Mastering Cinematics in Unreal Engine 5: A Beginner's Tutorial

hey everyone today we've got an unreal tutorial for you and this is brought To Us by our buddy Steve from the production crate Facebook group he makes a ton of awesome unreal cinematics and recently he showed us how to make this one so let's jump in first thing we need to do is create a new project so let's go with a blank project under the film video and Live Events category we don't need to start a Content but we do need Ray tracing so go ahead and tick that box and don't forget to name your project and save it where you want it to go okay here's our new scene and while it loads and compiles the shaders let's go load some plugins that we're gonna need and change some settings go up to edit project settings and at the top search for Lumen and make sure that the global illumination method is set to Lumen down in the rendering category locate reflection capture resolution and change it from 2048 to 512 and use Hardware Ray tracing when available and we can also turn on Ray traced shadows and here's a quick note if you find that unreal crashes a lot you can try going to the left under platform windows and switching from DirectX 12 to DirectX 11. now it's going to ask you to restart if you do that but hold off for just a second because we want to load some plugins as well go up to edit plugins and search for movie and make sure that movie render queue is activated now go ahead and restart unreal okay what's your backend Unreal Engine it's time to import all of your assets start by going to productioncrate.com and search in the 3D Vehicles category the crashed cars pack right here is already set up for unreal so let's grab that first same with this post-apocalyptic cars pack down here so get those two and let's also get this Blackhawk crash site model over in the characters category we need a Sci-Fi armor but make sure you get the unreal version not the regular version and in the weapons category grab a couple rifles like this one here and this sniper rifle once you've got those unzipped we need to get them into our project let's start with the ones that are already set up for Unreal Engine because those are easy when you open these up you'll see that there's an entire unreal project folder set up along with its own unreal project file the assets are in the content folder and you could just copy the stuff that's inside the content folder over to your main project but it's safer and more reliable to migrate them properly so here's how we do that first go save your main project in unreal and then double-click the project file for the post-apocalyptic cars pack and open that in whichever engine you're using to improve performance you can close down the main project while you wait okay and what's the cars project opens you'll see that everything you need is contained inside the content folder for example inside the meshes folder you'll find all the models if you drag one out into the scene it should have all of its materials and textures applied so to get this into the main project you want to find the post-apocalyptic cars folder and right click on that and choose migrate it'll show you a list of the assets that are going to be transferred click OK and then navigate to where you save the main project and into the content folder click on select folder and it'll start to copy all of the car assets to your main project do that for the rest of the unreal ready projects some of them may not have project files even though they are UE ready and if you find one like that just copy the entire folder into the content folder of your main project and it should be there the next time you you open it and repeat this process again for the Sci-Fi armor okay for the assets that are not unreal ready we'll have to import them and set them up manually so let's do it so open up your main project and take a quick look just to make sure that the unreal ready assets are working nice okay go up to file and create a new level a basic level will work just fine now select the content folder and then right click to add a new folder and name it helicopter click into the helicopter folder and then navigate to the folder on your computer where you saved the helicopter assets you can actually just drag and drop the Blackhawk crash site fbx directly into unreal so that's what we'll do when the import options pop up go down to material import method and set it to do not create material and press import if the textures didn't get imported go back to the folder on your computer and drag those in as well in this case the helicopter utilizes udems so you only need to select the first texture in each texture set those are the ones that end with one zero zero one unreal should automatically find the others okay right click and create a new material and don't forget to give it a good name like M for material underscore heli open up that material and drop all of the textures into the node graph and now we just need to connect up all of our textures if you're not sure which textures are which just click on one and you can see the name of it right here so now just plug the textures into their respective channels if you've never used unreal before and this is going over your head we do have a basic intro video that goes into more detail on how to import and set up 3D assets so be sure to check that out if you need it the link will be down in the description okay when you're all done don't forget to save the material to apply the material select the model and look for the element 0 slot under materials if you select the heli material in the content browser you can click this little air Arrow to apply it to that slot and actually let's double click on the helicopter mesh in the content browser to open it up notice that the material is not applied in this window so let's plug in that material here as well so that it's always applied by default whenever we drag a new copy of the helicopter into our scene alright looking good okay let's go up to file choose files to save and we can unclick this level because it's just a temporary working area and now press save selected assets alright let's repeat that process for the other assets right click in the content folder and create a couple new folders for the gun assets so gun 1 and gun 2. now if you navigate to the first rifle on your hard drive and you look at the folder you'll see it only contains an obj no fbx so this is an older file that was never set up for Unreal Engine but don't worry it's an easy fix open up a 3D modeling program blender is free so it's probably the easiest and then go to file import wavefront obj and then go find the rifle obj okay now go to file export and Export as fbx and just drop but in the same folder and repeat that process for any other objs that you plan to use but remember if it comes with an fbx that's not necessary it's already all set to go back in unreal drag the first gun fbx into the gun 1 folder when the import options pop up don't just close the window because we want to make some changes here the main thing is that it's made up of a ton of little parts and we want to tell it to import as one piece so to fix that go to mesh Advanced and turn on combined meshes now press import and drag it into your scene you'll notice that it's huge so come over here to the scale settings and type in something like 0.001 all right cool that's much better now we can import the textures create a new material and plug the textures in just like we did with the helicopter and of course repeat the process again for the other gun and any other assets that you want to use alright now we need to find some scenery for that we're going to grab some free assets on the marketplace from epic games and mega scans go up to this little cube with a plus sign and choose unreal marketplace now the Links for the following assets will be down in the description description of this video so you don't have to hunt for them but we're going to use this free bridge scene once you buy it for zero dollars click on add to project and select your main project from the list and let's do the same for these Mega scan trees those are pretty cool again Link in the description now when you go back to Unreal you should see the bridge and the trees are in your content browser if you dig through the folders you'll find some really useful assets okay we're almost done setting up but let's just grab a few more things from quixel bridge go up to that cube with the plus sign button again and this time choose qixel bridge now this is free but you may have to sign up for it with your epic games account once you're logged in search for barrier and grab whichever one looks best for you we're gonna go with this old concrete barrier so select it and then choose the quality that you want we recommend nanite if you're using Unreal 5. now click on the download button in the bottom right and wait for it to process once it's done you can click on this little blue arrow and choose export nanite you can double check that you have the file by clicking on local over here on the left and these are through all the files that you've downloaded now let's search for some grass and click on 3D plants and you'll see a huge amount of options for you to use pick whichever one feels right for your scene we're gonna go with this one click on the Green Arrow to download and again feel free to grab whatever you want to include in your scene there's no need to copy exactly what we're doing now once again you should see a bunch of new Assets in your content folder and let's just drag the barrier out into the scene to admire it and the plants look pretty great too okay and with that we're finally all set to start building up our scene to get started go into the folder for that Automotive Bridge scene and then in the maps folder find the one called Bridge underscore P to make sure we don't mess up the original let's duplicate it now double click to open and it'll ask you to save go ahead and do that and now we have a really nice scene to start with quick note though you'll notice all these little icons on the ground those are damage decals which you can move around if you want but all of those icons sometimes get in the way so press the hotkey G to toggle them off for now you can always press G again to bring the icons back which is very helpful when you need to edit your lighting speaking talking of lighting the scene comes with some lighting already but let's get rid of it and set up our own just so we know how to do it for ourselves in the future find the directional light in the outliner and delete it same thing with the exponential height fog and the post process volume this isn't really light but let's get rid of it anyway and we'll make our own later and lastly scroll all the way down to the bottom and delete the hdri backdrop and now it's completely black so let's learn how to rebuild the lighting from scratch it's super easy to begin go up to window and open the environment light mixer and first click to add an exponential height fog at the bottom set it to volumetric fog now create a skylight and this is the sky dome itself next click atmosphere light and also Sky atmosphere and lastly volumetric clouds basically just click all the buttons if you want to change the light angle hold down Ctrl and L and move your mouse around you'll notice that it actually changes the color and the time of day if you lower the angle which is really cool if you go up to the directional light and go into the details panel there are a ton tons and tons of other options as well okay let's compose our scene it's usually easier to start with the bigger centerpiece assets and work your way down the focus in this scene is the helicopter and it's the biggest piece so let's start with that I'm going to drop it in and to rotate it the hotkey is e if the model's snapping and you don't want it to go up to the top right and you'll see all the snapping options for move rotate and scale you can turn these on for exact movements or off for finer adjustments okay this is looking pretty cool so far so let's bring in some of those barriers now and those can be found in the mega scans folder 3D assets and old concrete barriers drop it in the scene and press e again to rotate it into place to quickly duplicate the model press W to switch to move mode and hold down alt while you drag it don't worry too much about perfecting the placement of everything yet we just want to get all the elements in the scene and then we can fine tune the composition later okay let's grab some cars pick whichever ones you like best but we're going to use car 6 from the post-apocalyptic cars folder keep in mind that some of these cars have options that you can change like paint color in this case if you go to the materials folder you'll find the second material without graffiti that you can drag and drop onto the model but I like the graffiti let's do some rough composition and placement here okay looking good now let's go find another car from the other pack this upside down one looks pretty cool for this one we have the option to apply different colors black will look best for our shot but you can feel free to pick whichever color you want one thing that will really help sell this flipped car is some small details like broken glass in the first car pack inside the meshes folder you'll find some glass shards for you to spread around and this could help integrate the car into the scene and make it feel more believable okay time to add some trees head over to the folder for black Alder and then into foliage and finally into pivot painter now these assets are different you can't just drag and drop them into the scene and you can see these are labeled static mesh foliage which means they're meant to be used with a foliage brush so up in the top left switch from selection mode to a foliage mode if you're making an entire forest and need a whole variety of trees you can drag all the models in there and it will randomly spray them around as you paint but for this example we just want one tree so drop in your favorite and then click the little check box in the corner to activate it and then click on single instance mode that way we're not spraying it all over but rather placing it individually but to give them some variety click on the mesh and scroll down and change the scale x max to something like 1.1 1.2 somewhere in there that way they'll all be scaled slightly differently they're also going to rotate randomly by default so we'll have some variety now all you need to do is Click wherever you want a tree and it will appear so just go down the road and start placing trees wherever your heart desires it helps to keep in mind that we're not making a video game level we're making a cinematic shot for this example the camera is going to start in pretty close to the helicopter and it's only going to pull back a little bit like this so if you already know how you're going to frame the shot don't spend too much time adding trees that will never be in frame so let's just place a few more on the other side of the bridge as well and then check our rough camera angle again to make sure it looks good don't forget that you can experiment with the lighting by pressing Ctrl L and moving the mouse around from this low angle we can kind of see through the helicopter and it's pretty obvious that our scene just ends so let's switch back to select mode and add some more cars or maybe barriers back there to block it off next we can add some grass and weeds and other small detail in the mega scans folder navigate to the grass that you downloaded earlier and you might find static meshes as well as a foliage folder the static meshes can be placed manually one at a time and the foliage meshes can be sprayed around the scene like with the trees but let's start by placing a few in some key areas like for example they could be used to integrate larger assets into the scene by placing them right near the edge in real life objects are not sharply separated from each other in our vision so placing debris and grass and cobwebs and things like that at the base of objects can help break up the sharp rigid lines in the composition since we've placed a few key pieces of grass we can use the foliage system now to quickly spray in some filler so go into the foliage folder and then switch to foliage mode and drag a bunch of these grass assets into the foliage brush notice that the tree is still in there so click the check box to deactivate it and then activate all the grass meshes don't forget to change the max scale a bit so that you can get more variation and also this time we don't want single instance mode to be active because we want to spray these things around if your brush is too big or too small you can adjust the brush size and the options along with the paint density and now just click around the scene to quickly apply a bunch of grass and weeds if you go a bit too crazy or if the grass ends up where it shouldn't be you can switch to the erase brush to remove some of it if you downloaded other foliage like weeds or flowers or bushes take some time to place those now to break up the uniformity of the grass okay now it's time to get our characters set up and animated the Sci-Fi Soldier is set up to work with the unreal four skeleton so if you have some Soldier animations from the unreal Marketplace already then they should work just fine but they're not usually free so if you want to use the free miximo animations we'll need to do a little bit of setup really quickly though let's talk about an important concept when it comes to character animation to demonstrate I'm going to use this Murdoch character from the unreal Marketplace and there's no need to follow along with this part we're just going to try to illustrate a point if I make an animation sequence with this character you can see that the animations are all in place as if he's walking on a treadmill this is good for video games but if we're gonna try to make a cinematic it creates extra work for us we would need to keyframe him moving forward and it's really difficult to get the speed just right so that his feet aren't sliding so we'll keep that in mind as we're looking for animations in miximo we don't want to accidentally download In-Place animations navigate to the Sci-Fi armor folder and into meshes and find the male or the female skeletal mesh as I mentioned these are rigged but not to the miximo skeleton so if you want to use those free miximo animations we need to export them right click on the skeletal mesh and choose asset actions export and then export it as an fbx and untick all of the options now open up blender and delete everything out of the scene and import the fbx and when the import window pops up untick the animation option once it loads go into the outliner and expand the groups until you find the skm male armor select it and then press alt p and choose clear and keep transformation and then select the group with a skeleton inside and press delete we've just Unbound the model from the skeleton so now we need to export a fresh fbx for miximo to do that select the model and go up to file export fbx and save it into your project folder next go to mixamo.com if you don't already have an account go ahead and make one and don't worry it's totally free once you're logged in Click up upload character on the right and then click select character file and go find that fresh fbx and now we can use miximo's Auto rigging tool to set up a new skeleton it's as easy as dragging these little circles to the appropriate body parts and then pressing next it'll take a minute or so to process but once it's done we can find whatever animations we need we do need to make sure to find some good soldier animations but feel free to go crazy and download whatever else you want just make sure that you don't choose the option for in place for any of them so that he's not walking on a treadmill okay now that you've got all the silly walks and Goofy dances out of the way let's search for Soldier and grab this Pro rifle pack this contains all of the animations we'll need to animate a soldier click download and save it wherever you want it to go hop back over into unreal and make a separate folder for the miximo version of the character so that they don't get mixed up navigate to the folder where the soldier animations were downloaded and you should find that miximo also gave you an fbx of just the character with no animations import that one into unreal first that way when we import all the animations there will already be a skeleton in the scene for them to attach to once that's done go ahead and import all the animations as well to test them out drop a few of them into the scene and press play awesome to start stringing these together into longer animation sequences go up to the button at the top that looks like a film slate and add a new level sequence drag and drop the character into the sequence window and at the top right of this little window we can set the duration in frames so if we want a 10 second clip and it's 24 frames per second we would want 240 frames but if you add a little more it gives you some more room to edit so let's go with 350. now notice the animation track below the character click on the plus side and you can pick an animation from the list as long as it's associated with this character skeleton for now let's keep it pretty simple and just grab a quick walking forward animation if we press play we can see that he walks through the animation cycle but then he goes back to the t-pose you might be tempted to drag out the end of the clip to be longer like this but now the problem is that he jumps back to the origin point after each cycle so here's how we fix that these mix Mo animations and other similar looping animations are designed to be seamless so we can alt drag the animation clip to duplicate it and drag it to the end of the first Loop now scrub the playhead so that it's on top of the second clip and then right click on it and turn off Match TR rotation and then in the same right click menu go up to match with this bone in previous clip and find the right foot bone this will ensure that when the second Loop starts instead of jumping back to the origin it starts with the right foot in exactly the same place where it previously left off now alt drag the clip as many times as you want to create an indefinite looping walk cycle very useful and very powerful we can mix and match and combine all sorts of animations this way into a longer sequence but when we're done it would be convenient if we could bake this sequence into a single animated clip that we can reuse whenever we want right click on the character track at the top and go to bake animation sequence name it and save it where you want it to go and to show that it worked we're just going to quickly make a new test sequence we're going to drop in the character and if we click the animation track we can see that the longer sequence we just created is now an animated clip that we can use now that we understand a bit about the animation sequences we can bring it all together bring up the bridge scene that we've been working on and drop the miximo version of the soldier into the scene position and rotate him into a good starting position and then add a new level sequence like before this is going to be the timeline for a cinematic be sure to save it somewhere appropriate for the project and before we get too far let's remember to set the frame rate we want at the top of the sequencer window choose what's best for you but for that cinematic look we're going to go with 24 frames per second let's also set the length of the timeline and our plan is to end up with a 10 second clip so I want at least 240 frames possibly a bit more for editing purposes now drag the soldier into the sequencer from the scene outliner and in the animation track forum choose that longer walking Loop that we made if the clip ends up somewhere other than the beginning just drag it back to the start of the timeline if you ever want to adjust the speed of the animation you can right click on it and go up to properties and find the play rate if you want to slow it down you can change it to something like 0.6 and now we can do some cool stuff like blending different animations together let's make him stop just outside of the barriers to do that scrub the timeline to the point where you want him to stop and click and drag the end of the clip to trim it and then click on the plus sign in the animation track and choose idle standing snap it to the end of the walking clip and then right click on it and just like before turn off Match yaw rotation and then go up to match this bone with previous clip and choose the right foot and now he idles in the right place but it snaps too abruptly from one animation to the next to Crossfade the two animations together just click and drag the idle animation to make it overlap with The Walking animation and that will soften the transition and make it blend you can fine tune the transition by right clicking on it and going up to options and choose a different curve for the easing let's go with linear okay sweet now let's add his gun go find the gun that you want to use from the content browser and drag it out into the scene if you used our gun from rendercrate it will come into the world pretty huge that's because if you remember it wasn't designed for Unreal Engine so in the transform settings set the scale to 0.0015 now try to place it in the Soldier's hands you may have to turn off snapping in the top right if you can't quite get it to go where you want now go back to the sequencer where we set up the character's animation and drop the gun from the outliner into the sequencer and now we have a second object in the same sequence to make it follow the character's hand go up to the top left where it says selection mode and change it to animation mode with the gun selected go down to constraints click the plus sign to add a new constraint and choose parrot now your cursor is an eyedropper so go click on the character to pair the gun to him a menu will pop up with a list of body parts choose the right hand and voila next time you press play The Gun Will Follow the character's right hand at this point you can just repeat the process as many times as you want to get more characters in the scene start by placing another copy of the character into the scene drag them from the outliner into the sequencer and in the new characters animation track you can add and blend whatever animations you want in order to tell a compelling story pair to gun to the right hand bone and repeat oh and a quick note about level sequences the next time you open your project if the characters aren't animating go up to where you created a level sequence earlier and load the existing sequence and now it's time to set up our camera and render click on that little cube in the top right go down to the Cinematic category and add a new cine camera actor and then find this in a camera actor in The outliner and right click on it and snap object to view now the Cinematic camera is aligned with the viewport view drag the camera actor from the outliner into the sequence with all the soldiers and now we can adjust some of the settings the first thing you might notice is that the it's probably out of focus with the camera selected find the camera component in the details panel for the focus method change it to do not override and it should come back into Focus for the film back setting you can pick whatever setting you want to try to simulate different types of cameras but we're going to go with 16x9 DSLR and now we can pick a lens 50 millimeter is a classic look so let's go with that next set the crop setting to 16x9 there's no right way to set up a camera it all depends on the look you want to achieve so feel free to go with different settings for your own shot after changing all the settings you'll probably need to reframe the shot so go ahead and do that now you might also find that you want to recompose the scene a little bit now that the camera and the lens are set up we can see that the cars might not end up in frame or maybe they're covering up your characters so take some time to adjust the composition if necessary the next step is to animate the camera movement it helps to practice the camera movement before you start animating so run through the sequence and try to figure out where the camera is going where it's going to start where it's going to end and how it's going to move through the scene when you're ready find the cine camera actor in The sequencer and find the transform track inside to add a keyframe click this little circle icon here and we're actually keyframing at the end first because we already found the final angle that we like so now we'll scrub back to the beginning of the timeline and then move the camera into a good starting position and then click add another keyframe don't forget that you can also keyframe the rotation of the camera too it's not just about the location so open up the transform track and then go into rotation and change the roll setting by a few degrees and don't forget to click to update the keyframe and now when you press play you should see your awesome animation if you need to make adjustments like to the speed of the camera you can just select the keyframes and move them to the left and the camera will go faster and you can always add more keyframes to create more complex camera movements like let's Zoom back into this guy's face at the end for example okay awesome we can also keyframe other camera settings Beyond just transform let's keyframe focus and depth of field back in the camera component on the cine camera actor change the focus settings back to manual and next fiddle with the manual focus distance to get him in Focus if you're having trouble with Focus you can turn on draw debug Focus plane and it will show you exactly where the camera is focusing if you want to change the depth of field you can adjust the current aperture a higher number will give you a deeper depth of field and less blurriness let's try four this looks nice but once the camera moves it's going to go out of focus again so in the sequencer add a keyframe to the manual focus settings go to the next position keyframe on the timeline adjust the focus distance again to get him back in Focus add add a keyframe to the manual focus and repeat as needed okay looking great now that we have our shot nailed down we can go back and fine tune the lighting click on the directional light and you can fiddle with things like intensity and color temperature and don't forget that you can change the light angle and the time of day by holding down Ctrl and L and moving your mouse around it's up to you if you want a bright daylight shot or something more dramatic to further fine-tune the look of the lighting let's click on the exponential height fog and bring up the fog intensity to add some extra Haze next we can adjust some of the post-processing effects by going up to the little cube with the plus sign going down to visual effects and adding a post-process volume this thing comes with a ton of extra options to help you get exactly the look you want like Bloom exposure chromatic aberration and so on let's add some lens flare if you don't see any results it could just have to do with the angle of the light source to the camera or you may also need to adjust the intensity so Crank that up but remember to check the entire animation since we have a moving camera if the lens flare looks good from one angle it might not look good from another in this case the lens flare gets a little too crazy at the end so we can bring that intensity back down once we're happy with the shot it's time to think about rendering in the secrets window click on the little film slate button and that will open up the movie render queue in the settings column click on unsaved config to open up the render settings window there are tons of ways to set this up depending on your needs so go with the settings that best fit your project but in this example we don't want to export a JPEG sequence so let's delete that and click the little green plus to add settings and choose anti-aliasing change the temporal sample count to 16 and click override anti-aliasing so that it uses these settings when it renders instead of the default ones next add a new setting and choose exr sequence again you could choose PNG sequence or even just export straight to prores if your project calls for that next add color output and disable the tone curve and now add game overrides and lastly let's add console variables these allow you to use scripts to override some of the default engine settings to get a better more cinematic quality click on the little plus sign next to the console variables to add a new variable and type r dot depth of field quality as one word and change that to five add another variable and type r dot screen percentage and set this one to 150. what this does is it renders the video at a bigger size and then it scales it back down to the final size it can take longer to render but this improves the quality and the crispness of the image a lot Okay add another variable and type r dot motion blur quality and set it to five and add another variable and type r dot Shadow quality and set that to five and lastly add one more variable and type r dot Ray tracing Global illumination and set that to 50. okay let's finally go to the output Tab and get ready to render you can choose where to export or you could just take note of the default file path here next set the output resolution that you want by default it's standard HD or 1920x1080 if you want to render to 4K set it to 3840 by 2160 and double check that the frame rate is 24 frames per second okay the only thing left to do is press accept and then hit the render local button it'll take a while to start and a while to render so Now's the Time to grab a quick snack while you wait once it's done import it into your favorite video editing program like after effects and check it out from this point you could add effects or do color correction add sound and so on hopefully this inspired you to make some really cool 3D animated shots Unreal Engine is so powerful and it makes it so easy to build complex scenes really quickly so thanks for watching and big thanks to our buddy Steve from our Facebook group for putting this tutorial together for us if you make anything cool with these techniques be sure to tag us on Instagram with it or post it on our Discord or specially post it to our Facebook group so Steve can check out all the cool animations you guys are making with his tutorial alright let integrators

Channel: ProductionCrate

Views: 136,404

Keywords: productioncrate, footagecrate, rendercrate, soundscrate, graphics crate, vfx, vfx artist, visual effects, visual effects artist, free vfx, free music, royalty free, royalty free vfx, royalty free music, 3D, 3D modeling, free 3d models, after effects script, free after effects script, film, filmmaking, independent filmmaking, unreal engine tutorial, unreal engine cinematics, how to unreal engine, 3d animation, 3d film, virtual production, virtual production unreal engine

Id: M0GE6d4Gck8

Length: 30min 27sec (1827 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 08 2023