position here so here's my character now looking at the transform track all i'm really going to be transforming is his location in x in this case so if i want to key just the x-axis i can click on for on the zero frame here i can click on his x-axis that sets the key here then he's taking a few steps and before he switches into his transition or maybe right in the middle of it he's going to be down here somewhere all right so he'll have walked down the sidewalk a bit i could turn on auto key if i don't want to keep clicking the key button right here for that but for now i don't have auto key on so i have to hit that button but now i'll go ahead and turn on auto key it's right here if you like using auto key just click that button so now let's check this area and see if he's sliding or if that's decent that's a lo well notice that at the beginning he starts walking but not moving right so if you watch his feet they're staying in place and then he moves forward that's just the default of the animation in unreal it defaults to ease in and ease out so if you click on this icon this is your curve editor you'll see this is our smooth curve smoothing into the transition and then smoothing out i actually want this to be linear if he's walking consistently so i'm going to grab both those keys and hit the linear button which is right here or the hotkey is four and now that snaps those to be straight you might have to come back in here a couple times as you're doing this to straighten out your curves but for now we'll go back to the sequencer and he's got a straight walk i'd say it's fine he's slipping a little bit but that's fine you get the idea let's move down the sidewalk here when he hits the run he needs to go farther faster so right about where's the next transition right here so i'm going to pull out maybe at that many steps he's gone this far i'm just guessing let's see if that's very smooth at all let's see uh it's got you know there's see how there's like a weird something in there you'd just have to mess with the keys in here to get that right but again that just takes time but at least you know now how to do it then when he gets to here if he needs to change his pacing again he's kind of slowing down a little bit so i'll go to the end of the run switch to move tool and come down here and let's see if that is if he's slipping or if that's fine let's hit play so now we might be going a little too fast through there but again just takes a little bit of finesse for you to adjust the timing to set the keys in the right position but at least you know how now just add a little bit of your own time to clean up the animation that you want for him now this character is done in this particular bunch of action now we could call this a shot but generally a shot would have just one camera i'm going to show you how you can add a camera but you can also add multiple cameras for coverage of the shot from multiple angles so let's take a look at that now if you stop your animation and go back to the beginning not that you have to but just have a fresh start here let's say our first camera view we want to have kind of looking at him from the front i'm going to hide up the character here on the track i'm going to bring a camera into the scene by going up to the camera button here and you'll see there's a cine camera actor i'm going to drag that in and pull it up a little bit and hit f and you'll see it's looking down the other way on the sidewalk so i'm just going to hit the rotate tool and swing it around so it's looking at our character and we'll move it a little closer maybe it's not too wide whatever now i'm i'm moving the camera but in a minute we'll actually look through the camera i'm just getting it in a rough position for now if you have a camera you have to have it in your sequencer so that you can render through it in the way that we're doing it there's other ways to set it up but for now just do it this way so with the camera selected i'm going to show you the other way to add things into sequencer you're going to drag it from the outliner into the sequencer so now here is our it's showing us that we're piloting the camera when you drag the camera in you're looking through the camera and this is the camera's point of view i'm going to switch to what's called cinematic view so i'm going to go to where it says perspective and i'm going to switch to the cinematic viewport this is the default that we see when you switch to some cinematic that shows you kind of your camera framing but you'll say wait that's not my camera when you switch to cinematic viewport it kicks you out of your camera so to go back looking through your camera just come down here and click on your camera icon again and now that is the framing of our camera what's nice about this view is you have your controls right here it gives all your camera information if you needed some of these overlays like your grid or your action safe title safe and those kind of things you have that at your disposal here right so it can turn on action safe and such so now when i hit play that is my camera's view for this particular shot so far now i can animate the camera position i can animate anything about the camera actually also the field of view and all sorts of other things but we'll get to that in a sec let's just start with this camera and for here he walks for a few frames and let's say from here i want to switch to you know a side view camera so what i'll do is now i got to be careful here so you got to pay attention that right now we're looking through the camera this is on and this up here says pilot is active pilot means you're looking through it if i move my view right now i just moved my camera so that is my live camera position right so if i switch and turn around here i'm looking through the camera therefore that is the new camera position if you didn't want to do that well you just did so what you can do is to switch to another camera and to turn this off is either hit the eject button here or hit the camera icon here and that takes you out of the camera and now you have oh there's that catch you got to look out for if you're a maya user and you hit alt and to tumble around if you happen to hit alt and hit the characters transform tool or any of the manipulators it makes a duplicate it's useful in some cases but not when you don't want it to happen so keep an eye out for that just delete it if you happen to to do that so i'm going to hold alt and not do that again so let's say my next camera's point of view i want it to be something like this so i'm going to make another camera and i'm going to drag a new ceno camera actor into the scene and pull it up now you might say where where'd the camera icon go uh hit g so if you're ever missing a camera or all your lights just hit g that's the toggle to flip them on and off and i'm gonna rotate that one just as a quick first view here and then i'm gonna start looking through that camera that camera is um called senate camera actor three you might say wait here's one why did it jump to three uh don't worry about the naming just change the name when you need to so i'm gonna go back to my first camera actually i'm going to hit f2 to rename i'm going to call it cam1 i'm going to go to the next one that i just made hit f2 call it cam 2 and you can call it whatever you want you can call it cam side cam front it's just a name but i need that camera since i renamed it i lost it in my outliner here so i'm gonna type cam to go find it cam 2 right here i'm going to drag it into my sequencer again to be able to use a camera it's got to be in your sequencer i'm looking through it currently and what i'm going to do for this one is i'm going to keep it really close to the character and have it follow the character for a little bit so let's see what that's going to look like this icon means i'm looking through it this also double confirms i'm piloting it so if i move and get really close to his head it's really out of focus totally something we can fix on any camera if you look at your camera settings here you'll see that you have the option in the cam 2 settings you have a manual focus distance so i'm going to left click and drag through that and drag it really low because i'm so close to character you'll see it's now coming into focus alright so as i do that it snaps into focus and once i get close to focus that i think is good enough i can go ahead and set a key here and if this is where my camera is kicking in remember i'm using my other camera up to this point so before this on this particular camo i don't really care what the focus is but the value will stay the same before that keyframe and then another thing i can do is i can have the camera automatically follow this character so i don't have to hand transform and follow him so the way i can do that is if i have the camera selected and i go to the details of the camera you would go to the look at track settings so look at tracking so i want to enable it but first i want to set what i'm looking at so the actor to track i'm going to use the eyedropper and i'm just going to click on the actor or the character so now this is going to track that character when you turn it on however it's going to go down to the character's feet it's going to aim at the feet because the feet is where the transform handle is for the character so what i need to do is adjust the offset so i'm going to drag through the z value to get back up to the head so the camera didn't move down it just pointed to where the pivot point was at the character which happens to be his feet but now if i drag through the timeline as that character is walking it's going to continue pointing at the character all right so i'm tracking at the character i'm looking at the character's head and i'm following the head wherever it's going to go if i wanted to move along with the character i would need to adjust my transform to go with the character as well which is totally doable it just takes again a little bit of time but i'll leave you to do that if you want in your particular shot but let's now see what happens let's go up to the top here and if i go to look through my camera cuts track so the camera cuts this is your camera switcher so right now when i hit play and i switched the camera cuts this is your master camera selection for this particular level sequence and if i hit play right now it's going to look through camera one still looking through camera one still looking through camera one and you're gonna say wait i want to switch to camera two though you can switch to camera two but you gotta decide where you wanna do that so maybe let's say here i don't know where i was maybe here i wanna switch to camera two in the camera cuts track so i say all right switch cameras hit plus camera and go to camera two now from in the timeline from this point forward you're using camera two if you wanna have a third camera kick in you need to add a third camera to the scene so i'm going to jump out of looking through my camera cuts here by clicking that icon come up here and maybe i'm going to finish the shot from back here or something so again just going over how all this works and i'm going to back up that camera a little bit we'll say that's the sidewalk cam all right so for here we're looking at his feet and we'll say we'll look at his feet for the rest of the shot the camera is still here in the outliner but it's not in the level sequence so i'm going to select it hit f2 call it cam 3 and it needs to be in the level sequence so i'm going to drag it in here and i'm not going to deal with animating or adjusting well maybe i'll at least adjust the foot focus for the moment so i'm going to drag this down so at least it transitions to being in focus and this is a keyable value if you want it to follow the character i'll show you how you can automatically do that or you can just set keys so if i hit play for the rest of the shot that's what i see him running and then running slow right now we're seeing it for the entire frame range because this icon is selected for camera 3. so whatever camera icon you have selected that's what you're going to see for the frame range if i come up and set it to the camera cuts it's going to be camera 1 switch to camera 2 and then say from here i want to switch to camera 3 i just click on this plus camera doesn't mean add a camera to the scene it just means switch to a different camera here in the camera cuts i'll switch to camera three and then now hit play and it plays out the rest of the scene from that camera so camera one camera two camera three and finally let's say we want to have the focus automatically track the character that's pretty handy as well we don't have to keyframe it we can go to camera 3 go to your settings and you'll see there's a focus settings you open that up the focus method if you have it set to manual you have to keyframe it yourself but if you set it to tracking and then you switch over to your tracking focus settings and click on your eyedropper again and go pick your character and now it's gonna know the distance to the character so if i scroll through here he's gonna be in focus the whole time so starting here the foot's in focus so if you hit play his feet are going to stay in focus all the way through the shot so it's automatically tracking his focus so let's say you're done with this shot and you want to render it out the easiest thing to do is just come over here to the slate icon hit the icon and it's going to default to an avi sequence you'll see there's a couple other output types you could do exrs or pngs but let's just for simplicity keep it as an avi here's your quality settings if it's using compression and such because it's an avi you can uncheck it if you want higher quality then you have your resolution and importantly where is this avi going so it's going to save down into your project's saved video capture folder and then you just hit capture movie to make that avi i need to save all this it's saving all my imports and then it begins rendering the sequence gives me a little preview window pop-up and then down here at the bottom as well in the bottom right it's showing me where that is being captured to so it's being captured right here so i'm going to open that up open up the capture folder and then i'm going to double click to launch the movie file so there's my short film of that little sequence technically you do know enough now to do everything you need to create your own short film but let's add a couple more layers of information here let's say you want to create some more shots but in a different location of our asset ville town what's probably the best is just to go back to your content browser and create a new level sequence to hold the information for that other location i'm gonna grab a level sequence here let's call it bunch of action o2 double click and open that now one thing to note because we're in a totally different level sequence now your character has gone just back to t-pose because all of the information that was on that character was in a bunch of action one level sequence so in this new level sequence just to really understand what a level sequence does again all of the characters all of the props everything's just showing up where you want it to start with and you use the level sequence to override any kind of information so let's go into the donut shop and maybe in this shot we're not going to have much action other than just a camera panning and maybe some interactive lighting so the level sequence can hold any kind of information for example let's put our camera in here i'm going to bring in a camera and we'll just make it look down the counter here so here's a little preview of it to bring it into our level sequence i'm just going to drag and drop it in here so here's the shot of our camera i'm not going to animate it i'm just going to show you something we haven't talked about yet if you have lights in the scene so for example i'm going to put a very bright light right here you can animate light positions and values as well so to add that to my level sequence i'm also going to drag it in here and now i have access to the light attributes now you'll notice i have intensity and light color if you're curious about moving the light you don't see it as a default track here but it's no problem just go to where it says point light add a track and just add a transform track so there's many more things you can animate on an object besides what it gives you by default anything in the light that has this little icon over here that means it's a keyable property you could just click on this and that will add a track as well to your level sequence so if i add a transform track i now have the ability to move the light around just like i move the character in the previous level sequence but let's look at the intensity i'm going to set a key here and actually i'm going to drop it down to zero drop that light to 0 come down a few frames and set it to 10 you get the idea so now in the level sequence when i hit play i get an animated light source so you can animate lights you could also if you want to do all of your editing here in unreal you could do that i prefer to send it out to premiere myself and do the editing there but you could add an audio track so here you'll see there's an audio track you need to bring into your project your audio clip as a wav file and then you can drop it here you would just add it as an asset type as well for an audio track you could even add things such as a fade track there's a lot of different things you can do with level sequences you can make subsequences you can bring them in a shot so that's that's a little bit more advanced than just the basics of putting your first short film together but there are different ways to work and there's really no right way it's kind of a whatever way works for you situation so now that i have this little bit of a shot here right so i just have a light animated i'm going to save my level sequence and if you want just to further that discussion of how you can work i have two level sequences here i'm going to make a third level sequence animation level sequence and i'll call this all film so this is the whole film all together in one giant level sequence remember it's just a container so in this case i'm going to double click and open my all film level sequence i'm gonna add a track this time i'm bringing in the other level sequences which in this case is referred to as a shot so i'm gonna add a shot track add a bunch of action one add another shot bunch of action two and now it is like a non-linear editor of sorts i'm going to add some extra frames here and use my out point and drag that way out so here's my first shot here's my second shot now if i click on the camera icon so that it's grabbing the camera from each one i can hit play it's playing through my bunch of action one and then it's gonna switch over to bunch of action two there's actually not a lot of action in there so it's not a bunch of action it's a little bit of action i'm gonna stop that if i bring this back to the end of shot two as my out point i can now render this entire level sequence again just hitting this button here i'll choose an avi and it's going to play the two shots together as a single sequence once you get a little more into unreal you probably won't use this particular interface for rendering you'll use a different one called the movie render queue just to show you how you would add that you go to edit plugins and you want to look for render movie and then sorry movie render queue and you would check that box and you would need to restart your engine i'm not going to do it now this is just a so you know that's what you'll probably end up doing you'll switch over to that method as extra information here for you one thing to be aware of as you've been moving around in your scene you may notice that for example when you go outside it becomes fairly light balanced but then as you come closer to something that's relatively dark it also lightens so there's some auto exposure going on in the scene to try and help balance but when you're working on trying to light a shot you actually don't want that to happen in game mode it's fine but to shut that off what you want to do is go to your outliner and look for this item called a post process volume you want to select that this is what's controlling your exposure and if you go down to the exposure section in this particular example map it's already been enabled for a min and max brightness and they're pretty far from each other so set them both to one and that will essentially lock the exposure you can also come into your project settings and if you have auto exposure turned on here uncheck auto exposure and turn that off so now even though you go into the scene here it's going to be a little bit darker that's actually true to the lighting otherwise if you add a light it's going to brighten but then it's going to darken because it's trying to fix the auto exposure that's one thing you want to do if you find your fighting with your lighting is make sure your auto exposure is turned off also you may want to add more into your set than just what comes in the marketplace there is a huge library of additional assets besides the marketplace called qixel so if you go up here to this plus again and go to the qixel bridge this is a free subscription you get when you're using unreal and it's just a giant library of assets for example if i go to the 3d assets here i have all these that i can grab and pull into my project let's say i want some food in my project and i want a banana so i'll just click on banana actually let's switch over to watermelon here's my watermelon here's the relative size of the watermelon you have different texture options for your object you can choose that here i'll keep it with medium you click on download that downloads it to your computer then once that finishes i can add it to my open project by just clicking the add button and that's going to push its way into my project just like the asset ville town did so it's done already i'm going to minimize that here in my folder structure it created mega scans 3d assets watermelon so here's my watermelon right there static mesh i'm going to throw it on the hood of the truck and now i have a watermelon in my scene so you can put that now in that level you'll see it's loaded here in the outliner so there are a ton of things you can add from quick so that's also where you're gonna get now this is probably jumping way ahead for you maybe go easy don't don't go crazy over here but this is also where you'll find your metahumans so if you go to metahuman here's all your different default meta-humans if you were to pick a particular meta-human and start the meta-human creator this is where you can custom make your own meta-human but i'm going to leave that for you for future exploration because it's a little bit heavy for a first hour introduction to making a short but it is totally possible now i've got some additional videos that talk about how to transfer animation from mixmo to metahumans some cool cinematic tools like rails crane and shake also some videos talking about levels sub levels sequences subsequences in my most viewed video building a control rig from scratch and that'll push your learning even a little bit more but we've really covered enough here today to get you up and running so you can output a cinematic sequence make a little short and just have a lot of fun with this software it it is just fun it's a easy way to create if you have questions throw them down in the comments i'll try and get to him as soon as i can and keep exploring the channel see what else you can do and grow your knowledge of unreal engine and check it out we even had nine seconds to spare and here's a quick plug for my son's youtube channel go watch it

Channel: 3D Education with JC

Views: 206,061

Keywords: ue5 unrealengine5 animation

Id: eTWnzHQJvBE

Length: 60min 0sec (3600 seconds)

Published: Sat Aug 20 2022