Render your animation in Unreal Engine 5 - PT 01 - Animation Import and Quixel Megasacan Sets

hi my name is amedeo beretta and in this video which is part of a larger series we're going to see how to improve the look of your animation by rendering it in the newly released unreal engine 5. in an animation course i've just released i am showing students how to animate a panther walk the course shows how to animate the full character by animating only the pelvis and one leg and reuse that animation all over to build the rest of the walk you can find the link in the description below the problem is that while the resulting motion is appealing looking at a lit and rendered animation certainly makes for a more gratifying experience than watching a great playblast while it is true that most animation supervisors will be able to evaluate the level of your animation even just by looking at your play blast i believe that supporting your animation with appealing lighting and rendering can add the extra layer of care to your work that will make your animation stand out from the crowd at the same time however since the core value of your work is your animation we would like to spend as little time as possible on lighting and rendering which is why in these and the following videos i am going to show you how to create an appealing set for your animation and design lighting for your scene and render it out taking advantage of unreal engine if you are interested just follow along in the description below you will find a link to the cached animation we are going to use in this tutorial so that you will be able to build my same scene i also recommend you first watch my mayat unreal engine alembic video to understand how to import animation into unreal engine you should be able to do without it but it's a good idea to have a solid understanding of the procedure in terms of unreal engine knowledge you will only need a basic understanding of the ui although i normally make a point to point out all the difficult steps so you should be fine either way enough with the pleasantries now let's get started normally before starting to do the lighting and rendering for anything it's a good idea to have a camera in mind by now the camera for our animation would have been long set however this being a walk cycle i didn't really think of a camera when i was doing this but i think it's now time to sort it out normally the fastest way is to do a quick rough sketch and find out what the angle is so that's exactly what i will be doing i think i want to position the camera low on the ground and follow the character as it moves along one of the issues here you see that the head becomes a lot bigger so i'm going to select the camera and put something like a 70 in there so that the deformation of the lens won't be so strong for the objects in the foreground so that the head won't be that much bigger than the body so i guess that more or less this will be the camera i'm going to use for the render with the character being a panther i kind of think that it should be in the jungle and when i think about jungle and panther usually the jungle book references come to my mind so with the jungle book references come along ancient ruins of a temple somewhere so one thing to make this shot a bit more interesting could probably be to add some ruins amongst the jungle as a background for the character and probably has a bit of foreground too so i'm going to very quickly put something together in terms of framing if i hide the floor in maya and remove the resolution gate for a second i can select a single frame to play blast hide the grid as well go play blast options and in the format i can pick image as encoding i can pick png and just play blast a single frame that's going to give me a frame with the alphas so i can easily sketch on it if need be and now you can just start drawing something so i'm going to behave as if i didn't know how to draw so i'm just going to draw a bad horizon line and maybe for the panther i'm just going to draw over it real quick just to give me an impression of the shape in there in this scenario we're just thinking about staging this thing so that the framing looks appealing and the character is clearly visible on screens so i'm not really going to go for beauty there so maybe in here there's going to be a little bit of ruin there and then i'm going to have some plants of sort and in the background another big piece of ruin here and again i guess there would be some plants in there there will be some confusion in the background maybe i can add something in the foreground so a big chunky rock that is going to be maybe blurry and a bit of leaves or grass sticking out in the foreground and this is really going to be my composition i'm not really going to spend more time on this because all i really need to know is if the camera is working fine or if i need to redo the camera i'm maybe going to make the rocks of the ruins a little bit darker there i don't want them to be darker than the panther really because i want the panther to stick out a little bit more and the foreground is going to be a bit darker than the background i'm going to give a little bit of color to the rather gray color to the plants in the background just to understand what goes on in there and there you go this is going to be my composition it's just a thumbnail that you literally do in a few seconds to understand whether the composition can work which kind of assets you're going to need and where and what's the general look of the composition where's the character going to be in the frame and so forth and this is going to be enough for me to have a clear direction when i'm going to place the camera in a reel and decide where things are going to be as i said it doesn't need to look beautiful the composition just needs to look balanced if you think of these red lines as the thirds of the composition then the core the panther is falling squarely on the right third and the panther is overall taking the center stage of the composition a little bit off center to the right is big enough to attract the attention of the audience and i think that should be considered one of the requirements if what we want to attract the attention of the audience to is our animation our character this kind of images can usually be called a thumbnail because usually they're just very small drawings which are jotted down in a very short time to establish the composition and you shouldn't really be spending too much time on them the idea is that you make several versions and then you pick the one you like the most so now that we know a little bit which framing we're going for let's go into unreal in unreal we pick up a field video live events type of project we set it to blank and we do not need really the starter content for this one but i will enable ray tracing because i'm using an rtx board once in a reel i'm going to pick up a film video and live events project it's going to be a blank one i'm going to keep the starter content off but i'm going to enable ray tracing you can follow along even without ray tracing but i really want to try it out on my graphic board which is an rtx 2070. i'm going to create it i evaded it out the loading part of unreal in your case you might wait a little bit longer depending on whether it's the first time you open unreal so in here we are into the main interface and what we need to fetch are the assets and i do have some assets i have an fbx containing the name of the shaders i need to use and i have an alembic containing my animation the first thing i need to do is to import the fbx content in my shader so right click in the content browser import to game go grab the fbx the default settings will do just fine we just need the shaders and the default settings do import the shaders a little bit of weight some error in the olympic but we don't care because we only need the shaders and in here we've got our shaders we also got some assets that we do not really need i've noticed that the first time i opened this thing unreal was kind of calculating stuff so if you don't see the thumbnails as i do now my suggestion is to go file and save all so that you save the imported assets if you don't save the imported assets in practice you risk to lose your work if unreal crashes so as i said in here we have static objects that we don't really need so i'm going to just delete them and remove them from the content browser as well the only thing i need is the shaders these guys in here so i'm going to make a folder call this panther shaders and i'm going to move the shaders there with the left mouse button and move here there you go so now there's a little bit of organization now i need to import the alembic animation but i would like the olympic animation to automatically pick up the shader names however remember that alembic really stores the shading group information from maya while in here in the fbx we have the shader name so i'm going to need to rename all of these shaders so that the underscore capital m token is no longer there so i'm going to select all shaders right click scripted asset actions and rename multiple files however you will not have the script unless you have it installed and i will leave a link to it in the description of this video if you want to see how to install it please watch my maya 2 unreal alembic video because in there i do explain how to use this thing so i'm going to rename my shaders by replacing the string underscore capital m with nothing i'm going to click ok and now my shaders names no longer have the underscore capital m token at this stage i can import the animations so right click import to game let's grab the alembic as settings as import type we want the import type to be of geometry cache we want flattened tracks to be on and the important part for us is the materials section we want to make sure that the importer will both create and find materials so i'm going to enable both of them create and finally and then there's the buggy part of this importer which is the conversion system the rotation coming from maya needs to be set to 90 degrees otherwise your character will be imported with the wrong rotation i'm going to click on import while i'm waiting if any of what i'm doing here is a bit obscure i suggest you watch my maya to unreal alembic import video and i'm going to post the recording while olympic importer figures it out and as you see the importing was successful we have it here in the thumbnail although alembic sometimes is the only way you can import your animation into unreal based on some factors and if you're not using usd caches that is i have to say that it is not a great format to work with because it's very slow on import it creates big massive files which are very slow to import however if i drag the asset into the scene you will see that the asset comes in with all the shaders already connected to the geometry that of course depends on the fact that we already renamed the shaders before importing and alembic found the names and assigned them to the face sets they were assigned to in maya once more if you don't understand what's going on in here just watch my olympic video and things will be a lot clearer anyhow now the problem we have is that the animation won't play unless we play the game so if i play the game you see that the panther walks pretty nifty but it would be cool to play this on a timeline so let's create one in the top left section of the ui you have this clapping board icon we click on it and we add the master sequence let's just put in there one shot for now and hit create master sequence the sequencer will open up in front of your eyes somewhere on your monitor and in here you should be able to eventually play the animation right now it's not working because the sequencer does need you to specify which characters you want to play the animation for this animation was recorded at 24 frames per second so this is one of the first thing i always do is always check the frame rate and so i'm going to set 24 fps otherwise the animation will look different in a certain way then i double click on the shot that gives me the shot details and in here on the left i have the camera actor that i'm going to render through for now this is just very basic we didn't do anything to it what we want to do is we want to really have this cache rendered and we want to add the cache so i'm going to rename this cache as panther anim so that i know it's the animation i'm going to drag it into the sequencer i'm going to click on the plus next to the track name and i'm going to go pick geometry cache component into the geometry cache component you click on the track again and you grab the geometry cache and now you have a timeline in there and you see that i can scrub through the animation i'm going to make my animation start at frame one in my experience the animation start frame is normally a thousand and one that gives you room for edit handles for instance or pre-rolls or warm-ups and a lot of stuff which is not relevant to this video i'm going to also set the shot start and end if the animation comes across a bit too fast like i think it does you can right click on the track go properties and under the play rate you can set it to i don't know let's do 85 that's going to play 15 percent slower as animation that's going to look a little bit slower a little bit heavier to be honest this animation was based on live action references so the timing is the correct one but sometimes when you want the character to look a little bit heavier you just slow it down it's a good idea at this stage to save all our assets because if it crashes now we might have to reimport the alembic and i certainly don't want to wait that amount of time again now it would be good to have a camera follow the panther maybe on a dolly let's do that i'm going to go under the add button on the top left corner of the screen and in there i'm going to find cinematic and i'm going to build a camera rig rail the rail does look like a rail the one thing you want to do is to rotate it so that it's in line with the motion of your character now we can attach the camera to the rails so i'm going to grab the cinema camera actor just drag it under the camera rig rail so that it's parented to it and back into the sequencer i do want that rig rail in the sequencer so that i can animate the camera along the rail see the camera translated somewhere else so we can just reset the camera from the attribute editor and just place it the way we need it i want the camera to frame the panther a little bit up close but without creating a massive amount of distortion so by default cameras come with 35 mils usually and one of the issues with a 35 in my opinion is that it kind of deforms the character quite a lot so whichever part of the character is close to the camera will become very big and the rest will become very small it's down to your communication needs in terms of directing but in this case i really want to have the panther not to deform as much because it looks a little bit cartoonish when i see the head that big in comparison to the body so i'm going to put an 85 millimeters in the current focal length into the sequencer and that will mean that i will have to move out the camera quite a lot to frame the panther maybe i'm going to lower this to a 75 then i'm going to lower the camera you see that the camera moves all snapping and that's because all the snaps up here are on so i'm going to switch them off for now and now i have way more control also the axis of rotation is the global one so i'm going to click on the world icon in the top right corner of the viewport and now i can tilt up the camera a little bit so this way i have my framing done once you have found the position for the camera my suggestion is before moving the timeline just hit the plus button next to the transform of the camera so that that keyframe is recorded and the camera is not going to snap to outlandish positions in order to have the camera run along the dolly well first of all probably we want to know how far the tiger goes and it goes pretty far out in fact the animation of the alembic is about 1500 frames so i'm going to type in 1500 in the bottom right corner of the sequencer and then i'm going to make this shot as long and probably i will need to move the end of the shot also to 1500 let's put it in there 1550 so i see a little bit better what's going on i can go straight to 1500 by typing it in on the top left in fact let's go there and snap the shot length to 1500 there and then i'm going to check how far the panther goes in there there's a little bit of a problem here and the problem being that when i go past current frame 11 18 or so the panther doesn't play anymore and that is red line on the timeline which seems to coincide with the moment when the panther doesn't move forward anymore so we have to figure out why that's the case my suspicion is that in the main sequence this shot belongs to the length of the shot is just about 118 frames and past that length even if i'm into the shot and not in the main sequence the animation is no longer playing which is a bit counter-intuitive for me i'm not sure if i'm missing something here but let's see if that's the case i'm going to click on the sequence master on the top right corner of the ui of the sequencer and i'm going to try and see what happens if in the sequence master and make this shot 1500 frames long now if i go into the shot again and i move the timeline you see it does work so the problem was indeed inherited from the sequence master which again as they say it's a bit strange for me because the sequence master being above in the hierarchy it's strange that it affects the playback of a child when the child timeline is watched outside the context of the master sequence so now we go to the last frame and you see that the panther is moving quite a long way away from the scenery so i'm going to scale the floor a number of times 100 is too many so so we'll put about 20 in this case there you go that should work nice so this will give me enough room to play with now if you select the camera rig rail you will find out there is a current position on rail attribute and that's probably something we want to play with however the problem is that the rail now is really a fraction of the length needed you see that there are two dots on the rail one at the beginning and one at the end you can grab the one at the end and just drag it to make the rail longer and you see that there are handles in there and if you translate the handles you see you can control the rail itself that's very useful you can control the band of it if you need this to add another dot on the rail you hold down alt on the selected dot you just drag out the rail once more i'm going to make it a little bit longer than needed then maybe i'm going to start with the rail a little bit further out and then i will have the rail closing on the character you don't want the rail curvature to be too extreme to change too much because if you do it will become noticeable that you are playing a little bit too much with the curvature so just be careful the dots can be rotated of course so that that makes it a lot easier to do the rail be careful not to bend it too much make gentle curves unless you're looking for a specific effect the handles can be made shorter so to affect a smaller section of the rail there you go i have my railing there now if i use the current position on rail you see that the rail moves about the problem is that the camera doesn't really follow does it so in order to make it follow the rail you want to grab the cinema camera actor go on to track attach and you grab camera rail and you will see that now the camera rig rail became apparent to the cine camera actor i will call this in a camera actor sh010 that's my first shot and now hopefully if i grab the camera rig rail and i move it on the timeline you see that the camera is actually following along that's good the problem is that i need to put it in the sequencer and to do that you click on the track next to camera rig rail and you go find current position on rail the second from the button i enable this thing and now i should be able to animate my character let's have a look now if i go back to frame one where i place my camera you see that i'm seeing something strange through the camera rig rail i don't know what the deal is in here so i'm just going to select the camera and i'm going to get my framing so now let's do the animation so on frame one i'm also going to key the current position on rail by clicking on the plus button next to its track i'm also going to enable auto key from the sequencer this little icon with the key on it because this way if i do any correction to the animation it will be automatically recorded and that's also the way i work in maya and i'm going to move to the end of the animation at frame 1500 and i'm going to try and move the rail there hopefully it will work i'm going to change the current position on rail until we are closer to the tiger again now i'm a bit confused by the fact that the camera has been rotating that's a bit bizarre i'm going to save a keyframe on the transform there and i'm going to go back so at the beginning the the position is the right one and at the end for whichever reason the camera flips side but it's framing the panther from the opposite angle that's a bit inconvenient so i'm going to maybe delete the key in here grab the first key copy it and paste it at the end to see what happens and you see that doesn't change anything so there's something in here we're not understanding and i might have done something wrong in here i don't really know so i'm going to try and fix it by going on the track attach and camera regrail again just to make sure it is attached i'm going to check in the outliner that the camera rig rail is the part to my shot which it is and then i'm going to check if at the end of the animation i'm in the right position so i don't really know what was going on in there but now it is working i really have no explanation to this thing also not very happy about the fact that i get this flickering in the camera when i position the camera that makes it very difficult to position the camera and this wasn't the problem in my previous version on real so i'm not sure what's going on in here there you go so now we have the camera now one of the problems is that the camera starts moving later than the animation that arrives earlier that's because the animation is probably set to move linearly forward while if we grab the camera position rail and the camera component and we go into the graph editor or the sequencer you should find out that these curves you see have flat tangents so you select all keys you press 4 on your keyboard and they become linear and now if i look at the animation you see that we are following the panther there is a way if you grab a camera to look at an object in particular in here you have the look at tracking settings and you can enable it and you can track a specific actor in this case the panther anim one of the problems being that this tracking system tracks the transform node of the panther not the panther itself the problem is that alembic moves the vertices forward not the transfer node so there you have it over there you have the pivot staying there so this is not a good solution for the way we imported the alembic so we can't quite use it now if i grab the camera i should be able to pin it into the viewport so now i can see both the perspective and the camera viewport and now you see i am following the character to avoid having the camera look a little bit too computerized maybe i want to end up with a framing which is slightly different than the one i had at the beginning maybe a little bit more profile so that it will feel like there is some human operator there trying to frame this tiger and maybe i can go to the center of the timeline here you see where we lose a little bit of the framing and just adjust that framing ever so slightly again i'm a bit surprised that every time i rotate the camera i see something else i think i'm missing something here i didn't have this problem in an earlier test there you have it now the punter walks forward and the rig rail is making sure that we follow the panther along and the animation works pretty nicely throughout the timeline the focus is a bit off if you think of it so we're going to fix that i'm going to go to the first keyframe and and i'm going to change the manual focus distance to something that puts the panther in focus this way the panther won't be that blurry now we have the animation in we have established the camera work and it's time for us to build an environment around this character to do that i'm going to use the good old quicksilt bridge you can get for the real assets for free in there so it would be a shame not to use it and in the quick seal bridge i already downloaded some assets to speed up the process in here some of these assets come from the ancient temple collection this is really useful i think if you want to do something set in the forest and some of them will come probably from the roman empire maybe i need a few cylindrical objects like columns there to break the squareness of the environment i'm going to create with the ancient temple which has mostly you see squarish bits and bobs in there and then of course i will have to grab some stuff from the tropical vegetation there this is going to be very useful so we'll start by laying down the ancient temple stones these big massive blocks you can just drag them into unreal and you'll have them there this is a job that requires multiple monitors because i want to have the sequencers that i can play the animation through so maybe i will move the sequencer away from the recording for now and whenever you will see the animation going it means i'm scrubbing the sequencer somewhere else on another monitor so that i can keep maybe the quick cell bridge open here and still see what's going on in the viewport so i will go to the beginning of the animation and then i will grab this rock and i want to build some sort of perimeter for the temples and sort of wall that is parallel to the way the panther is going and i want this to look a little bit more imposing so i'm going to scale this up quite a lot so that it will look like there used to be a massive wall in there as a first frame i want to establish the presence of the panther so i will be putting stuff behind the panther and in front of the panther but i'm not going to cover the silhouette of the panther so i'm going to keep it quite clean there this is also useful because i can reuse the same asset with the same orientation twice and at the beginning i will see one side and then i will see the other side i can actually duplicate it once more maybe and try and play a trick and just build some sort of gate there as if there was a door the beauty of the mega scans is that they are so detailed that you can just melt them together sometimes and people won't notice that it's two assets that you're melting together this is actually quite useful i'm going to check that it doesn't look too weird and you see it doesn't quite look that weird i will of course need some vegetation but for now let's focus on the rubble maybe after the first rocks i will give a little bit of space to the panther and the vegetation and then i will start again with the rocks maybe i want to start with a different kind of structure there i will use this ancient temple lintel there just to see how it looks like and again i will scale it up and move it so that it's in line with the wall maybe this stage i can re-enable this knob because the end of the day i'm dealing with regular assets there you go i will maybe put it a little bit to the side there it's a bit too vertical there i will have to do something about it i think but now we have the panther walking and the lintel in there with some decoration and now it feels a bit on its own it feels like it could benefit from a bit of irregularity here because otherwise a bit too regular so i'm going to maybe grab the ancient temple rocks in here again from the same ancient temple environment so i will drag in the rocks and see if i can break a little bit of the regularity there there you go something like this will make the rocks feel a little bit less squarish and it will create some sort of anticipation to what we will see after that and similarly i will have to have an exit from that structure so i'm going to maybe duplicate the rock i've just dragged in and blend them in with the existing rock so that it will feel a little bit more like this was part of a bigger structure and it wasn't just planted by me there randomly into the space i'm going to use a little bit more of these rocks because they because i like their irregularity and maybe i'm going to duplicate them again and rotate them by 180 and maybe i'm going to scale this one up a lot more so that it will feel hopefully that whoever built this structure was thinking big there you then the beauty of unreal is that you can grab multiple objects and duplicate them together just by dragging them around and even rotate them together you see as a single block which i feel has the potential to speed up the layout workflow if compared to maya there you go i'm creating a little bit of another rock in there just smaller same asset but smaller so that it will create some variety hopefully there you go and now if i look at the animation once more i have some spaces which are empty which i can show the vegetation and some others in which we have a little bit of rubble from an ancient temple somewhere it would be cool to see the temple in the background to be honest but we're not going to do that and we now have our environment at least the rocky part now i'm noticing my computer is getting hot really quickly so i'm going to disable the ray tracing effects while i'm working on the environment and then later on when i'm ready i'm going to enable them again you can disable ray tracing by inputting this command i'm going to link to it in the description of the video and you can put that into the console at the bottom of the screen and if you set a space after the command you type in zero you're going to disable all retracing effects hopefully this is going to keep the temperature of my computer at bay i have found this command they're retracing the documentation of unreal and i just copied and pasted it so i wanted to try and apply a material to the floor i have this ancient temple material in here that maybe could work so let's try that i'm going to add it to the project it's going to appear into the surfaces folder into mega scan and i can just drag it onto the floor to see how it looks like it looks okay but there are rocks everywhere and this is not a forest so maybe i'm going to try with the jungle roots to see if that works any better and i think the jungle roots shader works a little bit better i'm not very concerned about the fact that it looks super flat now because i'm not even sure i'm going to see it that much at any rate i can open the material instance i can enable the tiling open up the tiling options and maybe set the tiling to 2 and see what happens with italian 22 the scale is a bit more human-like right now it's clear i'm tiring this thing but i'm not very worried about it yet as i said there are also tricks to make the tiling disappear so to speak there you go so now i have my floor material it's a temporary thing maybe we'll keep it maybe i want i'm going to have a look at the animation once more you see that starts to look like something you see i see the rail however in the render if you hit g on your keyboard you're going to disable the visibility of the rail including that of any asset that is designed to be a helper of your viewport not really something you want to render out so now i'm going to go quickly through the timeline you see this looks quite nice already and i think it's time for us to think about vegetation as far as i know there are two main ways to add vegetation one is by using foliage so if you go on the top left corner you select mode and you go into foliage you can paint vegetation using foliage the other one would be by just dragging a vegetation asset from megascan into the scene let's see the foliage first so maybe i can go into the 3d plants assets and look for plants that i would like to see in my jungle so some ferns would work so i'm just going to download them earlier on i spotted there was a tropical jungle biome collection there so i wonder if this has something interesting in there oh i like this rock so maybe grab also some stones i think they will be useful later a couple of trunks some branch some rocks that i might use and if i find branches on the floor and roots i can maybe paint them on the floor later on if i need them just to add variety to the floor the problem with mega scan is they're still working on trees so you will find tree stumps but you won't really find full-on trees i think there's a european tree collection somewhere but remember i'm here for the plants now so i would want to add some plants to my collections i want to see if in the collections there's something tropical as well so i think i'm going to download a bunch of them the idea is that i will paint them all together randomizing some sort of jungle so i'm going to download a bunch of them for variety now that the download is done i'm going to go into my local repository grab all the plus that i can find and i can add them to my project see they're being added in the meantime i don't know if there is a way to select everything in a single click with bridge that will be really useful because sometimes you just want to add a bunch of assets and you don't want to go there and select them one by one i'm sure there is a way it's just that i don't know it there you go so now i'm adding all the assets again but there's a lot of waiting involved in the preliminary phases as far as i'm concerned that's the investment you kind of have to do i think with unreal so very often you will still see me posing the recording just to do an operation that takes a long time and then we start back with the operation performed like the download of the assets from bridge or their addition to the scene so now i have my variety of plans you see plenty of plants in there and as i said i wanted to paint them into the scene so i'm going into foliage mode and then here you see that they're already there in case they are not there you can just drag them from the content browser into the foliage window and one thing you can do in here you can press ctrl a select them all i'm going to do a very basic test now to see if it works and if i now paint you see that it paints me the foliage and you see that it's painting a variety of foliage i mean all of the foliage that i have selected in here now of course this is too much and it's also slowing down the viewport quite a lot so i will undo this and i will find a way to have that variety without having to slow down the viewport that much first of all i do not really need to select them all i think this is a bit too much so i will remove the tick box from them all and i will go around and just grab a few of them so that i will have a little bit less variety maybe but i will be picking the plants that i like the most also please notice that it's putting in there the various lods so i have lod 1 lod 2 and so forth so you have to be a bit careful about which led you are working with which already poses a problem if you ask me i don't want to see all the lods in here so i will again disable them all and under search foliage i will type in lod1 so that i will only be seeing lod1 for all the planes and now i can actually just select everything in lo d1 and i get a much faster response in here because earlier on i was mixing different lods and probably also lod 2 and so forth so this is a lot more lightweight now the thing is they all look much the same still so i'm going to undo and i'm going to see if i can maybe add some variety to it as in maybe different scale for instance for the plants so if you scroll down into the window of the foliage you will find that there is a density this is a super useful tool because if you reduce the density to say one in here you see that there are fewer plants being painted out this is very useful because this way i can maybe set the density to 25 and i have something that looks like vegetation from a florence from distance but it's not really as heavy weight as it was earlier on and the other thing is this skill now at the moment scale has a range of a minimum of one and a maximum of one but maybe i can set the minimum 2.7 to have smaller plans and a maximum to free to have bigger plans so now i should get as i paint i should get you see some variety now it looks a lot more like a jungle because some plants are smaller than others this is super useful as well so again i will want to have the camera paint in there so that i can see what i'm framing we'll go to the beginning of the animation and i will paint a little bit of foliage ooh that's a bit too much and i will paint a little bit of foliage in the background you see there that's super fast i really like this thing something like this but here i have another doubt i said i wanted to keep the silhouette of the panther quite unimpeded so i'm going to move the jungle a little bit more to the back so that maybe once i will not say fog for instance it's going to be less visible if i place the jungle too close to the panther apart from the intersections but i'm going to make the silhouette of the panther a lot harder to read so i'm going to just stick to the jungle in the background there you go maybe in here i can actually have it closer because at the end of the day the jungle will have been established at the beginning so maybe i can just put some jungle close by after we have seen the panther walk for a few frames and in here this is definitely a place where i need to have a little bit more variety maybe i can try and have the plants a little bit bigger as well as a min and max value that's too much and too close well it gets really close really quickly something like this maybe will work let's have a look as we move forward that's cool this looks really cool there's a bit of a gap in there maybe i can take this gap as an opportunity to put something in the background far far away from the camera say here so that the jungle will be in the distance there then in here there's again another bit of a gap that maybe i can leave there and i can see if maybe i can leave just something in here so that we will have the gap here and i can maybe put a rock in the distance somewhere over there and then we will have some other plants in the foreground having the plants very close to the rocks also helps creating some variety on the rocks i mean i could go as far as painting the plants on the rock let's see what happens if i make much smaller plants growing on the rocks instead you see i can that looks quite good in fact this is a very quick way of populating an environment the the drawback of course is that foliage needs maintenance of some sort it makes the scene a bit heavier to render and you have no control over individual plants but having said that i really like the result and maybe i could benefit from making the brush a little bit smaller and mixing some foliage with the rock in there as well so that it's not just rock but it has some vegetation going on and in here as well there you go just to create the idea of vegetation taking over everything it would be really cool to have some tree trunk around as well because right now we only have one kind of vegetation we have different kinds of vegetation but all in all we are talking about the bush nothing more maybe in here i can add a little bit of low level vegetation so that it will feel like the vegetation goes on but not in the distance in the distance i want to try the bigger rock maybe and similarly here in the distance this reminds me of certain parts of morocco and the vegetation is very rich there you go so now we are establishing more of a jungle environment and as i said there are moments like this one where it would be cool to have a rock in there maybe a big chunky rock let's see if in the 3d asset we have anything but you see we only have ancient temple stones so before doing anything i want to save all because if unreal crashes now i may risk to lose all the planes that i put in so we'll go back to the bridge and i will look for a big chunky rock to put in the background like some sort of mountain let's see if they have boulders i want something with an irregular shape maybe this one it's not really a jungle boulder but it has an interesting shape so i'm going to download that even this mostly forest rock is going to be maybe useful i also like the suggestions that quick cell makes tells you which asset is related to what we just downloaded i will have to wait for this stuff to be downloaded so we'll post the recording again or actually even better while it records i could place some tree trunks around and see if i can somehow place them without people noticing they're not real trees so i will add them to the project also these guys i'll add them to the project and i want to see how they look like i need to leave foliage mode and go back to select this looks cool this looks like it could live in a forest now the problem of course of this thing is that we don't have the rest of the trunk so i wonder maybe i could have this act as some sort of mega trunk maybe there's a an enormous tree in the forest and it's so big we are only going to see the tree trunk let's see if if this is something that could work i'm going to need to pin the camera again i think we're on to something here let's just maybe let's rotate it until it gives us a smoother angle so now the panther is going to pass in front of a big ass tree there nice i want this to be at a certain distance so that it will create depth because it will translate on in camera at a different speed than the rest of the vegetation and i will give depth you see to the to the composition i want to make sure however that at no time we see the the end of the trunk up above in here similarly i could maybe place another trunk that tells me that probably we'll need to cast some shadows over the panther maybe this tree trunk i'm going to scale it up and make it a little bit thinner and to rotate it so that it's not oriented like the previous one we've placed so there you go in there there's a you know the trunk i could have made them into foliage to be honest and just painting them since i'm placing them so precisely around i think it's better if they're manually placed in here one thing you don't want to do is to have all the assets with the same scale and orientation so see i'm making a chunkier one a slimmer one and maybe i can try and make an even chunkier one there so it's a family of trees there instead of just a single one there you go maybe i won't need the roman columns after all you always want to go through the whole timeline there just to check what's going on just in case you're forgetting something in here i think it would be cool if the trees were visible in the background at the beginning of the scene so i'm going to maybe move them to the back there and maybe even further away from the camera that means probably i can scale them closer together and leave it a little bit higher so that we won't see there you go so we have three different trunks in there i'm not very happy about the result i have to admit in here maybe i will move them just to the side of the framing to the right i want the gaps to be one big and one small i don't want the gaps to be all the same because my brain will try my brain will try to make the gaps always look the same but i don't really want that to happen so maybe something like this no i'm not i'm not happy i think over there i need something else so i need maybe a big rocket rocking there so i'm going to go into the bridge to see if in the meantime i have downloaded the rock and i did so well maybe try a pointy rock in there i will put all the rocks in there to begin with into the project and then i'm going to find them it'll be good to have a history of the stuffy downloaded and then i'm going to place the rock the rock is really tiny there so i'm not sure it's going to work i'm going to try it anyway i'm going to see what happens if i yeah i like it more with a boulder there the fluid is a lot clearer it doesn't cover the panther that much so maybe i will also make it a little bit more sloppy so it's diagonal line that we have in the composition there something like this will probably work the problem with this rock is that it has a bit of a different color than the others so you can open up the instance with the mega scans you can enable the albedo tint you can try and color the the rock a little bit more towards the red like the rocks we have in the foreground you see now it looks a little bit more like the rocks we have in the foreground probably we're not going to see that in the end because the fog that i plan to put so now we have something that looks a bit more like a jungle although in the background it still doesn't convince me too much i mean it feels like we are in an open space rather than a thick jungle and part of it depends on the fact that in the in the background there is nothing and part of it depends on the fact that in the foreground there is nothing either and the floor is very clean i mean somebody really likes law and order in this jungle which doesn't really look believable but before adding assets and making the scene but before adding more stuff and make the scene even heavier i think it would be a good idea to add the fog just to see what we actually see in camera with the fog because you know maybe we are spending time in here adding assets but then once we put the fog we are going to realize that those assets are not even going to be visible so it's all wasted time at the end of the day if if they're not going to be visible so i'm going to add a new object i'm going to go into visual effects and this time around i'm going to add the exponential height fog of which you find many tutorials online really with the exponential height fog things change dramatically quite immediately into the exponential height fog i want to enable the volumetric fog to begin with so that the fog will be a little bit thicker and maybe i can add some sort of cool effects like volumetric shadows then i'm going to increase the fog density quite a lot there's still a lot of light in here and if you think of it we never really took care of the lighting which we should have so you see how i blocked out the environment and once i'm relatively happy and i realized that maybe i'm adding stuff but i don't know if i would be seeing that stuff i go in and add the fog that i plant too hot from the beginning now that i have the fog i realized well but there's a lot of fog in here but really there's also a lot of light so i have to have a look at the light in here now i have the light source coming from the default settings of the project i'm going to delete that and that's going to change again the whole lighting scenario dramatically i'm going to delete the sky sphere the skylight and the sphere reflection capture so i can start from a clean slate also i'm going to grab all of the assets i dragged in manually and put them into a folder this is this i'm going to call environment so that i can keep the outliner a little bit cleaner so you see that automatically this is looking a lot more interesting in a way because the silhouette of the panther is a lot clearer now i need some light anyway so i'm going to add a directional light oh nice look at that so things start to get interesting now i don't see the directional light in here mainly because i hit g remember so if i hit g again i will be able to see the light and will be able to orient the light you see that just by controlling the light i can play with the silhouette quite a lot i could maybe cast light on the background and that will give me a clear silhouette for the panther that i didn't have earlier on this is this is actually quite cool but the panther is going to be but we're never really going to see the panther this way this starts to look quite cool i think already but one of the problems of keeping the light so parallel to the floor is that it is very unlikely that the panther will ever get into the full light and i would really like to have that happen a little bit so i'm going to maybe rotate the light a little bit more frontal to the panther and i'm going to maybe point it down a little bit more so that at a certain point the panther will come into the light so it will spend a good amount of time in the darkness and then it will emerge from the darkness and it will be a little bit more visible that's more interesting i kind of like this there are still moments in which it's pretty dark but overall this looks okay i will go into my directional light and maybe reduce the intensity quite a lot to six maybe and then as a light color i will give it a color which is a little bit more on the cold side a little bit more going towards the blue and then i will also go and check if i'm casting volumetric shadows with this light i just type in volume and we have cast volumetric shadows set on by default i can actually increase the volumetric scattering intensity to give me a little bit more fog in there if you think of it however the problem here is that as i increase the fog you see that everything becomes yellowish so that seems to indicate that the fog is coloring the environment so i'm going to grab the fog and i'm going to check the albedo in here i'm going to check what happens if i change the albedo to something bluish and you see that as i change the albedo the fog to something bluish i get a little bit less yellowish in the scene that's good that's good for us maybe we can even increase the fog density 2.1 there you go i think we we are starting to get there so i can go into the volumetric fog section in there and i can play with the extension scale you see if i erase it i get even more fog so i will set it to 0.5 and that will give me the fog in background but not as much fog in the foreground you can also play with the view distance but i struggled a bit with it because if the camera moves it becomes a little bit clear that there is a view distance going on i'm going to change the view distance just until i see the panther a little bit more clearer you can change the scattering distribution as well i can play a little bit with the scattering distribution to make the panther pop out a little bit more i do not want the panther to look all foggy so now i have a little bit of fog in the background i have the shadow rays coming in i don't know if they're visible in the video but as i scrap through the timeline they are usually visible then the panther emerges from the shadows and then probably goes back into the shadows at some point i guess there you go and then in the end emerges again there you go now the environment looks a bit too bright in the background it would be cool if there were some sort of shadows also going on in the environment it's clear that there is nothing there is no canopy of the trees and this being a jungle i would really like some shadows to be cast onto the background environment as well however i want to control a little bit of the color here in the background that we have in camera so if you go into the exponential height fog and you go into the scattering texture you can place an hdri in there but i don't really need that i could probably grab the grey dark texture cube in here that would already give me something less bluish and then you can go into the in scuttering texture tint and you can just color that up a little bit of the color you like so just for kicks let's see how this would look with a gobble one way to create a gallbladder in a reel would be to grab the light and into the light function material here in the bottom right corner of the details we could plug in a material which carries the gumbo itself that is the silhouette of the foliage for instance we right click in the content browser create a new material i'm going to call the new material capital lf underscore that stands for light function and then i'm going to call it gobo if i open up this material in the content browser i'm not going to see much going on in here it's basic material we want to go into the material domain and under the material section and instead of surface we're going to set it to light function then in here we would really need a texture i have collected some references in my pure refs you see so they all are foliage and i have this one which i particularly like this one in here so maybe i'm going to export this one out of my pure ref into my my assets folder and i'm going to call this thing gobble test now i can drag my picture in there and i can drag it into the network of my material i could directly plug it into the emissive color but i want to be able to control the intensity of the black in there because the black area will be the part through which the light won't filter so i'm going to create a nod node a single parameter node a constant node and i'm going to add the constant node to any given channel of the image it doesn't really matter which one because they're all the same because the picture is in black and white then i'm going to convert this to a parameter so that i will be able to make an instance of it and control the intensity of the addition if need be i'll just call this thing add factor there you go i'm going to save the shader close the shader and then i'm going to right click on the material and create an instance the instance is the one i will put into the light function of my directional light you see that the moment i do that everything becomes dark but you see that in the distance somewhere here's the gobble that's interesting now of course the picture is not exactly what we want and we just wanted to test it out we wanted to see if it worked and it seems to be working you can control to a certain degree the gobo by going into the light function scale of of the directional light in this case and play with the scale see if it changes anything if you put a very low number you see that the texture gets repeated several times over it becomes super small the bigger the number and the less it will repeat the problem with this kind of stuff is it's kind of difficult to control we could of course control the tiling of the texture and position it the way we want but for now i'm just happy to see the effect it does and i'm very happy to see that i could achieve a pretty dark foreground and a brighter background so that the silhouette of the panther will stand out a lot better if you see so i actually quite like it and i think that the fact that there is a bit of light and a bit of shadow in the background is actually very positive i just probably would like to have a way to control this a little bit better however one of the problems we are facing now is that we are essentially working without references to get to a destination we don't know about we are relying on some small tactics to get to a result but many years ago a chinese strategist once said that tactics without strategy is the noise before the defeat so if we do not know where we're going with this picture we should probably make a plan otherwise we're going to get lost in technicalities you see i made a gobo and then i'm thinking yeah and now i need to control it through tiling and i can even sit down and do the tiling that's not really the issue here the problem is that maybe in half an hour i will have the tiling sorted out but i will have no more clarity that i have now about the destination so it is time for us to devise a color key we have assembled the scene we have a vague idea of the colors let's try to maybe paint something in photoshop real quick to see if we can plot out the destination for us and if the destination can help us understand which tools we need and i think that's it for today hopefully i'm going to see you in the next video when i will continue with this tutorial if you have found this video useful please consider liking subscribing and hitting the 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Channel: Animation Pandemic

Views: 9,522

Keywords: unreal engine 5, unreal engine, unreal engine tutorial, lighting in unreal engine, rendering in unreal engine, render animation in unreal engine, lighting and rendering, maya to unreal engine 5, maya to unreal engine worlkflow, maya to unreal engine 5 workflow, transfer animation to unreal engine, learn to render your animation, how to render animation in unreal, how to render animation in unreal engine, quixel megascans, quixel brigde unreal, quixel megscans unreal engine

Id: KADbKzEUFiU

Length: 56min 32sec (3392 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 13 2022