New filmmaking tools for Unity - Mini Tutorial

so today we're going to talk about how i achieved this uh shot right here i'm so hungry so every time i post a new animation online i always get asked how did you do that do you like blender can you show me how you did that and let me just be honest i don't really like making tutorials i'm not really an expert in every single aspect of production i feel like i know animation really well but i don't really know the other ends of production super great so i always just rely heavily on tutorials or other content that i can find online so i'm just gonna quickly show you today my workflow and how i achieve uh the types of visuals that i get and i won't go super in depth but i will show you kind of the bare bones and hopefully it'll be enough for you to springboard on uh when you go to make your own content trying to grow this channel this channel in case you haven't noticed it doesn't get a lot of views so if you could do me a favor and just subscribe share this video around share my other stuff on this youtube channel so i can kind of grow my presence here that'd be really cool i wanted to animate something that was really big and heavy i also wanted to test out a couple of new tools you know i'm heading into production on my short film for magic and machines and i just wanted to see if you know these new tools would help me in that production so yeah let's check it out it's going to get more boring now all right everybody so i've sped up some animation tests here um you know it's important to have reference you can see in that first clip i had some reference uh myself acting the thing out uh and i just wanted to you know start with anime normally in maya that's the first step of this process you can see the various stages of ugly animation blocking and and getting that weight and poses feeling right and once you're happy with it i just want to select the hierarchy of this asset and i want to remove the namespace so just like the namespace there and then select the hierarchy you just want to make sure that you have everything all the joints and mesh selected and then i export this as an fbx make sure you have animation included uh you're gonna bake down the animation for the selected clip and you export it and it does its thing okay so now it's important that we export a base asset that we're going to use that we can apply all of our animations to we want to see the namespace to make sure there is no namespace applied to this when you reference scenes into maya it replies the namespace on top of it based on the scene name so we want to export it with nothing that's why i removed the name space in the previous version as well so i'm making this base marine you don't need animation or anything on this you just kind of want that bass pose so we're gonna open unity now and you can see my scene is already completed so i'm just gonna remake this uh roughly for this demo tutorial uh so i'll make a new scene and i like to start with this basic outdoors hdrp scene it just adds a nice little bit of shadows and it just looks nice um and i'm going to now as you can see i have an empty scene i'm going to import our marine base that we exported and also the animation cool so here is our base marine with no animation he comes in with the default materials on which we'll replace as well later um he looks beautiful the first thing we're going to do now is make a timeline so i'm just going to create an object an empty object uh call it timeline and or maybe just call it timeline test type tutorial there we go and you want to create a director component on it this just tells you know unity uh you know kind of the brain of the timeline the game object then grab the clip from the exported animation that we made and toss it in there and voila so we now have the animation fbx playing on the base fbx that we exported this is nice because you know you want to make a base character that you can set up just once you know you want all your materials and stuff to be set up properly on just one asset and then you know if someone else is working on that asset they change it and stuff it will just automatically update and you don't have to reapply it to you know much different characters great so the next thing we want to do i'm just going to make a ground plane so we can see what's going on uh there are a robot marine dude he looks a little bit small so we're going to scale him up a lot let's make him a giant and that's probably even still too small but we'll see how he looks when we get the buildings in there so i use a bunch of kit bash assets for this uh i bought i think it was one of the neo shanghai assets i can't recall but these look really great i think what's awesome about kit bash is the fact that you can export to multiple formats you know you have unity and you have hdrp built-ins you don't have to you know play with materials or any kind of stuff it just comes in and it works great um the only word of caution i'll give you is that you know these acids are fairly high res and if you use a lot of them which we do in our scene uh it'll slow down your your scene playback a little bit so um use them wisely and be careful so shout out to the kit bash guys thanks for making great assets this is not sponsored by gitbash at all i just really admire the stuff they're doing sweet alright so we have all our buildings this is looking good and now i'm just going to go through and arrange them [Music] all right so next we're going to set up our camera so we've got our scene basically set up here i just kind of threw a bunch of buildings in and i'm going to quickly i forgot actually a step i want to apply a material to this dude so i have some textures here that i forgot to quickly throw on they're made by my friend martin uh who is a very talented modeler and texture artist and okay so obviously one of them is not working on his helmet so just reapply that helmet material you can see everything like the emission is going a bit crazy and we'll address that later when we get into the proper render settings right now everything is just a little bit a little bit crazy um so i've got my scene mostly laid out here but i want to start adding cameras uh and how we do that is with cinemachine so we can go to package manager which is uh how you add you know unity packages to your project uh it takes a second for me to refresh here but you can find cinemachine it's i think it's in by default now but if it's not you can find it in here uh if i can find it where is the letter c i believe it's after a and then b okay there we go and i've already got installed but you can just you know install it that way in the bottom right where it says remove you would click install instead so then you want to make a new cinemachine track and drag your main camera into that setting machine track and there we go so they're going to add a slow machine shot which is kind of like your timeline and you want to kind of time your shots out like you know you can this is your sequence here you can edit things around move things around change how long cameras hold then you click on create virtual camera and i also need my game view because the game view is kind of what your main camera is rendering so there we go and i'm just going to dock it in here so that i can see both the scene and the game view at the same time and why didn't my camera work here let's try that one more time just to create i'm going to try and find an angle that i like first because wherever your scene view is that's kind of where your virtual camera your first camera gets made and there we go so there's some fun features in here that i won't explore today but you know you can this is all physical based camera so if you've used a typical camera before uh the lenses and all that kind of stuff are are similar to what you'd expect a real camera to be uh what i'm looking for is the film back takes me a minute here because i don't know i'm just being silly um physical camera there we go and we want to change there's all these preset film backs and fill back is basically the size of the sensor of your camera um so that you can emulate like a film camera um or you know whatever an imax camera whatever kind of crazy camera you can dream up you can you can put that in here and it'll change the aspect ratio to match um and then what i'm going to do is create an empty game object to uh have my camera pivot around this is going to be our pivot point there's maybe other ways of doing this but i like to just put cameras under game objects all the time and then just animate that game object um to pivot around stuff and it's kind of a i don't know hacky way of doing things but i like it so i parent the camera under my game object which is centered on my robot and i add an animation track on that camera or sorry on that game object and i just want to rotate it so that i'm like where do i want to start around here sure and where do i want to end do i want to end it around here i kind of want him to end wait does his hero pose thing like he's like yeah um so there that's kind of where i want to end it so i'm just going to move it a bit more and open the graph editor here and delete some keys i'm going really fast guys i'm sorry um i don't know i'm just i'm just crazy and i make these linear because you want to keep your keys you want to keep your speed kind of constant you don't want to have a slow end slow out type thing and i didn't mean to shorten my animation clip i meant to shorten my camera track but i'll fix that um i will fix it i promise i'm going a bit tighter here as well just because i want that more cinematic uh perspective kind of change parallax thank you is the word uh where you get more things kind of whizzing around in the foreground and background there we go uh and i'm going to quickly add a few more shots here as well so just to quickly show you the power of sequencing uh with the timeline so make a new shot kind of line up my camera in the scene view first where i want it to be i kind of want his hand to kind of slap down that building and create a new camera there and yeah good you'll notice here like hey where did my dude's hand and fingers why are they popping off this is a thing that for some reason just happens uh when your character is off screen i'm not entirely sure why this happens i'm not a i'm not a graphics dude but select the geo and go update one off screen and just just enable that so that the character's geometry is never called uh and it's just kind of optimization thing and cool his hand slaps down boom yay and he jumps he's gonna jump really high and let's make a new camera angle here that is going to be kind of like his landing and then i'm going to use my virtual camera to kind of film these later the virtual camera is coming up next let's just make this lens a bit wider a 35 millimeter lens kind of makes sense boom cool and i really wanted to add like flying cars and all that kind of stuff in here i didn't really get around to it in the original version i wanted to add destruction and stuff but again i don't know i just kind of i only have so much time in the day but maybe next time you keep on building that's what's exciting is i keep building as i as i go i'll keep learning more and uh faster ways to do things and um move on to the next thing and now once you have the cameras kind of laid out i realized oh hey my there's a lot of empty spots in the background like you can see the skybox and the horizon line uh and i think that's never a good thing i want to create a illusion of a very busy city so i'm just going to quickly pop in a few buildings and just to fill in those pockets this is a very quick job that's it's not the greatest in the world but uh hopefully you know you get the idea but also really like that sense of parallax it's like the michael bay shot where martin lawrence and will smith are standing up and they're being badasses um i just kind of wanted to emulate that and you know you got to have lots of stuff in the foreground lots of stuff in the background wasn't around to get that shot of that that sense of dynamic um camera movement cool boom yay fun stuff something animation in here still bugs me but again whatever this is just for fun i'm not going to split hairs over this you know so i wanted to demonstrate the new virtual camera tools which i feel like are just as as a animator and storyteller it's just so cool load the app on my ipad so that i'm able to film this camera what's great with this is it kind of gives you that nice handheld motion that we're all kind of looking for it's something that you can easily overdo it on but i just like to have a nice little bit of that organic kind of feel to my cameras when i'm starting to animate and using a tool like this just makes it really fun i'm just going to quickly close this scene view close dab just because it's a bit faster there we go now we have some nice uh firmware all right here we go so this dude's running i'm just gonna be like wow i can zoom in holy crap you're running around and we can review that by clicking on this button here and watching that go saying yeah it looks pretty cool let's try one more and we can record again so you want to start a bit wider and then you can zoom in a little bit and go a little bit lower you know maybe we want one that's really camera shaky because uh we're on a helicopter and this guy's shaking it so let's try it whoa we're bouncing around this is crazy and let's review that awesome let's say we're happy with that we just pop it back into the editor and take a look and there it is so it's that easy just to make something that feels organic easy uh and it gives you that creative flexibility all right let's talk about lighting so again i'm not a lighter so i use resources especially this one here from pierre i'll put the link below it's an awesome tutorial that kind of breaks down how to get the most out of hdrp lighting and here in this video i just wanted to demonstrate that i i had this volume here when you're seeing uh some things are giving errors saying like hey ray tracing's not enabled right now i'm just in like a low quality um preset right now because i just want to get the light position sort of right and throw in the hdr eyes and adjust the you know some of the fog volumes and all that kind of stuff um if you look at the tutorial he walks through everything in much detail much more detail than this that i'll have time to go into today um but uh yeah i just wanted to show that uh it's just one directional light for the sun is in the scene that's the only light and the rest is going to be handled by the volume settings and global illumination which we will get to shortly is the uh ease of use for some of these more high-end features like ray tracing uh there's this awesome webinar that you can find just by searching ray tracing in unity it's on unity's channel i just followed that and it's 30 minutes long and i wanted to show you guys just kind of the flexibility and the visual upgrade it gives you just by you know taking a few minutes to get there um so this is kind of just the default values of everything in our scene uh not nothing nothing too fancy going on here um of our little robot dude doing his thing hi yeah all right um so i followed the tutorial and i started setting up ray tracing all these uh you know in indirect illumination indirect lighting all that kind of stuff so take a few minutes i won't walk you through it now i just want to show you with 30 minutes of tutorials you can kind of quickly get into something that is customizable and easily makes a difference that's just enabling the volume changes that i've made uh so that i'm using hdr lights and stuff and so that's just one part of it the other fun part of it is going into our preferences and enabling the ray tracing i i set this all up this custom thing that it's part of the tutorial uh it's not on by default or anything so if you just you know once you have it set up you can just swap between these levels to get a varying amount of detail it has to compile a few shaders and stuff but immediately i mean wow it makes such a difference you can see you know all the reflections in the glasses and the glass windows here i just think uh right off the bat it just looks really cool without me as a creator having to do anything like i again i am not a lighter i do not really understand uh how to make cool images i just do my best um and using these tools that unity has provided just makes it really easy to do that uh i just you know i'm really impressed by this this is just a couple of days worth of me you know animating and laying things out uh and you you get a really really incredible image it's just fun man this is just fun to poke around let's see what you can come up with so the last step we want to do is record things out of unity how do i export a movie or image sequence and to use that we use the recorder tool which you can get from package manager i um i'm using a new recorder tool like there's a new pre-release that you can grab from this blog they will walk you through the steps so you can go to window package manager and add the recorder i already have it but you would click on it here and go add and the version that i'm working with is a pre-release 3.00 0.2 i guess and the reason why i'm using this pre-release version is because it has accumulation motion blur so if i go to general recorder quarter window you'll see here that there's this accumulation button then you want to turn that on after my samples to 20 and what that is is just the sub frame samples that it's going to render so for every single frame it's rendering it's going to render 20 sub frames to calculate the motion blur and i kind of wish that i actually cranked it a little bit higher just because you can on some of the fast-moving cameras you can kind of see like the the motion blur is a little bit ghosting uh that's just because the samples are a bit low so yeah you can play with that in your own scenes and see what works best for you um i kind of wish that i made a bit higher the other thing about in here you want to set your frame rate and i always make this manual just because there are some bugs here with the subframe accumulation uh but that is being fixed um and i always said it to be you know proper film is 23.97 but i just use 24 for now um and you can choose you know you can make a new recorder here with uh different types of options that you want to export you can do image sequence if you want as well and just disable cellular one you would like it to be you can choose between png jpeg or exr i use png just because i don't want my image to be compressed like jpeg so that's png or exr are both some of the highest quality images that you can export and the other thing is you want to set your resolution so what you want to render at 4k or or whatever i only run it at 1080p for my version of this shot uh just because the scene is melting my computer enough as is it's not optimized at all so rendering at 4k would have i don't know i just don't have patience that's it you just hit start recording and it launches the game and will render your sequence for you as a movie and i think that's it thank you so much guys i hope that was helpful i hope you dug the uh behind the scenes look and how i work if you have any questions things you want to see um please let me know and i'll do my best to follow up and perhaps make another video answering some of those questions and [Music] bye

Channel: Little Mountain Animation

Views: 3,900

Keywords: tutorial, unity, filmmaking, film, virtual camera, hdrp, raytracing, ray, tracing, animation, big dinosaur, big, dinosaur, pacific rim, was, cute

Id: 7R7_xJGdY8k

Length: 25min 8sec (1508 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 29 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/uri_developer]

Thanks for sharing