Real-time Motion Design with Unreal Engine!

hey Aron reinitz here for school of motion if you're following motion design news you know that epic games just released Unreal Engine 5.4 preview one which included new realtime 2D and 3D motion design tools previously called project Avalanche these tools make it possible to create realtime Motion Graphics just like this and in this video I'll show you how to do it okay so before you do anything else in unreal what we've got to do is go up to edit plugins and you're going to look for the one called motion design and mine is turned on but you'll need to turn this on and you'll probably have to restart Unreal Engine at this point then you can go on to working and following the tutorial okay so here I am in Unreal Engine 5.4 and I've got an empty level and I'm just going to take this hex 3D object that I created externally in Cinema 4D and I'm just going to drop it in here and you could really just use any 3D model for some of what we're going to do but since I'm going to be going with a honeycomb this is the perfect shape so you can see it's got a white material at the top a glowing blue one on the side and then red here we're going to change those materials anyway but it was a good way to sort of block it out okay now that I've done that what I'm going to do is hit this motion design button and you'll see that it changes the interface and one of the things that comes up is create defaults and these are basically settings that the folks at unreal felt were good starting places for Motion Graphics type work so I'm going to hit create defaults and you don't have to do this but but this gives us some good places to start I'm actually not going to use the postprocess or the camera and I'm just going to hit spawn I can create a camera later and once I've done that for now I'm going to go from camera to default viewport it's just the way I prefer to work and you can see that we've got our object here and then I'm going to go over into this whole area that's been added and by the way notice here motion design mode normally we start in selection mode but when we press that button that shifted us into this motion design mode and you can do that without pressing that button that we used before but I just wanted you know that it was here okay so we're in motion design mode I'm going to go over to actors and I'm going to add a cloner actor I clicked on it then I'm just going to move over here into the middle and drop it in and I'm going to select my hex object I'm just going to reset the position make sure rotation is also reset I'm going to select my cloner I'm going to reset it's rotation its position and if we look inside the cloner we can see that we've got this default cube in there that's being used as a part of the grid that it's creating if I dropped in the hex and I mixed it in with the cloner then it's using both objects now I'm going to get rid of the cube and just going to hit yes get rid of that and then I'm going to make some changes to the cloner so let me select the cloner and then I'm going to go down into the settings and the first thing I want to do is change it from a grid I want to change this over to a honeycomb so once I do that that looks more like what it is I'm trying to get to I'm also going to set this uh the width and the height count I'm going to set set these up really high 100 and 100 and that creates this really awesome field that we're in and then I'm going to go over into this view right here look at it from the top and once I do that I'm going to play with these values of width spacing and height spacing so let me just lower that down a little bit there lower that down a little bit till they're nice and tight and then I'm just going to go back to my regular view okay that's looking really good the next thing I want to do is is add in some noise that just kind of has the whole thing kind of flowing and moving so what I'll do is with my cloner selected I'm going to come back up here at the top and you can see that there's this option here called spawn link effector and when I click on this it will instantly add an effector in that is linked to it and that if you grab hold of it and you move it you can see how it's affecting it now I don't want this effect to be just raising things up I want there to be noise and more than that I want it to spread over the entire thing so instead of using a sphere as the type I'm going to set it to Unbound which affects everything but I'm also going to set this up from mode I'm going to set this over to noise field and then once I'm in there I'm going to change the location strength for the Z up to let's say 30 and you can see what noise is doing now right so if I pull back you can see there's this big field of noise I can also play with the frequency make it more frequent and that gets pretty crazy just going to reset back to the default and then I can turn on pan and by activating pan it controls the speed at which the fractal is moving so bring it up really high and you have that that's too high I'm going to set it down to 20 let's see what that looks like maybe even 10 which is pretty good I think and then maybe even you know I'm going to even take that down to like seven okay I like that and once I've done that I'm going to add in another refector and to do that I'm going to go over my cloner again and I'm going to hit spawn link effector again but by the way just so you know in the actors over here in the motion design mode you'll see that there is fector actor and you can add that in it's just that you have to link it manually so here if I just click on spawn link Defector it gives me another one and this is definitely more of what I want it's right here and let's pull in a little bit we can see it being affected and it's linked so let me go down to affector 2 and just get into some of these settings here and I'm going to raise this up maybe to let's say 200 for now just so we could really see it I'm also going to change the size of my affector and so let's bring the outer radius up a bit and since it's hard to see the effector right now let's come up over to here and just choose visualize thickness I'll set it to two for now maybe even four that will really help me see it and then finally I can play with the easing how does the falloff work for this affector so I could maybe set the easing from linear to something like inout Quint and let me just again I'm going to raise the outer radius of this and I'm bring the inner radius down so we only have one High Point bring that to zero I could go with something else like you want to see some weird stuff we've got like inout bounce and it creates some weird sort of ways that it's doing and we can see this in motion if I grab hold of the affector you can see how it affects things but I'm going to go with something simple like inout cubic and pull back here and let me just bring up the uh value a little higher want I set it the 300 and so now it moves through there finally I want to add some materials to these objects and what I'm going to do is head over into my materials for Motion Graphics here from the pixel lab and I've got some that I worked on here so I'm just going to I modified a few of them so let's select our hex object and let's do a few things here so for the white part I'm going to use this uh silvery one right here for the glowing blue one I'll use this neon and then for this red one right here I'm just going to replace that with this black brushed metal now we're not seeing anything and I don't know if that's a bug or if it's just something you have to do which is I'm going to pull the hex out of the cloner for just a moment and then I'm going to put the hex back into the cloner and that solves the problem that makes it work so now we've got this we can rotate here you can take a look around check out how it looks and before I jump into the last part which is just animating this thing what I want to point out is and this is important something I've noticed is that sometimes you'll add materials to an object that you put inside of a cloner and it turns out that it's just shows up as gray uh so you don't get the material in there if that happens here's the way to handle that I'm going to double click to open up this material right here and within this material this is a child of a master material so I'm just going to go into the hierarchy here and I'm going to go to the master material and what I want to show you is this one spot right here further down go all the way down and you'll see that this this area called used with Niagara mesh particles is checked off sometimes I'm finding that it automatically does this but if for some reason it has not done this go into the master material check this off save it and then that should solve the problem you Pro you may have to take the hex out of the cloner again and put it back in but that's what you should do for any materials that you're finding are not showing up once you put them into the cloner they need to be told they have to have that tag that says it can be used with Niagara mesh particles okay the rest of this is pretty simple let's create a camera let's go to cinematic a camera actor with the camera actor still selected I'm going to choose actor snap object to view then I'm going to switch over to my cinematic camera actor and I'm going to pull out a little bit here and here we are you know I think I'm going to go into the noise effector the first one and I'm going to lower the strength of that noise so let's say we set it to like 20 that way we can see this uh effector right here that's pulling up these other objects so in fact I'm going to go back into Factor 2 and maybe even set that up to 400 yeah that looks really good okay then next I'm going to go into the sequencer and animate this all so let's head over to the sequencer here that's been created and I'm just going to take the camera I'm going to drop that in I'm also going to set this to 24 frames per second and that's going to reduce the number of frames here so I'm going to bring this up to let's say to 120 and uh just get that to there to the end and and you know we can expand out but that's fine I'm going to drag this out so the camera plays through the entire way then I'm going to take effector 2 the one that creates this raising of these objects I'm going to bring it in and drop it in as well and go to the first frame here and I'm going to set a key frame for transform so let me just click on this click on transform and we'll set a key frame there and then I'm going to move all the way down to here and mine is set to automatically key frame right now you can see that that's turned on but I'm going to grab hold of this move it down and I really should have moved it further back at the beginning so let me just jump back to the beginning here and grab this one over here and if I hit play and there you [Music] go anyway I hope that this helps you in your work if you enjoyed this don't forget to like And subscribe and do all that stuff below and if you want to learn Unreal Engine check out our course unreal for 3D artists with John Jan Winbush at schoolof motion.com once again I'm AR Rabinowitz thanks for [Music] watching I [Music] just

Channel: School of Motion

Views: 51,751

Keywords: Motion Design, Motion Graphics, After Effects, Learn, Basics, MoGraph, Unreal, unreal engine, unreal engine 5.4, unreal engine motion design, school of motion, motion design news, unreal engine 5.4 preview 1, project avalanche, epic, motion designer, learn motion design, motion design tutorial, tutorial, vfx tutorial, learn vfx, cinematics, game dev, motion design school

Id: DOgfmp_ot9E

Length: 10min 54sec (654 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 21 2024