MAXON NAB 2021: Cinema 4D X-Particles to Unreal Engine

what up what up wimbush here and today i'm excited to show you guys how i made this [Music] now this project is called hypercube i made it as a feature project for maker's place everything in here was built using cinema 4d x particles unreal engine and after effects and as you can see in this example everything in here from the lights to the actual fluid simulation is all audio reactive and so in this tutorial today i'm going to show you guys exactly how i built everything out here but before we get into that for those that don't know me my name is jonathan winbush i'm a motion graphics artist based out of southern california you might have seen my work with netflix marvel dc slash warner brothers discovery channel and a whole lot more basically if there's a screen i'm designing it animating for it and then on the education side i've done work alongside maxon adobe school of motion mograph.com my youtube channel and of course nonprofit motion for all i've been doing motion graphics professionally working in television and movie and interactive experiences since around 2006 i first got my start interning under adam sandler and from there i went to work on for studios such as like universal warner brothers and then my own studio which i run today winbush immersive but enough about me let's get right into the tutorial so without further ado let's jump right into it so before we jump into cinema 4d this is a program called amplify studio i wanted to show you this because this is what i made my audio selection in and i believe that audio is a very essential piece to any visual medium whether it's for tv whether it's video games if you don't have audio it doesn't look complete if you want to get really hardcore with it you could go as deep as myself like i got this mpc the new one that just came out i also have midi controllers which i use like mpc beats ableton live and pro tools but if you want like a simple solution which is actually a free solution at that you could use this program here it's called amplify studios so let me show you exactly how i built this beat out using amplify studios and so you can see that i have everything structured out here i have some snares i have my bass i have melodic loops in here and basically with amplify instead of building it out with like a keyboard like i have here you can actually take you know loop packs and bring them into this program and lay them out it's super simple it's basically built for beginners that want to get into making their own beats so let me start by playing this beat out for you so basically what you're seeing is i built this out in five different sections i just took a couple of loops let me actually go over here to view come down here to show browser you can see some of the free packs some of the bonus packs that i have so let me click on like trap dynamic we have everything basically laid out here and i'm not going to get into like a deep tutorial but it's as easy as taking some of these assets dragging them into our sequencer over here let me bring this back and hide it and then from here you can actually come down here or you see like this playback mode you could take your loops you could chop them up you could play with the octaves you could pan it left or right you could change up the speed basically manipulate it how you see fit or you could use the loop as you see in here and you're basically just dragging and dropping and making out your beat from there so i would suggest going in there downloading amplify studio play around with it and once you're happy with your beat it's as easy as coming up the foul you can actually export it out to appleton live if you want to do some professional mix or if you're happy with it as is you can export out as an mp3 or wav file and so the whole reason i wanted to show you this is because of course my project is audio reactive and so we needed a sound file to get started with so next we're going to open up cinema 4d and i'm going to show you exactly how to incorporate this audio file with x particles in the mograph module okay so now i have cinema 4d opened up right now i'm currently using 24 for this example because 25 wasn't out when i particularly built this project out and so i just want to run you through the steps with the programs that i actually use during the process of this and so to get started i'm actually going to come over here and i'm going to make a cube so come right up here to the top so click right here where you see this cube just left click drag over hit cube here and now we just have a basic cube inside of our scene and so from here what i'm going to do is where it says cube down here in my attributes window i can actually drag this up and right here under object make sure this is clicked on i'm just going to make this 250 by 250 by 250 just a little bit larger than what the default one is and i think i'm going to rotate this a little bit just to give it a little tilt and so i'm going to come over here to coordinates i'm going to come over here where it says r this stands for rotate and so i'm going to make this top one 24 and then the center 34 and then down here at the bottom like negative 45. and there we go so if i look at it head on you can see that the cube is at like this particular angle which looks pretty neat actually let me drop a camera in here i'm going to come up here to the top right click on camera and then i'm going to come down here to my coordinates tab and i'm just going to zero everything out so i'm going to hit zero hit tab hit zero again and if i hit tab it just runs me through all the attributes and i just hit zero and now i have a camera that's in direct center i'm going to click on here which is the z you see like this little blue handle i'm just going to scroll this back a little bit and the reason that i like zeroing out the camera is because i just like working you know in exact movements here and so i have it directly in the center and from there i'm just going to pull it back and make sure that everything is aligned up so let's say negative 710 here and if i look through my camera view this is what it looks like so i can actually come up here to my top right where you see like this little arrow right here i'm just going to left click hold and drag to the left and it's just going to pull my camera back a little bit more so somewhere around here is cool i can actually come back down here to my coordinates window where it says six i'm gonna hit zero so it's gonna be negative 10 10 then i'm going to come up here and let's say where my render settings is right here i'm going to make this 1920 by 1920 so i'm just going to work in a square and actually i could probably move my camera back in from here but before i do that i'm going to come down to frame rate and i'm going to hit 60 because i like working at 60 frames per second i'm a gamer at heart and i like high frame rates so i use 60 whenever i can so i have everything in here the way that i want it so i'm just going to click this off and then i'm going to hold down control my keyboard hit d and that's going to bring up the project settings in here under my attributes window and so from here i'm just going to come down to fps i'm going to click on 60 right here so you want to make sure that this fps correlates with the same fps and your render settings or sometimes it could be a little bit funky so i have my frame rate here at 60 and then i have my frame right here at 60 and we should be good to go so i'm going to close this out i'm just going to drag my camera in a little bit i should have actually made a square first but there we go so somewhere around here should be cool doesn't have to be exact for this example so maybe it's 40 80. there we go and so from here i actually want to make this cube audio reactive and so to do that i'm going to actually put this inside of a fracture first and that way i could use some of the mograph effectors on it and so to demonstrate i'm actually going to come over here where you see this cube with all these little spheres on it i'm going to left click on this and then i'm going to come down here to fracture and you might be asking like why am i using a fracture and the reason i'm using the fracture is it will allow me to use the effectors from the mograph module even if we have a solid piece so it doesn't have to be fractured up or anything like that we can still have it affect a solid object so if i come over here and drag my cube under fracture you can see everything turned white that means that it's a child under the fracture and if i click on fracture here you can actually see we have an effectors tab here but before i do that i want to make sure i'm on objects and for my mode i want to make sure that it's straight so if i click on this you can see we have exploded segments and explode segments and connects i don't want to use those i just want to use straight because i just have a solid cube in here and so from there i'm going to click on effectors and i'm actually going to come over to the mograph tab up here at the top come down here to effectors and i'm actually going to look for the sound effector which is right here so now i have a sound effector in here and if i click back on fracture under my effectors you can see we have a sound effector in here so let me actually come over to sound and if i come over here to effectors let me drag this out a little bit so we can see it better under the sound tab you can see that it says soundtrack and so this is where i'm actually going to click and drag my mp3 into this little attributes window here and that's going to give us a sound wave here that's going to affect our cube okay so actually right here under the sound where it says soundtrack i'm going to click on the down arrow click on load sound and i already have my folder opened up for where i exported out my mp3 which i called drop 1b i made a remix version of it so i'm going to click on this click open and now we have our mp3 in here so if i actually click play you can see it's affecting our cube here it's not splattered or it's not fractured or anything it's a solid cube being affected by the effector so that's a cool tip if you do have like any solid objects and you want to use any of the mograph effectors that's exactly how you would do it you just break it into the fracture and you're good to go and so from here let me turn this off because i actually want to make my timeline a little bit larger let's say about 750 i believe the original foul was like twice or three times as large but for this particular instance i'm just going to use 750 just for the tutorial here and then i'm going to come over here to parameter and instead of position i'm going to turn this off and i'm going to click on scale then we're going to go on uniform scale absolute scale and let's maybe do like 0.2 and i'm going to click play again and that might be a little bit large so let me do 0.1 i just want to get a little bit of audio bounce in here because after this i'm going to actually use x particles to bring a few assimilation in here and we're going to want it to be reacting to the audio in the cube here and so i think that looks pretty cool there if you come over to effectors you can see the sound wave here so i can actually move it around in here if i wanted to be affected by different parts so let me say if i want to be affected by this part here that actually looks a lot better and a lot closer to my original so i think i'm going to keep it in this sound wave area right here and you can actually drag this down if you want it to be affected more so let me click on yeah so maybe i go back to how it originally was somewhere around there and we're going to keep this bounce going right here as so okay so i'm happy with how that is right there and so before i move any further i'm actually going to hit ctrl s on my keyboard because i want to save it just in case and so i have this folder here this nab 2021 i'm going to click on cinema 4d i'm just going to name this one cube bounce and click save and there we go so i just have that saved out because from here i'm actually going to export this entire thing as a fbx and the reason i'm doing that is because whenever i was doing this method with x particles i found that the particles wouldn't stick inside of the cube it'll actually not be affected at all no matter if i had a collision on it or anything and so the solution that i figured out was if i export this out as an fbx and then bring it back in it has all the different audio solutions baked into the keyframes there and i was able to get the particles to react that way so let me show you how i did that and so i just want to make sure that i have fractures selected here i'm going to come over to file come down to export and then i'm going to click on fbx here and it's going to bring up my fbx settings window and so i'm going to have selection only global coordinates everything else i don't really need to worry about actually i do want to have animation tracks on bake all frames pla to vertex cache i don't think that mattered in this instance but i'm just going to leave everything else as is the most important thing that we want to have check marked on in here is under animation we want to make sure we have tracks and we want to make sure we have baked off frames because this is going to bake that audio reactive scene that we have there with the effector into our cube here so that when we bring it back in everything is as laid out as we need it and then as also selection only so i'm going to click ok and then i'm going to come over i have an export folder here from an fbx and i'm just going to keep it named as cube bounce so i'm going to click on save and that saved out pretty quick so let me come down to my windows explorer i'm going to come down to my fbx window i'm going to click and drag this into cinema 4d here and there you go so now i have my fracture cube if i click play we don't hear any audio of course but we have all of our animations baked in there and so i could use this with x particles now and have all the fluid dynamics and everything still be contained within this cube and it's going to be reacting to the audio as well so what i'm going to do is actually i'm just going to click on this click copy i'm going to come back to my window come down to q bounce and i'm just going to paste it in here and i'm actually going to hold down the left alt key on my keyboard just double click on this until you see red and i'm just going to turn all these off just so i have my fbx cube and i can probably even name this cube underscore fbx like so then i'm going to hit ctrl s just to save it and so my next step from here is i'm going to bring in my x particles scene so if i come up here to the top where it says x particles i'm going to click on xp system and the reason i like doing this is because it brings everything in and i can actually have everything pre-organized this is the organizational setup that um isidium actually put in here which i think is really nice it actually automatically has an xp emitter in here but before i do anything in here i'm actually going to make this cube invisible so that we can see the inside of it so i'm going to come down here to my cube underscore fbx i'm going to come up to tags and then i'm going to come down here to render tags and i'm going to click on display and so from here under the attributes window i'm going to click on use right here and then down here where it says shading mode i'm just going to make it lines in this way we can still see all the stuff that's going to be happening inside of here and so from here i'm actually going to go to my xp emitter here and i'm going to start playing around with these attributes to give me the flow that i need for my sequence here and so for emitter shape i'm actually going to come down here to sphere i'm just going to make this a sphere in here i'm going to make the radius a little bit larger around 85 and i think that's everything that i want in there so i'm going to come over to emission now and for this emission right here where it says rate i'm actually going to click on this and come down the hexagonal and i'm going to use that one there and then i'm going to leave my mode for simulate legacy that's what i use for my project here so i'm just going to leave it as is and then down here where it says emit all frames i'm actually going to click this off right here i'm going to have my start one at zero and then i'm going to have my n1 at one so the reason i'm doing this is because i don't want particles to be continuously emitting throughout this project i just want to have it in one shot it's going to come down splash around and that's all the particles that we're going to need for this scene and then for it down here where it says basic particle data where it says speed i'm actually going to make this 0 because i want everything driven by my gravity i don't want any type of particle shooting out it's all going to be contained inside this box and that should be it there so if i click on play there we go you can see we have our particles comes out at one shot it's not doing anything because i don't have any type of gravity in here yet so let's do that next actually so i'm going to come over here under modifiers and then down here under motion modifiers i'm going to click on xp gravity and that actually raises gravity strength up to let's say like 1000 so if i click on play now you can see our particles come out in one shot and they go straight down but they're not colliding with this cube at all and so i'm actually going to add a collider to this cube next so i'm going to click on my cube underscore fbx come over here to tags and if you have x particles you should have this window right here that says x particles tags and we just want to click on a third one here that says xp collider and this is going to give us a collider tag but if i click play you can see it's still not colliding until it actually hits the outside there and there's a reason for that and that's because right here where it says normals is actually using the outside normal so if particles will actually hit it from the outside it would collide that way but we want to do it on the inside so everything is contained so i'm just going to click on outside and i can actually hit any and let me click play again so there we go now you see we have the particles in here they're bouncing around because they're reacting to the cube and everything but this doesn't give us that fluidity that we want that was nice and organic that we saw inside of our project and so there's a couple of things under dynamics that we're going to have to play around with to get that even flow in there so the first thing i'm going to do under dynamics once i click on this i'm going to come down here to where it says dynamic objects choose dynamics and i'm going to look for the fluid flip so down here we see xp fluid flip i'm going to click on this and you can see that we have this bounding box in here let me actually come outside of my camera so i can make sure that my cube is inside this bounding box i can actually go to like my quad view up here so right where you see this cube right next to the rotate i'm going to left click on this and that gives me my quad view here and can actually click play actually let me turn this off first my emitter and i'm going to click play and i just want to make sure my cube is staying within side of my flip here in which it looks like it comes out in some areas and so i'm just going to click and drag a little bit not too much i just want to make sure that my flip is contained inside this cube here so let me click play again and the reason i'm doing this is because i want to make sure that the xp flip is going to be working with my emitter within this cube here so let me turn back on my xp admirer here i'm going to click play you can see it's looking a little bit better there it's starting to get a little bit messy so let's start messing around with this a little bit more so next thing i want to do is an xp fluid sim so i'm going to click on dynamics come right here where it says dynamic objects i'm going to left click on this i'm just going to look for xp fluid sim which is right here so i'm going to click on this right here i'm not going to mess with any of these attributes in here let me click play again and as you can see it's still a little bit messy actually i know exactly what's going on here so i'm going to go back to the beginning and i'm going to come down here to my cube fx i'm going to click on my x particles tag here for the collider and instead of any actually i thought i could use any but let me go to normals and click on inside and then for my bounce i'm going to bring this down significantly like around one so let me click on play again and there we go that's exactly what we're looking for there so we have some nice splashes in here it's actually binding to the audio there so if i zoom in a little bit it's going a little bit slower because we have a lot more stuff going on here but you can actually see the particles are colliding with the cube which is what we want so the last thing that i actually want to put in here actually hit ctrl s just save it first and then i'm going to come over to dynamics and i actually want to add a wave in here so i'm going to come back down here to where it says dynamic objects click on this and i'm just going to add an xp wave and then for my strength i'm going to bring this down to about 20 and let's click play now and there we go so we have a nice cool fluid motion in here i can maybe bring my waist strength up to about 50. you don't want to go too crazy in here basically the wave is just going to give you like a cool wavy motion inside of here but since i do have it reacting to the audio you're not going to see it quite as much until it gets further into the simulation so before i do anything else let me actually do a simulation cache so you guys can see it and so i'm going to come down here to my camera view then i'm going to come over to utilities i'm going to come down here and add a xp cache i'm going to select my cache folder here i'm just going to put it into my m.2 drive i have a cache here so i'm going to put it inside this cache folder and then i think everything else is good here so i'm just going to click on bill cash and watch this build out i should just take a few moments here but while we're waiting for this to build out i want to take this opportunity to tell you guys if you want to see these type of tutorials you can actually get to my youtube channel youtube.com jonathanwinbush where i get a ton of free tutorials such as you're seeing here i give complete breakdowns for programs such as cinema 4d unreal engine after effects and many more so make sure you go to my youtube channel to see more stuff like this and it looks like our particle cache is actually done now and so let me click play now so we can see everything running in cinema 4d in real time and so you can see we have our particle fluid actually banging with the beat there we see the cube retracting and blowing out and everything looks really cool in here and so basically what you want to do from here now is we want to add like a surface to it because we can't bring straight particles into unreal engine we're going to have to actually make this into a mesh and i'll show you how we do that now so if i come over here to generators and then right here where it says generators i'm going to left click where it says choose generator i'm going to come and look down for where it says ovdb measure which is right here xp ovdb measure click on this let me drag this up a tad bit and so down here we're going to see let me actually scroll down here right here where it says sources i want to actually add my emitter in here so i'm going to click on my xp emitter just left click hold down and drag that into here and now you can see we have a huge blobby mess in here in which i'm going to show you the attributes to fix this out so i'm going to drag this back up here where i see this filters tag i'm going to click on this and i'm actually going to hit use filters and we can see that it kind of smoothed out a little bit there but instead of this median i'm going to delete that i'm actually going to use the gaussian one so i'm just going to left-click click on gaussian that gives us a much smoother mess here but you can see it's still a big blobby mess so i'm going to come back over here to general i'm going to look for where it says point options point radius which is right here so for my example i used about 0.1 or 1.65 which is what we see here let's see what it looks like at 2. yeah maybe we could use two it gives us a little bit more mission here and so if i play this back it's not going to play back as smooth even though we cached it now we added a mesh to it and so it's going to go back into you know running at a slower pace and so what i'm actually going to do is i'm going to cache this out now but i'm going to do it with the mesh so same thing i want to come over here to my xp cache you can see that it's red now and that's because we added some stuff to the scene so what i'm going to do is actually click right here where it says empty cache click on yes here and now my cache is emptied out and i'm going to go back and build another cache this one's going to take a little bit longer just because we added a mesh now so i'm actually going to click on build cache i'm just going to click on overwrite and this should overwrite auto data but this time it's actually going to add the mesh with the particles in there and from there we're going to be able to export everything out from here and bring that into unreal engine all right so it looks like the cinema 4d cache is actually finished now so let me come down here and click the play button all right so there we go so say that we're happy with how everything is looking here and now we want to bring this fluid simulation into unreal engine so we can further build from there so let me stop this right here and to do that we're actually going to have to actually export this out as an alembic file and that will allow us to bring out the sequence as an animatable mesh and then bring that into unreal engine and then for the cube i'm actually going to have to save that out separately so i'm going to save this into two different parts one the alembic and then one the straight c4d file and so i'm going to start with the alembic file i'm actually going to come down here to my windows explorer i'm actually going to come back here to my nab 2021 folder click on new folder i'm going to name one abc because that's going to stand for alembic and then inside of here i'm actually going to come down here to my timeline where we see go to next frame i'm actually going to click that just make sure i'm on the first frame i notice whenever i go to frame one this gives me a more absolute mesh when i bring this into unreal if i start with like just a blank scene sometimes it messes up and the limit file doesn't save out correctly so that's a tip there if you said we're not an alembic i would at least go to the first frame once we start seeing some mesh and then over here on my right hand side under my objects tab i'm actually going to click on ovdb mesher because this is what we want to save out as the alembic and so make sure you have this selected right here and then i'm going to come over to file i'm going to come down here to export and then i'm going to come down to here where it says alembic abc so click on this and this is going to come up with the olympic export settings and so on my start frame i want to make sure that i have one on here usually if you do this for the first time it's going to say zero so make sure you have it on one that's very important and then for my end frame 750 for my selection i want to make sure i have selection only on and then for over here or it says particle geometry make sure you have this clicked on and then for the optional data i'm just going to leave this as is but these are the really important ones so selection only you want to make sure you have this turned on and you want to make sure you have it selected here inside your window over here and then particles geometry make sure you have that clicked on and then start frame make sure you're starting at the first one so once you're comfortable there and have everything you need selected i'm going to click ok then i'm going to come over to my folder abc and i'm going to name this one q balance underscore fluid and i'm going to click save here and this should take a few moments to save out here for exporting out to alembic and it looks like it's done so i'm going to go to my windows explorer i'm just going to go into my abc folder make sure it's saved out it's a little bit under a gig and this is important too for alembic files they're usually pretty large so if you see file size and it only has like a couple of kilobytes that means that it didn't save out correctly you want to have a pretty large file here so usually it goes up to like a couple of gigs usually if i have a really long timeline this is a way that i could double check that everything's saved out correctly i can also just click and drag it into cinema 4d here and i have my limbic import settings i'm just going to leave everything as is click ok and now you can see we have our alembic file in here if i click play this is showing me that everything exported as i needed it to be and so everything is looking good there and so next let me actually close this down come up the file close project and actually for this fbx i'm going to close this one out as well i'm not going to save it that's my fbx file so i'm back inside of my original file here so i'm actually going to click control s just to make sure i have ultimate project here saved and then i'm actually going to come over to my xp systems and i'm going to delete everything out and then also here where it says sound and fracture i'm going to delete these out as well now you might be asking why am i deleting everything out and that's because this is the project file that i'm going to be bringing into unreal engine so i'm going to decimate everything that i don't need that's just going to be extra weight and only bring over the project files that i actually need which is my q bounce here so once i have this here the cool thing about the newest updates with unreal engine and cinema 4d we no longer have to save out for cineware so no longer do i have to hit control d make sure i have everything saved in cineware actually let me show the example so previously i'd have to hit ctrl d on my keyboard let me scroll this up i'd have to click on the centerware tag and then i would have to save the polygon cache save animation cache and save material cache if i have materials on there but as we know that can sometimes make your file size a lot larger and so with the latest versions the cinema 4d i believe it started in 24 and of course with 25 you no longer have to go through this process we can actually just take our straight cinema 4d file and import into unreal engine so no prep work that we need to do anymore just save out your file and you should be good to go and so before i do that i'm actually going to take off this file here my display tag then i don't need my collider tag for this one i'm just going to make a simple material down here so down here in the lower left hand corner i'm going to double click i'm just going to name this one material and then i'm going to double click on it and i think i'm going to add luminance to it so basically when we bring this into unreal i always like bringing a cinema 4d material in here because it makes a master material which is really easy to use once you're inside of unreal and so i like adding the luminance just in case i need it for reflectance i'm actually going to remove the default i'm going to click on add use a ggx and i'm going to bring the brightness down to 1 on the layer and this should be good for here so what i'm going to do now is i'm actually going to save as because i don't want to save over my master project file and i'm just going to name this one cube bounce underscore ue and so this one is my master one i could have probably named it master but i'm just going to leave it as is but i'm going to underscore this one ue just so i know that this is the project file that i decimated everything out and i want to bring this one into unreal engine so i'm going to click on save then if i come back to my folder here look at my c4d you can see that this project file is actually really small it's actually under a megabyte and with previous versions of saving out for cineware this thing will get exponentially larger so this is really cool that they added this update recently so what we're going to do from here is i'm going to open up unreal engine 5 i'm going to show you how we can bring all the assets that we just built inside cinema 4d into unreal so we can run and play everything back in real time and then i'll show you guys my completed file that i built inside of unreal previously and then i'll show you how we can export that complete package out for road time rendering so that we can bring the multi passes into after effects all right so to get started in unreal i'm actually going to open up my epic games launcher so this is what you get whenever you download unreal engine and in the top right i can actually launch unreal engine five it's an early access or if you don't have this up here you actually just go to this tab here that says ue5 and you can download the early access it's free for everybody so you don't have to do any type of registration or anything as long as you have an epic games account you can go into unroll engine 5 and start playing away so what i'm going to do from here is launch unreal engine 5 or if i come over to my library you can see right here where it says engine versions you can actually have multiple versions of the engine installed at one time as you can see here i have 4.26 4.27 and then i have five and you can also launch it from here as well so i'm just going to click launch and now you can see we have the unreal project browser opened up here and so where i'm going to go from here is i'm going to come down here to where it says film video and live events i'm going to click on that and now i have these templates here i'm actually going to use a blank one here and then down here under project location i'm just going to leave it at my nab 2021 project name i can name this one bounce cube and i can actually add ray tracing here i don't think i'm going to need it but i'm going to add it anyway and then i'm just going to click create this is going to create a brand new project for us inside of unreal engine here so just give this a few minutes to load up here all right and so this is the brand new unreal engine 5 in all of its glory here you can see i have a couple of things down here in the right hand corner saying update your project file i'm just going to click update for that and then from here basically i'm going to have to activate the data smith plugin that will allow me to bring in cinema 4d content and so to do that i'm going to come up here to where it says edit i'm going to come down here to plugins and then i'm just going to type in c4d and that's going to bring up the datasmith c40 importer i'm going to click on enable it's going to tell us that the importer is still a beta version but it's practically fine i've been using it for years i'm just going to click yes and i'm going to click restart down here and wait for unreal engine to restart it shouldn't take that long since we're just restarting it for our plug-in here and there we go so we have unreal restarted now i'm actually going to click on my content browser down here just so i can see my stuff starting to populate here and then from here i'm actually going to come up here i'm the top left where it says content come down here to data smith so right here where it says import assets data smith i'm going to click on that and then i'm going to look for my cinema 4d project file that i just made so i'm going to look for my c4d folder i'm going to click on this one right here the q bounce underscore ue because that's the one that we saved out no cinderware or anything just straight cinema 4d so click open and then right here i'm actually going to click open again that's just going to bring it into our content folder down here in our content browser so click ok and then for my import options here i'm just going to have everything check marked i don't want to check mark anything off for here so i'm just going to click import here and there we go so if i scroll down here you can see that we have our cube inside of our scene here let me actually delete this floor but as you can see i actually don't have a material on this cube here i forgot to put it on a cinema 4d but that's quite okay it's basically as easy as going back in the cinema 4d just saving it out again with the material on here and then i can actually re-import it in here not directly live link but it's pretty close and pretty fast so let me actually go down to cinema 4d i'm going to make a new material i'm going to actually name this one glass i'm going to double click on this one here so right here where it says transparency i'm going to click that turn off reflectance turn off color and i'm just going to leave it as the preset glass everything is easy as that so i'm going to click and drag this onto my cube fbx and now i have a glass shader on this cube here so i'm just going to hit ctrl s to save it and that's all we basically have to do so now if i come back over to unreal engine right here where it says q bounce ue4 under my folder that i brought over from cinema i'm actually going to right click on this and i'm just going to re-import like you can read import a new file if you want to but if i just hit re-import on here and basically leave everything checked on but it does give you options so say that you have a more intricate scene and you only want to re-import the geometry you have that flexibility here as well or if you just want to re-import materials or just lights or just animation you could do all this stuff here and so that's pretty cool that they give you that flexibility but since i just started this project here and i'm not doing anything too crazy i'm just going to leave everything check marked on here so i'm going to click on import and there you go so now i have my glass on my cube here you can kind of see the reflectance in here yeah there you go so if i kind of scroll around here you can see the reflectance and the refractions inside the glass here but let's add the fluid so we can see it a lot better in here so basically from here let's go and go to this player start controller i'm going to delete that i don't really need that in here okay there we go so again here's my cube i have the glass on here let me come to my details panel you can see on the materials it added the glass there and you know that's pretty cool that we could just re-import stuff so if you're working inside of cinema you make updates over there even animations just save out your cinema 4d project re-import it in unreal engine and it's magic just like that and so from here i'm basically going to want to add the alembic file so i'm going to come down here to my content browser i'm going to right click make a new folder i'm just going to name this one abc just to keep everything organized i'm going to double click on this one here then i'm going to go back down to my windows explorer and just get my abc file here so my limbic file my fluid cache i'm just going to click and drag this into unreal and now you can see that we have an alembic import options here so i want to make sure that i have my track name and i have my ovdb mesher from x particles selected here as well and then under import type i'm actually going to want to come to geometry cache experimental and then down here i'm going to leave my frame start at zero now i know inside of cinema 4d i have my frame export at one inside of unreal i'm gonna leave it at zero for some reason it matches up this is the way i've been doing it for years and it's been working perfectly fine so i'm just gonna leave that as zero there and then i'm gonna scroll down here all the way to the bottom and right here under conversion where it says preset i'm going to select this autodesk maya and i'm actually going to do the 3d max and so what that's going to do is it's going to make sure that my rotation the scale is the way that i exported out of cinema 4d i guess 3d max is as close to summer 4d as we're going to get in this instance and so i'm just going to click on import here and depending on your fluid scene this could take a couple of seconds or this could take a couple of minutes depending on how large of a fluid simulation that you have so i'm just going to wait for this to import here okay so that took a few moments there but now i have my alembic file down here instead of my content browser so i'm just going to click and drag this into my scene here and i don't have to try to line it up or anything it should have our coordinates from cinema 4d so if i come over here to transport under my details panel on the right hand side and the location on the right hand side we should see an arrow that's pointing to all of our attributes here and it's going to reset our value properties so if i click on this it makes sure that everything is absolute zero just how we had our fluid simulation instead of cinema 4d but we're not going to have anything moving yet because we have to add this into our timeline aka our sequencer which we use inside of unreal engine and so we have our sequencer actually already made up for us because we work inside of cinema 4d so if i come down here to my q balance underscore ue file this is my cinema 4d project file here so if i click on animations we actually see this clipboard here and what this clipboard represents is our timeline aka our sequencer so if i double click on this it opens up our sequencer in here and if i click play and i select my cube you can see my cube is actually moving but not my fluid and so it's easy to bring that fluid dynamics in here as well i'm just going to go back to the beginning down here to my timeline i'm actually going to come over here to my row outliner in my top right hand corner and look for my fluid simulation which is this one here my q balance underscore fluid so i'm going to left click select and bring that into my timeline you can see we still don't have anything moving in here and that's because we have to add our cache into here which if i click on this click on track if i come to geometry cache click on this now if i click play now we can see we have our fluid cell moving in here and everything and it's reacting to the b as well it looks like it might be off by just the frame no that looks about right so let me click on that so now from here basically what i could do is i could add a material to that as well so if i come back over to my content browser and actually before i do anything else i'm just going to click save all i'm just going to save selected just make sure to save everything in there and then from here i'm going to come down here to materials i'm just going to click the one that i brought from cinema 4d make sure i have my abc file selected up here my fluid sim scroll down here to the right hand corner in the lower right hand look for where i have my materials i'm just going to click and drag that into here and now i have my material on my fluid sum here which we can see and that looks pretty cool as is i can actually raise up some of the luminance if i want so if i double click on this also shows you everything that brought over from the materials from cinema 4d so you can see all the stuff that i had selected and everything that was turned on but say that we didn't turn on something in cinema 4d and we want to have access to that unreal all you have to do is select it inside of unreal here so it makes a cool master material for you like if you want to turn on metallic you could do that if you want to turn on transparency your normal maps etc and you can also turn stuff off as well but what i'm going to do is come down here and look for my attributes for emissive and i have my missive glow here let's say i want to bring this up to like five and then let's say i want to change the color as well let's say to like a bluish somewhere around here click ok now if i click on save here then i look in unreal now i can see that i have my fluid sum is blue it's not quite glowy and that's because we have to add some more stuff in here instead of unreal so let me go back and let's maybe delete some more of this stuff in here so let's turn off the sky maybe the atmosphere as well so i'm just seeing the fluid which i want to have glowing so to do that i'm actually going to come over here to create and i'm going to come down here to visual effects and i'm going to add a post process volume and then once i have that added i want to come over here to my details panel and i want to go here my search details i'm going to type in um and that's going to bring up this box for infinite extent unbound and what that's going to do is make sure that everything that i do inside this post process volume is going to engulf our entire scene here not just whatever is inside this cube and so if i come down here and start looking through some of the effects you can see like we have a bloom effect so if i turn this on and actually start raising it up you can see that it's affecting my glow in here which is really really cool i could come down here a little bit more to my like my exposure settings so let's say i turn my exposure down to zero and then i come down here to my min and my max and just make these one that's going to give us a better glow effect on our material there so this is just a way that you can start playing with some of your bloom effects there see i could get a really cool glowy effect in here if i click on play this is exactly what i did for my final project there that i did for makers place but this is basically how i started to build this project out so you can see the core fluid sim you can see some of the glass in here refracting and everything you can also add some lights in here you can add hdrs things of that nature but i'm going to actually go into my final project file which i built inside of unreal engine 4 so let me open that up and then i'm going to show you how i could go for my final project export it out as like multi-passes and then i'll just show you how i put it together in after effects so i'm actually going to just close out unreal engine 5 just say save so i can save this here and then i'm going to go back to my epic games launcher and i can actually come down to where it says my projects because i have it down here and as you can see i just have it named drop one i have it built inside of unreal engine 4.26 because i actually built this before 4.27 actually came out so i'm just going to double click on this and this should open it up inside of unreal 4.26 for me okay so this is unreal engine 4.26 as you can see i have my scene all built out you can see the fluid dynamics you can see the glass box i have some stuff like this kind of sci-fi environmental corridor that i built here if i come over here to my sequencer and click play you can see everything playing out here really cool we have our fluid dynamics all working in real time you can see the cube retracting all in real time i don't have any lighting effects on inside of unreal engine i actually have that driven by the actual audio inside of after effects i'll show you how i put that together here in a second but this is basically how the scene plays out instead of unreal engine so say that you're happy with how everything looks here the next step is doing rendering and so i'm just going to actually click on pause here go back to the beginning and i'm going to come over here to window come to cinematics and movie render queue so this works exactly the same in unreal engine 5. the reason i'm showing you it here is because this is where i have the project already built out at but the motions are exactly the same so i'm going to come over here to render and look for my timeline here my hypercube level sequence click on this and then click on settings and from here you can basically just delete this jpeg because i'm going to be using pngs here so i'm going to click on png and then under output make sure that i have 1920 by 1920 because i render this out as a square then i'm actually just going to save this to my desktop for this purpose so let me see let me just say render i'm in the render folder here i'm going to select this folder then i'm just going to leave everything else as is in here and then back here for rendering i'm actually going to click on this green button again because this is where we can start adding some of our multi-passes so you could do like detailed lighting you could do reflections so let me just do a couple here maybe let me add reflections maybe let me do lighting only and let's say like you're happy with the multi passage that you want rendered out and so from here i'm just going to click on accept and then everything should be good to go so i'm just going to hit on render local and it should open up a window here and after a few moments we should start to see this render out so my final project it looks like it was about 2891 frames but as you can see we have our estimated time it's just kind of flying down we see our elapsed time kind of going up pretty fast over here on the right hand side you can see the frame count going up pretty fast and so i have a lot of stuff going on inside this unreal project but you can see it's significantly faster if i would have used any type of other render engines so this is another reason that i like bringing my cinema 4d project into unreal because within a matter of moments i can have my scene rendered out here so i'm not going to make you sit a couple of minutes to watch this run through i'm going to open up after effects and show you my final project there and just kind of show you how i put the passes together all right so i have my after effects project opened up right now as you can see i have everything down here my timeline i don't have a ton of stuff going on like i have my final image here in which i didn't add too much to it i just added like a curves here to it and then the detailed lighting let me show you what that looks like so this is what detailed lighting looks like it basically just added some curves i added deep glow to it they kind of give it that effect and then if i click u on my keyboard you can see that i actually have some espresso running and it's connected to the audio beat there so if i scroll this down a little bit more you can see that i have it going to like a beat reactor and so this is just going to kind of you know the glow is going to bang out to the beat and everything there i'm not going to be able to do a ram preview just because i have so many things running right now for recording purposes so i'm going to show you my reflectance pass which isn't too much in there so i just basically rendered out these three passes put it together put some glow effects on there like ultra glow and deep glow put some subtle dust effects have some camera shakes use a magic bullet looks right here to kind of give it the final look that i was going for and then from there just render it out of after effects and then upload it to maker's place and there you go there's where the project all came from from start to finish so hopefully this helped you guys out i want to thank maxon for bringing me on stage just to kind of show you my updated workflows make sure you get to my youtube channel because there are some exciting things coming up with maxon in epic games as they continue to integrate the two programs together and so i'm going to be covering that on my channel of course and until next time stay fresh keep creating and i'll catch you in the next video thank you guys again i'll talk to you soon take care [Music] this [Music] so [Music] you

Channel: WINBUSH

Views: 2,189

Keywords: motion graphics, winbush, tutorial, immersive, school of motion, mograph, creating the unreal, create the unreal, unreal engine 5, cinema 4d, 24, 25, nab, maxon, presenation, vegas, ue5, ue4, unreal engine 4

Id: OHf9eGl11Tw

Length: 50min 51sec (3051 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 14 2021