Hey, today I'm gonna walk you
through creating an animation just like this, using Rush Hour. Along the way, I'm gonna share tips and
tricks on how to improve your workflow, as well as some tips that I've learned
about how to do better camera work. We're going to be using Rush
Hour Vehicle Animator plugin, and we're also going to use the MAWI
Burned Dead Trees Forest Biome. Jae from JSFILMZ recommended
this environment to me, and it really does stand out. It even comes with an on-fire
version, which creates a really dramatic scene to drive through. In Unreal, I've actually gone ahead
and already moved a lot more fire around, placed a lot more fire just
to create a more exciting track. And as we move through it, we've
got embers and this is just gonna create a really great dynamic
environment for us to work in. So to begin, we just wanna make sure
that we've got Rush Hour enabled. Go up to edit plugins and type in Rush
and make sure that Rush Hour is enabled. If it's not, press this button here
and it will come up down in the bottom right, asking you to restart Unreal. Go ahead and do that, and we'll
be come back to the editor. So now Rush Hour is enabled. Let's start by creating a path. So if we come up to this plus button
up here, we can go to all classes and type in vehicle and we can see that
we've got this vehicle animation path. So let's just click and drag
that in and we can see that it's starting here and ending here. So we'll just quickly rotate that so
it looks along the road a bit more. And we might actually just move it
a little bit further up this path. So come back to the move mode
and drag it up and rotate again. So now one trick I like to do when
placing it is it can be kind of annoying to do this in the 3D view port. So I come up to perspective and go
to the top down view port, and if you zoom out, we can actually see
where the road is along this map. So we'll scroll in to where we've placed
a path so we can see the path up here. So we can see that there's
these two points on the path. If I click on the one that has the stop
sign, we can see that we've got the manipulator for this control point. So if we zoom out, zoom out a little
bit, we can hold T and drag off this point and we can see that it's
left that original point there. But it's created this new
point and the stop action has moved with this new viewpoint. So what we're gonna do is we're just
gonna go right along this path, and we're just gonna drag out, keep creating
this vehicle path along this road, and we'll just quickly get that done. Every time that you do this,
you wanna hold alt drag to the new point and then release alt. In the process of doing this, if you
notice the path becomes a bit twisted or a bit tangled, that just means you've
dragged the mouse back as you've done it. So if you can either click on the new
control point and press delete, or you can press control Z, and it will undo
that point, and just make sure that when you are dragging the new point that
you drag away from the existing path. Okay, so we've now
finished placing the path. I'm pretty happy with how it looks
at the moment, but there is a few strange kinks and bends that
are gonna impact the animation. But what we'll do is we'll play
through, watch the vehicle perform, and we'll make any adjustments to
make that look a little bit better. So we'll come back up to the top
button up here and go to perspective again, and we're back to where we
were looking at the vehicle path. So make sure you've got
the vehicle path selected. And we're gonna scroll down to the
vehicle animation path section here. So there's a few things we wanna do here. First, we're gonna change
to the racer profile. We want this to be a
fast, energetic animation. So Racer is going to be fairly
controlled, but also quite fast. Whereas frantic will be a little
bit less controlled and Sunday driver will be a bit slower. At the moment we wanna
just stick with Racer. For the vehicle type, we are just going
to choose the BP_Sedan_RH, which is the sedan that ships with Rush Hour and also
the path defaults to 100 miles per hour. So we'll just come down to this reset
speed and type in 200 and then we'll come up and press reset Path Speed. And that goes through every single control
point along the path and sets the speed. Otherwise, you could click on an
individual point and expand out the selected points part and go to the vehicle
path, and you could change, uh, speed at any of the individual control points. This setting down here, this reset
speed, allows us to quickly reset the whole path to a consistent speed,
so that just sets the target speed. The AI will automatically slow down
at corners according to its training. One more thing we'll do is
we'll just make sure that we are using the correct game mode. So Rush Hour comes with a few different
game modes, which, uh, allow us to have a few debug cameras to quickly
see our animation while we do it. So if we just come up to window and
come down to world settings, you'll see this world settings tab pop
up down near this details panel. And under game mode override,
we just wanna sh choose BP_RushHour_Spectator_Gamemode. So we've set the speed on the
road, we've selected the car. There's one more thing we need to do. We need to press a line to ground, and
that will just make sure that the path now doesn't hover too far over the ground. It'll sit about half a meter
to a meter off the ground, so that aligned to ground function. Just make sure that the path now follows
the road and will allow the AI to sense the elevation of the road and so on. So if you scroll along the path,
you can just see that it's now got elevation to the path rather
than all sitting at one level. So that's fine. And if we come back to the beginning
of the path, we'll just hit play. So now when we click into the
view port, we can press C to change camera around the car. This all comes from the game, game mode. And as we look at this car, we can
see that there's a few funny corners. It'll probably collide
with one of these poles. Yeah. Okay. So there's a few issues with this
path, which we can quickly change up. So if we press escape, let's
come back, uh, along this path. And yeah, so this corner looked
a bit funny, so we'll drag that point a little bit around. That's a bit of a funny point there. So we'll click on this
control point and rotate that. Maybe shift it out a little bit. That's also a bit funny, so obviously the car's cutting the
corner a little bit here, so we can just shift this point out a little bit. Not too happy about that kink. If we just delete that control point
that looks a little bit better, that might be just a better racing line. Let's see how that goes. Let's go back to hitting play. One thing I forgot to do there is I didn't
press a line to ground again in this case, I haven't adjusted the points too much,
but realistically, every time you adjust the path you should press that align to
PA around align to ground button again. So, yeah, we'll just watch this car. That's all looking a little bit better. It's playing it a little bit
safe at the moment, so we can change that pretty easily. So we'll press escape again. So if we select the vehicle animation
path again in the details panel on the right, once again, make
sure you press a line to ground. But also the vehicle was playing it
very safe Just then, so we've got the driver profile, but we've also got this
profile strength, so we can give hints to the driver to exaggerate how well
it follows a particular driver profile. Path zero would account to it
always going to the default driver. One would be fully acting like
the selected profile, so if you wanted to make it less like a
racer, you could make it like 0.8. Or in this case, we actually want it
to act more like a racing car driver, so we can actually exaggerate that. So if we were to type in say,
1.4, that might be a bit extreme, but let's see how it goes. Let's hit play. So we'll change camera again
to watch it from behind. Yeah, so the car's
sliding a little bit more. But it's looking pretty good, so
we'll just have to adjust a few of those points a little bit more. So here, I think it
overshot just a little bit. So what we'll do is we'll drag
that over here a little bit. Once again, aligned to ground up here
was a little bit, a little bit too close to that corner for my liking. Let's try that. So a line to ground again,
and let's, let's hit play. So we'll press C to watch it from behind
again, and we'll just watch it perform. We're not gonna worry too much
about whether the cast seems fast or not at the moment. We're just looking for a good,
nice natural motion here. We can see that it's
performing a little bit better. That came quite close to that pole,
but it didn't hit, so that's good. So that's looking good. So the animation's starting to
look a little bit better now. A lot of the sense of speed and momentum
from this vehicle is gonna come from good camera choices, which we'll
cover in a little bit at the moment. As I said before, we're just looking
for a nice natural motion on the car and getting the broad strokes in that we
want from the car so we can see that it's pushing those corners a little bit faster. We can see that, uh, it's got a, it's
got a quite a weight behind the car. We can see that it's sliding a little bit. That's gonna all look good,
I think at times the wheels even locked up a little bit. These are all nice things that are gonna
be nice to show off in the animation. So now what we'll do is we'll
actually record this animation. So we'll come up and
we'll go to plugins again. We're just gonna make sure that we've got
movie render cue enabled, which we don't. So we'll tick that. And also we'll make sure that
we've got tape recorder enabled. So take recorder is enabled. So we're just gonna restart the editor now
that those plugins are enabled and we'll come back and we'll record this vehicle. So now the editors restarted
and those plugins are enabled. We'll come up to window cinematics
and open up tape recorder. So this is open. Two new tabs, sequencer,
and take recorder. Let's come across the take recorder. So within Take Recorder, we'll change
it to record at the desired fps. I think it's generally better
to match your final output FPS. But it will interpolate what you choose. So you could even record at 60
FPS or at different FPS value. But I think in general it's better
to record at your desired fps. So we'll choose 30 fps there. And one more thing. When I'm recording a vehicle, I
really like to avoid any hitches or low low performance in the editor. I really want to record
the best vehicle I can. So what I'll do is I'll come
up to settings up here and I'll change engine scalability
settings, and I come down to low. It doesn't matter what computer
I'm on, it just means that as many resources as possible are dedicated
to making the animation smooth. This is especially important if you are
struggling for FPS in your view port, or if you're seeing a lot of hitches. We really just want this
as smooth as possible. So if we come up, we'll hit play
and we'll immediately pause again. So now the vehicle's paused and we can
start adding it to the take recorder. So if within take recorder, if
we come down to source, And hit plus and go from actor and choose
the vehicle that just spawned in. In this case, it's BP_Sedan_RH0. And then one more thing we
wanna do is expand this out. Come down to BP_Sedan_RH
in the sources part. Scroll down and make sure that we
uncheck remove route animation. Without that, some of the vehicle
attachments like the windows will not be in the correct place,
so make sure that's disabled. Now we can hit record. And press play again. So now that's recorded. Press escape. Now you can go back to your
preferred viewport settings. So settings, engine scalability, high. And now we can start
mucking around in sequencer. The first thing we need to do is
turn off simulate physics on one of the measures that was recorded. This is the same process
as recording a vehicle that you've driven with a game pad. I have covered this in my documentation
and in a previous video, so I'm going to gloss over it a little bit now,
but if you want a little bit more in depth on how to do it, make sure
to check out those other videos. But what we'll do is come into cinematics,
takes today's date, and choose the scene. And we can see that it's
actually got this other scene in here, this BP_Sedan_RH_1_01. So double click that and this opens up. We need to unlock this animation
so we can make changes to it. And on the actor here, we can see all its
different components that it's recorded. If we scroll down, we're
looking for the skeletal mesh. In this case it's called vehicle mesh. And now we can see these details
on the right and come down and make sure you disable, simulate physics. Press save on the sequencer, and
now we can close sequencer and that sequence is right to use how we want. What we'll do now is we'll
create a new level sequence. We'll come into cinematics and we'll go
tutorial, and what we're going to do is we're going to first add the car back in. So we're gonna add a shot, track shot, and
we're going to look for this BP_Sedan_RH0. Scene 1 0 1. So now that we've added this shot track,
what we can do is we can just move around. We'll look at the path, and if we
put our scrubber somewhere here and drag this path along, we can
see that the vehicle is recorded. And now if we scrub along, we
can see the vehicle's moving. So the best thing to do now
is work out roughly what we're gonna do with the camera. So I've got a few general guiding
principles that I use when working with the camera to try and emphasize the
feeling of speed or momentum with the car. You don't have to apply all
these principles at once. Some work well together. Some are completely opposite. So these are just general tips
that you can just think about when working with your camera. The first tip is to use a wide
field of view or a short lens. This will make things on the
outside of the frame mo look like they're moving much faster. The second tip is to have a lot of
foreground objects moving in the frame. So if you can get a tree whizzing
past a, any rocks on the ground and so on, that all makes the camera
look like it's moving a bit faster. The next thing is to keep
the camera low to the ground. Overhead shots and so on are great
from providing perspective, but they do miss some of that momentum. Going low to the ground makes it
feel faster and more energetic. Another tip is to use counter movement on
your camera when you do need to provide that wider shot to provide more context
to the scene if the car is moving along the path like it is now, if the camera
were to move in the opposite direction to the car and rotate like this, You can see
that the fire objects in the background look like they're moving faster. Plus also the car would be moving
essentially double the speed on the frame. This can help keep the momentum
of the scene up for the viewer. In this case though, we're just gonna be
following the first three principles, uh, short lens, lots of foreground objects,
and having it quite low to the ground. So with that in mind, we'll start the
car roughly where it is, and this camera, we'll probably place a roundabout here. And what it will do is this camera
will move along around here, staying on this side of the road,
and we'll just track the car. Even though we're tracking the car,
which can make the car appear slower, there's gonna be lots and lots of
things moving in the frame, which will keep up that sense of momentum. So if we start from about here, we'll
start, go to the start of our shot. And we'll drag this along. So we'll start the car about here. We'll frame it up and we'll press
this, create new camera here. So we've now got this new Sydney camera. The camera defaults to 35 millimeters. If we were to change that
to say a 15 millimeter lens, that's a very, very short lens. So it's got quite a wide field of
view, so that's gonna allow us to see a lot of this stuff in the foreground. Moving very, very quickly. And what we'll do is we'll move quite
low and we'll start, we'll start it here. So if we expand our sequencer, we'll
just make sure on transform, we add a key point and we'll move along. We'll probably track the
car to roughly where it is. We'll choose our last point, and
we'll set another transform there. So these key points, by default, Are
in cubic, which means that when we play this through, the camera starts off slow,
moves really fast, and then slows down. Again. That's not what we want, especially
not for the first key frames. So we'll change these key frames
to linear, and if we move that along, we can see the camera
moved at a steady pace there. But we also don't want it to move
through the forest too much like that. So we'll come back into here. And we'll frame up our car like so. And if we press tra add key
frame for this transform here, that's also added as linear. I don't generally like this look
cuz it does this sort of weird snap. So I will change the ones inside to be
cubic, which will smooth out a lot of that movement within the, within the path. We can see that one still moved. A little bit strange around about here. So what we'll do is add another key
frame like this that's also added as linear so it enhance that snap. So if we come back to Cubic
Auto there and play this, that's looking a little bit better. So that's all looking pretty good. I tend to watch the animation through
a few times and just sort of pick up on anything that I might wanna improve. So I'm relatively happy
with how that's looking. Normally at this part of the track around
about here, I'd probably push the camera in a bit more, but I actually like how the
trees are coming through, so I'm actually gonna leave that animation as it is. I think the last thing we need
to do to this is just add a bit of camera shake, which will add a
little bit more life to that camera. We can do this if we go over to
content browser and just in the cinematics folder, we're just gonna
right click and go Blueprint class. And if we search for all classes
and search for camera shake. We can come down and go
to camera shake base. So we'll choose that one and
select, and we'll just call this BP_CameraShakeCarFollow, and double click that, and then it comes
up with this full size blueprint window. We'll close it again and double
click it again, and we just want this reduced blueprint window, so we'll
just shrink this a little bit more. And under the root shake pattern,
if we choose Perlin noise, that's generally a good noise to use for this. So now you've chosen that
you can expand this out. We've got a few different
fields we wanna change here. First we'll turn off any blend time
and we'll change duration to zero. That will mean this will just
endlessly continue, which means we can control it through sequence a better. The way you control this is you
control the amplitude or the amount to move by and how quickly it moves. So the frequency is how quickly
it sort of oscillates or moves. So you can do that for
both location and rotation. It's easier to do this
when you're looking at it. So we'll go back to the sequencer, add
this in, and then we'll try all it out. So back in sequencer if you find
your camera component and hit plus on the track and choose camera shake. And then we can choose the new
camera shake we just chose. We just created. And we can just drag that down
and move it back over here. And if we look at it, it's
pretty subtle as it is. So if we change the location amplitude to
say 10, that'll move it by 10 centimeters. And the frequency, we might do it. Let's say, let's just start
with four, see how it looks. I think the amount of movement
is okay, but it just seems to be a very slow oscillation. So why don't we bump that
up to say more like 12. Okay. That's the right amount of
frequency, I think, but I think the amplitude's a little bit too high. So let's change that down to say five. It's still a bit much, you can just play around with
these and until you find a setting, you sort of like. You can also change around the rotation
amplitude slightly, so I might add a little bit of rotation amplitude to, it might change the location frequency
down, but to 10 rotation frequency might make that more like five. And this feels pretty energetic I'd. I'd dial this in a little bit
more, but I think that's good enough for this tutorial. I think that's pretty
good looking for now. So just hit compile and then save on that
camera shake, and then close that off. Now the last thing we need to do
on this sequence is we need to add. A camera cut track. So if we come back into the track and add
a new camera cut track, we'll move that above shots just by clicking and dragging. And on the plus camera, we
will choose our C camera actor. The best thing to do is make
sure that the camera cut starts before the start of your sequence. This ensures that movie render cue
can warm up properly with this camera. And sometimes it's also good to just start
your camera movement one frame early. So now that the camera. Starts moving one frame early. We'll just come back to camera cuts and
press this, uh, this little camera here, which means we'll see what the, what
the camera's meant to be looking at. And we'll hit play. So the framing's still good, and now we're
ready to render it in movie Render queue. Make sure you say that sequence
and then we'll move on. We'll move to movie render queue
now, but just before we do, we just wanna make sure that when. Movie render queue starts rendering, it
actually starts simulating the level. So that will mean the original
vehicle path that we created will actually spawn a new vehicle and
it will interfere with our render. So we wanna make sure that we turn
that off for when we're rendering. So we'll close sequencer for now
and we'll scroll down and look for our vehicle animation path. So we've got it here and we just wanna
turn off auto start and press save. So that'll mean now when we hit play,
the vehicle won't spawn, but it also won't spawn when we are creating
avid video with movie render queue. So now we can go up to Windows
Cinematics movie render queue, and in this we'll hit plus render and we'll
choose our tutorial level sequence. So on settings, we'll just click settings. There's some great videos on
YouTube, which I'll link below. About how to choose the
best render settings. For this example, I'm gonna stick
mostly with the default settings, which will just render things a lot
quicker than a full high quality render. But I'll walk you through some of the
settings you could change, which would improve the quality of the render. So the main thing is gonna
be around anti-aliasing. So if you go up to plus setting
and then go anti-aliasing in here, we've got a few different things. First on override anti-aliasing. Enable that and make sure that
the anti-aliasing method is none. And then up here we're gonna use the
spatial sample count as one, and we're gonna set the temporal sample to four. The difference between spatial
and temporal sample counts is a little bit nuanced. The main difference is that spatial
sample count will take many frames from a very, very similar camera
position, microscopic amounts of camera movement, and it will combine those
to create a high quality static frame. But temporal sample count, if you have
a frame with a lot of motion blur, it will take many intermediate frames on
that, along that little camera path for that one particular frame, and it
will blend those together, which will create a very high quality motion blur. So in this case, we don't really
have a static camera, but we do have a fair bit of motion blur. So we're gonna turn up
the temporal sample count. On another example video I've done in
this environment, I had to bump the temporal sample count up to like 60 to
ensure that these little fire ember. Particle effects rendered correctly. Otherwise, they were just little dots. Most elements in your scene should
render pretty good with a lower temporal sample count, but I couldn't get particle
effects to work correctly unless I really bumped up that temporal sample
count with the camera moving so fast. So for this, we'll see a few
little streaks not looking quite right, it will render correctly. When we bump that temporal sample
count right up, we can see down here that it's giving us a small warning. The default temporal
anti-aliasing uses eight samples. So the way these combine is
it's spatial sample count times, the temporal sample count. So in this case, we're only gonna
have four samples, so we might bump that up to more like eight, and that
will get us closer to what temporal anti aliasing would look like. Two more settings we wanna change
in here are use camera cut for warmup and render warmup frames. You'll remember in the sequence that
we extended the camera cut out a little bit before the start of our sequence. That's so that the camera can warm up,
the motion blur can warm up, and most importantly, the particle systems can
all start emitting their particles and getting ready, ready for the first frame. That's why it's also important that
we tick on render warmup frames. That means they all get submitted
to the G P U, which initializes these particle systems. Next, we wanna make sure
we've got game overrides. If it's not there, go up to
Settings Plus and go game overrides. It should be up here somewhere. And then in here, we wanna make sure that
cinematic quality settings is enabled and texture streaming is disabled. Now it can hit, accept,
and let's render local. So it's now finished rendering and
it's outputted to our project folder. So in your project folder,
go to saved movie renders. And we can see we've got a whole
bunch of J jpeg files here. So now we can see that the motion
blur on the car's pretty good. The motion blur on the
environment's pretty good. The embers are doing that weird
streaky thing I was talking about. That can be improved just by
upping your temporal sample count. But if you scroll through, we
can see that it's got the camera shake, all the tires are moving
correctly, and it looks pretty good. Here's that render Now as a movie. This is only rendered at 1080p with
the 16 samples as we showed before. If you wanted to take this render even
further, what you could do is export this movie as a series of EXR files,
and then take that into Davinci Resolve. Here's something I did quickly
in Davinci Resolve for this. I did actually end up going
back and re-render this. I rendered this at 4K using EXR
and using 60 temporal samples. I've increased the contrast. I shifted the colors a little bit. I added a bit of a halation effect,
which increases that bloom a little bit more, and then I've added a vignette. I'm not the best colorist. There's a lot more you could do and
you could make this look even better. But yeah, this is just something
I've done really quickly. EXR files contain more color
data, so it means you can do even more in Davinci Resolve than
just using JPEGs or PNG files. In the description, I've added a
few links to videos which discuss the Unreal to Davinci workflow. There's a lot of tips and tricks
in those videos about how to best preserve the color detail. Preserving that extra color allows you to
do even more and have it look even better. In Davinci Resolve. This would be enhanced even more
if we added a little bit of music or a few engine sounds to it. In a follow-up video, I'll show
off a few other camera techniques using the same animation.
