NEW Cloner & Effectors in Unreal Engine 5.4! (scene examples + walkthrough tutorial)

[Music] [Music] all right so today's going to be a super fun one we're going to take a super early look at the new motion design tools in Unreal Engine 5.4 I'm pretty much going to be focusing on the cloner object today but I'll definitely go through some other ones later on and I'm just going to kind of give you my first impressions I've played played around with it made a few scenes I'll walk you guys through the basic setup and again this is like a pre preview version uh of unreal 5.4 so just keep that in mind I might crash a lot also I just want to give a big shout out to Aiden Wilson and Luke from Fast chaos they helped me a bunch with the 5.4 install so if you want to learn more go check out Aiden's video he has a good video on how to build Unreal Engine from Source on GitHub and he also has a overview video of the new 5.4 features man my brain is feeling slow so I'm in a blank 5.4 project as you can see here version 5.4.0 again this is a super super early preview version so take everything with a prch of salt uh the first thing you'll notice is I have this motion design button at the top which I already have running but pretty much what this is is it'll be a new motion design mode that'll live in the menu with our other no uh with our other modes that we are familiar with an interesting thing is actually you need to enable this in the plugins window so you got to go to your plugins and type motion design and enable it all right so once you enable it and Press Start you will be introduced with this new side menu here uh and you'll notice a few different windows that pop up I won't go through everything and I also don't know EX exactly what every new window is with the operator stack and the remote control so we'll just stick with the motion design stuff for now as you can see here on the left there's some new menus here nothing too crazy though but the main one being uh 2D shape so this is those features where you could draw 2D things onto the screen 3D shapes which is similar to that other menu here I'm not going to click it cuz typically that causes a crash so I just want to be careful this is a very interesting one so this is where you can create your cloner and your effectors as well as other things like text your SVG stuff media plates null actor and a spline actor so really cool a bunch of new features here kind of another menu for creating static meshes a camera menu for the regular stuff and then a Lights menu so I feel like epic's just trying to make a little hub for common tools used in motion design so not all of it is super new they've just kind of repackaged some things up the top here again some more new buttons but again I'm not going to go through it for now we will stick with the cloner and the effectors so first thing I'm going to do is actually just set up a basic cloner so I'm going to go to this menu here please don't crash ah well I'll be right back okay so I'm back again all I've done is made a sphere from the scary plus menu and I'm also going to quickly scale it down to a three because when we put it in a cloner we're going to need some space and the default one size can be quite big so I'm just going to click Start on my motion design mode again and go down to actors and then click the cloner actor and just click somewhere in the viewp so now we can actually as you can see here do some really cool stuff with the cloner and this kind of gave me that feeling of learning how to use a cloner in Cinema 4D for the first time so it was super fun I'll go through some of my example scenes later on and give you a quick breakdown of each one of them so let me just zero out the rotation and position here and I'll also actually make a camera but I don't want to do it from that menu cuz I'm scared camera Center camera actor 2 and I'm just going to quickly make it a square aspect ratio and then change to the cinema viewport this is like some new motion design viewport where you can like zoom in and out and there's a g grid I think a lot more useful for 2D things or just using a grid to space icons and logos around but not super useful for me cool so this is our cloner I'm going to delete the default Cube and then make my sphere movable and then drag that on top of my cloner I don't know what that weird error was but I'm going to just drag my orange material on the fear and as you can see sometimes it doesn't work but all you got to do is Click your cloner again turn it on and off and that can fix it or you can just do force update cloner and that'll also help it and I'm just going to turn off my culling cool and my sun is a bit bright so my sphere is at three so let's make the spacing of our cloner as you can see oh my goodness so as you can see the details p in the cloner you get all your classic options uh your layout so you can do a grid you can do a circle line cylinder all these other things like the regular stuff with the line you got to actually set a spline which is a pretty cool uh effect you can do actually so I'll just do grid for now I'll make the spacing. 35 on each axis oh 3.5 no 35 oh of course centimeters to meters Okay cool so let me Zoom my camera in again sorry guys it's very late I'm just trying to stay coherent here and I'm also trying to contain my excitement and now what we could do is again in this menu you can change the spacing in the X Y and Z positions and you can also change the count and another thing you'll notice in the little updated icons here you can key frame all of these these things so it really opens up the possibilities and it should by default also open up this uh sequencer for you when you enter your motion design mode so pretty cool it's a bit different looking in the motion design template but pretty much the same stuff you just add a sequence select it this one will be here by default and then you can just drag any actor in here so could just drag my cloner in make this like 12 12 12 or maybe not 12 and height let's try one and then try like 50 and 50 yeah and then we kind of get this sort of infinite sphere world look which is pretty cool it's so awesome to be able to get like our real time Reflections and lighting and really responsive so these are going to be the main settings that you play with within the cloner actor now the next thing that we care about are the affector actors so I'm just going to click that guy and and then somewhere in the scene I don't know why I'm doing this like a walk through because a lot of you probably aren't even following along let me find him so with our effector again I'm just going to zero out the coordinates so it's in the middle here so this guy you can see here you have the ability to change its positioning its scale blah blah blah but you'll see nothing is happening and that is because we need to assign our affector in the owner so if I scroll up a bit you'll see effectors here I can hit the plus icon and then in the drop down select affector 2 and now crazy stuff will happen now our affector will actually work again all in real time without any lag and super good performance I would do want to try this with some high poly meshes as well like product uh objects and things like that so I will maybe make some renders and put it on my Instagram or make another video on that as well let me know in the comments and what we can also do is maybe set the Z direction to like a 50 and now you can really kind of start having some fun with it can even make it like 150 come out a bit and you can you can already imagine the sort of animation and motion you can do with this so while while I'm on the topic of that let's animate this in our sequencer so with our sequencer already open at the bottom here I can just drag my affector into the uh tracks tab or tracks window and then by default it's on 60fps so I'm just going to change it to 30 and then drag it out to 150 I don't know I'm doing it the slow way 150 so we got 5 Seconds go to the beginning add a transform track and then a key frame actually I'll start it I'll start it back here maybe and then add a key frame go all the way to the other Corner maybe there oh and I didn't move my playhead rookie mistake uh move this guy here and now you'll see we can have our cool affector movement and it loops and it looks all nice and all our flections and GI and all of that stuff is playing in real time now another cool thing I found out about while uh being in the sequencer is if I select my two key frames there are now presets for like the type of easing in and out that you want in the for your key frame so and if you hover over them you'll actually get a preview of that movement and it's super similar to what is that key E frame helper plugin in cinema and I know grayscale gorilla also have it so really cool for them to add these really um what's the word these like quality of life updates these like handy little tools that just save a few clicks every time that add up to a bunch of time in a project I don't know if that sentence made sense so for example let's try quartic and then go to the front and you can see it's slow at the start I don't know why I can't speak it's slow at the start and then speeds up in the middle and then slows down again let me move my end frame to somewhere just beyond the camera somewhere there and then I think if you update the frames you just want to click it again just to make sure it's fine and then you can see here and then if you can just if you just leave that playing you can really just like come up with some cool shots something like that even play around with your camera settings you know try a 75 get some nice depth of field going and really have some fun with this and the next thing you can do let me move out a bit and then also change my focal distance now the next thing we can do is actually layer different effectors on top of each other like you would in Cinema 4D so if I get go back to the menu on the left go to affector actor click somewhere we'll now have this new guy and what we could do with this is if I just go to out of my game view here I'll show you some of the other things you can do with the uh affector but some of it is either not fully working yet or I'm just not using it correctly I'm not sure but let me go to my cloner add a second array element and choose affector 3 for my affector list and and now if I let me move it out of my clones you have these other Force options as well so uh orientation Force kind of puts like oh no that just does rotation so that won't do anything cuz it's a sphere uh not orientation vertex force and you can see here a the the ver Vortex not vertex it just spins the clones and then you can uncheck it and then check it again to reset and I'll just change the force amount to like 100 and then move the affector down and you can sort of see it working in real time and you can like move it around in a live update so there's no collisions happening at the moment but one thing I found is that it sort of just applies the force to a particle and then it just keeps going on forever like you can't have you know you can't control it a little more like the upper limits of it or things like that but still really cool there's also curl noise so as you can see here you can just drag it around and pretty much add a noise a curl noise Force to anything that it comes through so really cool for like if you're have a bunch of clones lined up and you want to kind of add like a destructive force to them or like as something whizzers by maybe you have like a curl noise effector going by with that item just to kind of give that idea of like wind and movement you also have attraction Force so as you can see here it sort of just gets the Clones moving towards the uh affector origin like that so pretty cool again could be really fun to create sort of like some sort of sucking animation pause also just cool to be able to move move this around in real time and then you could use the take recorder and then really hand paint the type of movement you want your affector to have or just key frame it and then last but not least there's a gravity force so you can sort of just make cloners fall and give them gravity essentially so pretty cool a really cool effect here actually if you want like falling pieces falling geometry maybe again as some sort of object interacts with another it suddenly applies the gravity to them now one of my favorite features of this new motion design and affector cloner workflow is applying a noise field to the whole to all your cloners so if I go if I select my fector here and then under type choose Unbound instead of sphere so it'll Encompass my entire scene I can now change my mode from default which is that classic position rotation scale effector to noise field now nothing will happen yet but if I change my strength to say 50 550 you'll start noticing it is displacing all my clones in the noise pattern and I can affect it even more so if I go to 500 you'll see it's super affected so I'll just leave it on 50 for now and if you want to get this moving and I'm pretty sure this is how they did their wave example the Lego wave example in their keynote a few months back is if I just now make my pan if I up these values. 5.5.5 I'll now get this undulating noise pattern that's pretty much just panning the noise map along the world coordinates and then driving the location values based off of that and then you can also affect the scale so. 5.5 so I'm assuming the dark ER values or the lighter values are affecting the scale from the noise map .1 really cool I don't know why the 0.1 is stretching it it could I don't know if it's the order of these guys maybe the scale thing isn't working just as of yet or actually no that would be the gray values of the noise map I've just realized because it's not pure black and white one thing would be that would be cool is if we could input our own custom noise map or they would give us like a drop down menu of the different types of noises I think that would be something really fun that they could under the future also something that Cinema 4D does so let me just reset the scale and you can see here the frequency is going to be like the overall speed so if I change it to one I can up the frequency and like the contrast of it it's probably affecting the wavelength as well and if as you can see the edges are are very visible in this camera angle so say you didn't want that you could just come down to the cloner and then up the up the amount of clones or I think it's already in here yep we could go to this guy oh step that's cool that's cool I just found that out by accident but I guess you can't have like a growth cloner thing happening which I thought you could to be [Music] [Music] honest oh so this is like an overall random effector okay so let me explain this real quick I hope I'm still recording okay so this range check box lets you actually add a random effector essentially to all your clones and you can set the minimum and maximum offset of every clone so you could have them be from a minimum of- 500 Z and then plus 500 and z and now they're spread across 1,000 units or you could do make it more subtle minus 10 and 10 and now they're just slightly offset rather than completely aligned so really cool I don't know how I missed these settings before and these checkboxes but as you could see before I showed you the range stuff which is the randomization there's also a step checkbox which kind of steps I just put a super small value in but it steps the scale from the value you enter until the actual full value of the mesh so for me that would be 0.3 so that's pretty cool and you also have an option to step the rotation another thing you can do is drag in another uh object under the cloner so I just have a blue sphere I mean blue cube here just drag him on top boom now you've got a cube in the cloner and I think you can as you can see here I'm stepp in the rotation with the step uh the step modifier I guess you'd call it so this is with without the step and then this is with the step so really cool super flexible and I think there's a way to randomly assign how it's cloned I just got to I think it's one of these guys yep so if you go to renderer mesh render mode you can randomly uh clone or randomly spread out how the Clones are sequenced I guess is the word or you can go to iterate which it makes it one after the other as you can see here each row sphere cube sphere cube and then blend is oh pretty cool blend I wonder how to control the blend yeah okay okay that's what I thought so if you have whatever number of clones you have it'll just divide your grid up into that amount and then spread it across that but super cool wow super dope especially this as a visual and you can see the step rotation working it's magic here as well anyway that's enough of me mucking around on camera sorry if you feel like I'm wasting your time I'm going to show you some of the other cloner setups I have in another level okay so this setup very similar to the one we just made except I've just got two uh rectangular lights lighting the scene and then I've got a noise effector with a pretty high uh strength on the location and then also a scale and move effector sort of moving through the scene and then I think on this one oh I've just got a linear movement on it so super simple this was my first setup that I made so my second setup were was was using these cubes and I actually gave them a few bevels and rounded them which is a new feature in 5.4 I can make a quick video on how to do that but they've updated their modeling tool selection so again a really simple setup I've just got a cloner with a box or a cube in it and then for the affectors I've got this really slow moving noise that only moves the cloners in the X and Y positions also for for any of you out there that don't know Y is uh Z in Cinema 4D so it's flipped so in unreal Z is up and Y is like side to side one of them I don't know why I'm explaining this uh and then this is the sequence for it so I've got a sphere that moves around essentially I think the camera was originally here yeah so I've got a sphere that moves and then I've got a cloner as a child of that sphere so that it looks like the sphere is affecting our cubes so this is a very classic mograph technique in cinema so I've just got a regular sphere here and then I made a affector that just changes the scale of the cubes and then what I've done is I made the affector a child of the sphere and then just zero out its coordinates and then now when I animate the sphere it looks like it is affecting the cubes and again again really simple Lighting in this one in colors I've just got two spotlights shining down and I'm also slowly animating these spotlights from side to side and then for the sphere cubes this is where I learned about no there's also no key frame there definitely is cuz you can tell by the movement but I I don't know why it's not showing up here might be a bug but I used the quartic movement for this guy and this is the last setup that I made uh a bit more of an interesting one where I have four different cloners each with their own uh with their own affectors although you can have multiple cloners using the same set of affectors so you don't need to worry about duplicating them and then within the cloner itself I set the layout name or the mode to mesh and this is where if you select mesh you can then choose a sample actor for it to clone onto so for example Cube three which is this guy I just had a simple Cube and I selected the cloner and then chose this actor and now if I hide it it'll still work the reference will still work and then we'll just be left with these spheres which is really dope uh and then again just did the exact same thing for all these guys so if I just select these cubes you can see here we've got our uh original cubes that the cloner is uh placing its clones on and then in the actual settings I've made the count 500 or 5,000 sorry and then I made the sample data sections instead of vertices cuz vertices as you can see here it's a very low poly Cube so you're not going to have many uh vertices for it to clone onto so I just did sections although I'm sure if you you know um modeled your own cube with even subdivisions you could just choose uh triangles or faces or whatever you want and again a really cool and simple lighting setup just let me [Music] see just two rectangular lights so I got one here as my key light and then I got a background one to sort of act as this gradient fall off on the floor uh and I just got this plane as the uh base and gave it a metal material so as you can see the new cloner and effector workflow in the new Unreal Engine 5.4 is super fun to play with has a lot of possibilities for different uh types of mograph animations that you can do within unreal and I'm so glad cuz now I don't need to do uh the cineware workflow if I'm doing Simple cloner stuff because that can get really heavy as you can see I was finding out about a bunch of new things so this was sort of my first look and impressions of this whole uh New Motion design mode super fun to play around with again I hope I wasn't too all over the place and rambly I know I kind of was just playing around and being super casual I really hope this was helpful let me know if there's other features you want me to check out uh before the release or even after the release there's some that I also have in mind so I want to check those out and then also make a video video but other than that enjoy your day and I'll see you in the next one [Music] peace

Channel: ali.3d

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Id: ZftACL1CCEQ

Length: 27min 46sec (1666 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 08 2024