Mandalorian 3D Environment Tutorial | Unreal Engine & CamTrackAR

hey guys welcome back to another tutorial today  we're going to be doing something a little bit   different and we're going to be taking a look at  unreal engine 4. we're going to be using it along   with CamTrackAR and some live-action footage shot  against green screen to create a 3d environment   based on the mandalorian season 2 is coming out  very soon so we thought it'd be cool to create   an alien planet now this is our very first unreal  engine tutorial on the channel we've never done it   before and i'm no expert at the software i've only  been using it for six or seven months but i have   been able to create some really cool environments  for the visual effects that we've made and post   it on social and here on youtube as well we've  gotten a few comments from you guys asking how   we created these sort of environments so i'm going  to be taking you through a sort of overview of the   process this is a very inexpensive workflow that  gets you really high quality results now i'm not   going to cover every single step because i can't  condense everything that i've learned in the last   few months into this one video but for any steps  that i do skip i'll be sure to put a link down   in the description whether it's a video tutorial  or website so that you guys don't miss any of the   steps that i'm talking about if you're interested  in one of the specific aspects of the environment   creation you can either skip ahead using the  youtube chapters in the play button or you can see   the time codes on screen now as always if you have  any questions at any point in the video please do   leave them down below and again i'm not an expert  in the software if you are and you see me making   a mistake or seen something that i could do easier  please do let us know and we'll be sure to include   it in the next tutorial so the first thing we need  to do is actually shoot the scene that we're going   to comp in later this reduces the amount of work  that you need to do because instead of building   the entire 360 environment you can just focus  on a specific part where the camera is looking all right technically you don't need a green  screen to do this you could rotoscope your actors   out every single frame but that's a pain in the  i would highly recommend using a green screen   i wouldn't do it without it it just makes the  process a lot easier we do have a tutorial on   using CamTrackAR that goes into more depth but  the basic process is you film your scene and   it captures the camera tracking data automatically  there's not a lot you have to do to get it to work   one thing that is important to do before you hit  record is to walk around and capture the scene for   the ar camera tracking data this helps the camera  orient itself in the world and gets familiar with   the planes that already exist in your scene we  talk about this a bit more in the actual tutorial   once the footage is shot i can transfer it to  my computer and now i can start building the   environment inside of unreal the two things that  you need to install for this are unreal engine 4   and qixel bridge which is the asset library  that has all of those really high detailed   high quality environmental assets like rocks grass  surfaces textures all that kind of cool stuff i'm   going to skip over this step but you can find  guides for installing those in the description   if you have never used unreal engine before i  would highly recommend checking out the unreal   online learning platform this is an official  learning site that unreal or epic games which is   the main company has set up to help you learn the  software they have a bunch of different modules on   a wide range of topics if you're interested in  vr production or learning more about real time   architect stuff blueprints all kinds of things  i would recommend the course that's called your   first hour with unreal engine this has you  actually creating a map within an hour taking   you through all the basics in a really easy to  understand way so back to my environment the first   thing i'm going to do is create the ground layer  and to do that i'm going to follow a tutorial   because there are a lot of people who know more  about this software than i do basically what you   do is you create a giant landscape and then using  a height map which is a black and white image   you can add random hills and dips inside of the  landscape without having to manually sculpt it   unreal does have capabilities to actually sculpt  the environment you can add hills you can add dips   flattened plateaus whatever you want it's a lot  of fun but for this case i'm just going to use   a height map to make things easier and create the  environment based on this image once i apply the   height map to the landscape you can see that it's  way too massive for what i'm trying to go for what   i can do is come over to the details panel and  set the z scale to something much lower this will   shrink the landscape in one direction only for  the surface i'm going to use a mega scans texture   because they're really high quality and they look  great pretty much just out of the box so i'll   open up bridge and go into the surfaces and look  for something that fits the scene i'm going for   depending on what your scene calls for you can  download the texture in either 2k resolution   4k or even sometimes 8k i find that most of the  time 4k is what i need because my environments   require that sort of close-up detail that 4k  provides and 2k sometimes looks a bit muddy but   if something is far away and you don't really need  to see it up close you can probably go with 2k and   save on some space once the texture is downloaded  i can then send it directly to unreal using the   link built into the software and it will show up  in its own folder under the mega scans directory   i can drag and drop it onto the landscape surface  and it might be a bit big depending on the scale   of your scene in this case i'll just open up  the material and go into the tiling property   and that's pretty much it for the ground layer  everything after this will be props and 3d   assets that we add into the scene i just needed  something to establish the base to build off of   for the lighting in this scene i kept it  relatively simple i have the directional light   it basically represents the sun and is a single  point shining all across the landscape from a   single direction i also used a skylight which  captures the scene as it is and then shines it   back onto itself to replicate the bounce lighting  that tends to happen in environments like this   you have to be careful with this one because if  you turn it up too much your scene will have no   depth no shadows and it will appear very flat for  the sky i downloaded a picture that i liked from   hdrihaven.com and brought that into unreal by  default inside of unreal's engine content folder   there is an editor skysphere which is basically a  sphere and you can make it really big to encompass   the entire map and then apply the hdri to that to  do that i'll link the tutorial that i used down   in the description it's the one that's called  skydome material the set decoration can be a   lot of fun because it's pretty much just drag and  drop and it's really easy to use and change assets   depending on what look you're going for virtual  set you can just change whatever you want yeah   right once again i'll be using mega scans but  this time i'll go into the 3d assets category   and search for things like icelandic cliffs and  rock assemblies that i can just jam together and   they'll work because they all look kind of the  same one of the things to keep in mind to save   on space is to only download the lod that you're  going to use this stands for level of detail and   most assets from quixl come with multiple levels  of details basically the farther away from the   camera an asset gets the less polygons it  has in order to save on resources and keep   frame rates quite smooth this is more applicable  in games where your character is moving around and   can be far or close to an asset in this case we're  going to be staying in a specific spot so i'll   just select level of detail 0 which is the highest  once i find and download an asset that i like i   can select export to unreal engine and similar  to the materials it will automatically appear   inside of my mega scans folder and from here it's  pretty much drag and drop so i can place them into   the scene can change the position rotation  i can make it massive or really really small   and in the case of the rocks most of the time  i find that i can even mix them together and   overlap them and because they're of the same look  and texture they tend to work well together if you   need to change an asset to fit better with your  scene you can do that by going into the material   this is in the details panel double-click  to open it up one of the things you might   need to change is the albedo tint or intensity  and this is tinting the asset a specific color   to help it blend better with maybe your surface or  your ground that you have you can also change the   roughness which is how wet the mesh looks so if  your scene is rainy you might need to lower this   to get a shinier looking asset i would definitely  check out the official qixel channel they have   a bunch of tutorials creating multiple different  kinds of environments using high quality assets   and really making them look incredibly realistic  a lot of the tutorials are either a multi-part   series or they have a short version and then a  longer live stream version where they go into more   detail i find that when building an environment  it really helps to have reference photos   of the look that i'm going for so in this case  it was based on the mandalorian and so i was   referencing images from the actual show to build  this environment and get that sort of rocky look   from here it's just downloading multiple  different kinds of assets and placing them   in my scene to get variety detail and texture  and to make it look a bit more interesting   one of the things that can make a big difference  in your environment is exponential height fog   you can drag that into your scene and  it should have an immediate effect   you can change the color the density the distance  that it takes to have an effect on the scene   and it can really give some atmosphere  into your scene if it's looking a bit flat   the post-process volume is what happens at the end  of the render and is the final color correction   any sort of color grade that you might apply  changing the way the bloom looks which is the glow   adding a vignette adding grain chromatic  aberration this can make a huge difference   in the way your environment looks but in this  case i'm actually going to keep it to a minimum   because i know that i'm going to bring this  environment into hit film for the composite   and i don't want to have to match all this stuff  on my plate if i can just do it inside of hitfilm   so in this case i'm going to keep the post process  very small only making tweaks for things that   i can't change after it's rendered once we have  our environment built we can now bring our camera   tracking data into the scene so we can see how the  camera will be moving in the context of the shot   to import our camera tracking data into unreal  we're going to need blender which is free the   reason we need to use blender is because we need  to export the camera tracking data as an fbx file   which is what unreal uses for the camera we're  looking at improving this process so you don't   have to go through blender to export as an  fbx but for now this is the way it is it's   relatively simple so let's just go ahead and  take a look when you record your tracking data   cam track will create a dot hfcs file which is a  HitFilm composite shot when you open up blender   first delete the default camera in cube and then  go to file import HitFilm ar camera tracking data   if you don't already see this you'll need to  install the blender python plugin that comes with   CamTrack this is covered in our other tutorial  as well but it's a straightforward process once   the camera tracking data has been imported you  can see that it is moving along with the scene   i have the camera here and it's moving as i did  in the real world next go to file export fbx   and save the file on your computer inside of  unreal go to cinematics and add a level sequence   this will create a timeline in what's called  sequencer which is basically unreal's editing   timeline create a new camera by clicking this  button here and then right click to import an fbx select the file you just saved out  of blender and uncheck reduce keys if it didn't do it by default set the  fps to 60. this is the frames per second you should now hopefully see that your unreal  camera is moving as it did in the real world   now it's time to export our environment  from unreal engine and bring it into HitFilm   to do that i'm going to come over to  this button which is render as movie   i'm going to leave it as an avi and i would  recommend exporting as 4k even if your final   composite is only 1080p this is because all  that extra detail will keep the render sharp   and prevent it from looking a bit muddy one  thing to note is that CamTrackAR records your   video at 1920x1440 which isn't standard 1080p  we give you that footage just in case you need   it but you can always just crop it down to  1080 and it won't have any bad effect on it   so i'll increase the height of the render so that  it matches cam track and then select capture movie   at this point we're going to move into HitFilm and  bring in our footage and our exported background   we don't have to do any camera tracking because  the exported background will have all of that data   the only three things we really need to do are key  out the background mask out any unwanted items in   the shot and then color match the two plates we  do have a previous tutorial on green screening   inside of fit film which effect you use depends  on whether using express or pro in this case   i'm going to use pro and use the chroma key effect  then i'll mask out any unwanted items inside of my   scene again we do have a previous tutorial on this  from axel you can find that in the description as   well i knew that i was going to export the  final piece as a 2.4 aspect ratio so much   thinner vertically than it was shot this helped  save some time because i didn't have to mask out   things that were outside of those boundaries for  color matching and color grading i'm going to use   mostly just curves and the hue saturation  and lightness effect to tweak the contrast   and brightness of each clip individually to  help match them up finally i'll stylize it by   using the bleach bypass effect a little bit of  chromatic aberration a vignette and some final   color grading tweaks to bring it all together  and that is an overview of how to use unreal   engine 4 to create a fully 3d environment to use  inside of your HitFilm creations if you like this   video please do let us know and if you have any  questions about a specific section that we covered   if you want to see something in more detail do let  us know in the comments because again this is the   first time that we've done a tutorial like this  and we want to learn and improve and cover what   you guys are interested in be sure to subscribe  for more filmmaking and visual effects tutorials   and we'll be posting the stuff that we're  working on on our facebook twitter and instagram   so be sure to follow us there as well thanks for  watching and we'll see you all in the next video

Channel: FXhome

Views: 54,921

Keywords: how to, mandalorian, the mandalorian, mandalorian season 2, mandalorian scene, virtual production, unreal engine, virtual camera, unreal, virtual cinematography, camera tracking, virtual studio, camtrackar, motion tracking, augmented reality, 3d camera tracking, iphone filmmaking apps, virtual set, live virtual set, green screen, 3d virtual set, virtual set maker, mandalorian virtual set, virtual set software, virtual set editor, mandalorian set technology, mandalorian set

Id: sKkecsQsesQ

Length: 12min 41sec (761 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 29 2020