Short Film Made in 1 Hour Using Unreal Engine 5

hi I'm Corey Williams from Daydream Studios and today I'm going to create a short film in real engine five in under an hour hopefully I'm going to do my best uh this is all completely from scratch and the reason that I'm doing this today is because a it's fun I just love to do this sometimes uh B I want to share with you the process so that you know you can learn more maybe you'll learn something new from this and it's fun and then see I want you to actually do this yourself get inspired to just create something Rand rly and get to a finish because sometimes we get caught up trying to make these things and we never actually finish and it just kind of like takes you down a little bit so that's what this is about I'm also going to keep in mind that a lot of people watching this are probably trying to learn Unreal Engine as well so I will do my best to explain what I'm doing through this process uh but if I miss anything if you have any questions whatsoever feel free to leave a comment down below and make sure you subscribe so you can learn more as I share the things that I do in unreal engine in coming videos so I'm going to open up the uh epic games launcher after you download Unreal Engine uh into your uh computer you should have this uh already so let me open this up there you go now we can see it and let me make sure that you can see everything that I can see yes we're good great so uh I'm going to go to the uh the marketplace tab up here and I'm going to take a look at what's free this month and we'll just use that whatever is there that's what we're going to use to tell a story with so um I have already used the windmills for a video on my YouTube channel just for kids my kids channel um there's this clay Forest Village pack it's cool but it doesn't really seem to match the rest of the stuff here so I'm going to use these three things cuz they look like they could probably be used together and we'll go from there so uh before I actually use them let's take a look at what they are um this one is just a looks like a just a cool looking character it looks like he's uh he moves and things okay and then uh is he rigged yes that's good uh animated no so he is not animated which means we'll have to give him animations which might make it a little bit more complicated but hey that's the process right we're going to just do it but cool we have to add well I have to create the project I was going to add him the project but I haven't even started a project yet we're going to do that from scratch okay next thing um let's take a look at this Gothic Cathedral looks super cool very I love I love the foliage I love how it's just very Lush and there's a lot of like really creepy things mysterious sort of things yes very very interesting yeah that'll be awesome so we'll use that and then let's take a look at the cloud system I believe I I've already uh installed the cloud system system into the version of Unreal Engine that I'll be using for this which is 5.3 so um I don't think I need to install it but we can take a look at what we've got just to oh that's yeah that's literally it maybe I'll use it maybe I won't let's see how things go because you know given the time and I don't know I don't like to have too many variables right so let's go ahead and start a brand new project from scratch I'm going to go to Unreal Engine 5.3 but you can use whatever version of Unreal Engine you want so long as that is is supported by the assets that you want to use and we're going to get this and I'm just going to go to film and events and I'm going to start a new virtual production thing um I'll go and enable Ray tracing keep the started content why not and we'll just call this uh quick there we go quick and then we're going to let these uh shaders compile my computer's super fast I've got a 4090 with the all the bells and whistles of of a good computer so it shouldn't take too long 3 2 1 oh it's fast faster than me okay great um this is a fast computer dude all right let's do that and we'll go ahead and just say update that's right dismiss whatever and this is the content browser I'm just going to leave this off to the side okay now that we've got this uh brought up I'm going to go ahead and go back to the epic games launcher and let's now bring in those things that uh that we have and again I don't know if I said it before but I'll say it again every month uh you get free assets from Unreal Engine uh from epic games so make sure that if you're starting to use uh Unreal Engine every month even if you're not using it all the time make sure you download these assets they're free forever and next month you'll have to pay for it if you haven't already downloaded them so big perks to just coming in and checking in and stuff so I'm going to go and add this to my project which was called quick it's like okay there's that one super fast and let's do this one and this is quick which is right wait oh moved okay there quick oh I missed it you go adding to project and uh the other thing we don't have to worry about all right cool we got that let's take a look now at the content browser and make sure everything's in it's in fast super fast uh so what I would like to do is I would like to take a look at the ancient Golem first to see what he really looks like uh so we've got a couple of pieces here um these purple ones are skeletal meshes these are basically different versions of him kind of it's best way to explain it I guess let's open it up and take a look at it see what we've got so here's our character okay he's got arms on the side here you can see that he does have bones you can see the bone structures and it looks like spine three is the only thing that has any sort of control let's see spine two what does spine maybe spine two controls this bottom piece no that's just the whole okay no so so spine three controls that good to know and then they he does have a pelvis and probably has legs yeah well technically has no legs but the skeleton for let's take a list I'm going to go to a character I'm going to go to bones in all hierarchy yeah so there we go he that's right cuz he was rigged to the Epic skeleton although he doesn't have a neck that might be a little bit of a pain in the oh no there's a neck right there so there is a neck okay this is going to make sense later uh because I'm going to to make it this faster the animation thing since he doesn't really have any animations I swear I saw an animation folder though did I yeah there's an animation folder oh oh okay so that ring just goes in a circle kind of Animation is that just put it on a rotator why do they have to do that weird okay well there's that I don't even know that so this this could have been simplified that could have just been a a static mesh instead of a skeletal mesh and then just put that thing on a rotator so I don't know why they chose to do it that way but everybody's got their own process uh let's take a look at this one whoa oh check that that's cool it's like a like a drill thing still looks like we got like one one big bone in the middle attached to a couple of other bones which attach to all of these and yeah those are all individual bones skeleton tree yeah look at that see the discs okay so that's how this runs it's good it's good to kind of understand how these things move uh I know it's a little bit more complicated but I think as we go through this process we'll probably make something that looks cool all right we know what those look like uh we know what those do I don't think we need to go anything do they have any blueprints for it to put it together there's no blueprints folder no no I don't see the ball in the inside of any of those so which so what's what's going to have to happen is we are going to have to create yeah we're going to have toate create a blueprint that takes all of these separate pieces here and puts them all together so that we can have that character as one character because I in the in the picture like wait let's go back to this and see what he actually looks like because he's yeah so he had the the thing so see interesting why would they not create a blueprint that already involved all of that and well we're going to keep this open or we're just going to keep this in mind and then and then do something with it so I'll just minimize that for now okay let's go to the environment I'm excited to see this I haven't seen it yet all right so uh we're going to go to real quick I just want to see what kind of blueprints they have is there going to be anything that's going to cause us any problems in the future we don't know yet engine content this is just me verifying that things are going to work sorry as needed okay uh there's the maps meshes the foliage okay yeah okay all right yeah let's go ahead and open it up I know that's you're probably wanting to see that all right so let's open up we got two levels here we've got the Showcase level which is going to be all of the individual pieces on a showroom floor just going to be a plane like a white plane most likely and then uh this will be what we saw in the picture which I'm really excited about so we're going to see this really big Lush beautiful environment and this is where our guy is going to be so wait a minute this is not we have foliage hang on there's there's got to be another Castle or something as Not Another Castle I mean it looks it looks cool but where where's the where are the trees hang on where are the trees meshes statues guard rails foliage grass weeds wait a minute am I missing something it has trees this is going to be way more interesting if it doesn't have those trees cuz look there's the trees it they should be in there warning the pack don't include trees and bushes the trees and bushes and the screenshots are only for the purposes of illustration of what you can achieve with those assets if you are unclear about the content of this pack please look at the Showcase screenshots okay well that's we are just going to roll with what we have and that's okay it's a little misleading at first but they said it clear out that that's that's what it is so that's okay and I'll I'll deal with it okay so this is where this is where our our our adventure takes place I think this is super cool this reminds me a lot of like the game Shadow of the Colossus I love Shadow of the Colossus this feels odd like why would you excuse me why would you have such a like big Cathedral are the things in here though yeah the things are in here I hit G G to go into game mode to get rid of all the little things there um the darkness is going to make it a little bit hard to make something cool with our character because that means we're going to have to add more lights and I just don't think I'm going to have time to do that because we are already um 12 minutes into this video and I said I would have something done in an hour I'm crazy uh so let's go ahead and optimize this map really quick um I'm noticing we have a lot of some odd filters happening that are making this scene look weird to me it could be a post-processed material uh which is May maybe having a sharpening effect or it could simply be that this is just really high um chromatic aberration and I'm looking like if you look at the side here you may not be able to see it very well but there's like a on the high contrast areas we've got like a a light blue or teal line here and then we have some red highlights on the side and that's it's this is um a it's it's a it's it's a fakey way to try to mimic the way a lens is like a real life lens and it tries to make it look more legit but I don't really care for it that much so what we're going to do is we're going to go to the uh postprocess volume looks like we've got a bunch of them here a post-process volume is what controls uh how the world is seen and processed and rendered if that makes sense hopefully I got that right um and so what we're going to do is first we're going to go check for a postprocess material and it says no sometimes if you have a really sharp looking scene that's where the problem is you can either delete it or adjust it here there'll usually be like a slider so that's not the problem that tells me it's going to be a um chromatic aberration which is set to 04 which is quite High let me show you like an exaggerated version of that whoa It's like 3D right yeah it's just set high so I'm going to set it to like 1 point or 0.15 that's what I prefer for my projects typically because it just adds something to it like look how much more beautiful well I don't know if you can tell really anything else but it just looks so much more beautiful on the cathedral as well like 04 it softens the cathedral makes it look kind of like muddy so 0.15 yeah just feels better to me that's a personal thing um yeah okay so I'm I'm looking at other things to see see if there's any going to be any other potential problems uh last thing I'm going to do is make sure that this is all nanite enabled so I'm going to go ahead and just click on anything in here and I'm going to go to the stairs whatever double click it it says uh enter nanit or enable nanite support is selected that means that it is it is it is good for nanite uh the grass though I I don't I think well well let's let's open it up go to meshes let's go to our foliage let's go to our uh uh weeds and then click on that and it is nanite enabled so I I'm going to just assume that everything in this scene is nanite enabled I'm not going to touch it that just helps your computer run a little bit faster to deal with things so you don't have things popping in and out with lods uh if you know anything about Unreal Engine 5 or you've heard anything about Unreal Engine 5 you'd probably understand what that means uh and if you don't there's a whole big thing you can search if you just look up nanite on YouTube what is nanite all right so let's grab our hero and um put our hero in the scene since we have nobody else so this is our hero our hero being our ancient Gollum so let's grab the golum and uh I have to create a blueprint for this Golem but uh first let's just do this let's just do this and see what the Golem looks like all right the Golem is quite small surprisingly small um I'm not really happy with that so let's make the Golem twice as big so I'm going to change the size over here the scale barely showed up on to two and that doubles the Golem's size I like that a lot more that's much cooler and what if the gollum is just going for a stroll right maybe maybe he's like um maybe he's patrolling this bridge for for what I don't know maybe there's like there's never been anything here everything's been gone for centuries uh Humanity's been wiped out uh he he just makes sure to keep the candles lit and and and then like make sure that everything's safe I don't know so he's we're going to say he's patrolling this bridge so let's go like this he's just patrolling right and um what does he do may maybe he's going like this right and then Weir the camera and then maybe the camera sweeps in like this and then we surprise him and he goes like maybe he gets freaked out he gets freaked out that somebody else is here and he gets really angry because like well like what would he do if if somebody was here like what what I don't know doesn't matter doesn't matter we got one hour let's make something so that's what we're going to do he gets freaked out he gets mad maybe he's just a grumpy guy and then he just like turns around and goes back the other way cuz I ain't got time for this ain't nobody got time for this all right don't need that all right so yeah that's that's what we're going to do I'm happy with that um the cloud system uh I'm not going to worry about it right now because this looks okay and the cloud system without all of the trees and stuff might look weird to be honest it it it might be completely out of place CU I'm trying to imagine clouds it would just be like forced right but if you had trees and stuff then you could really just add coolness but yeah um it's going to be super silent this Sky doesn't make any footsteps high five on that don't have to do any footstep sounds uh 18 minutes in already gez all right uh so what I'm going to do now is I want to animate him and um in order to animate him there are a couple ways I could do this one I could do it inside of Unreal Engine uh create a control rig for him and all of that but to be be honest I don't have time to create a control rig for this character uh so I'm going to use another Tool uh that I use all the time because it's so fast um it is the reill usion suite that means it's Character Creator and iclone uh they are super powerful tools that can just very quickly uh create animation uh rather than trying to retarget inside inside of Unreal Engine so I'm going to go through that process now these are assets that you're going to have to purchase if you uh plan to use them but I believe they have a trial version um not sponsored by the way I I just genuinely love and use this and for those of you who've never seen it before who work in the animation industry uh be prepared to be pretty surprised at how cool and fast and easy this is um I can't say enough good things about them so here we go drop that in that's good enough I can see everything and let's go ahead and hide my face just cuz so what we need to do is bring in our character from Unreal Engine which I forgot to do so let's go to here uh I'm going to just select this character I'm going to right click and I'm going to go to asset access actions and go to export export this character to uh content no I'm not going to do that let's go to uh u5 exports and let's just leave it as it is SK ancient Gollum remember that name for me thank thank you and then here we have this let's change this fbx 2020 I don't know the difference but that's what I do uh I don't care about level of detail and nothing else is going to matter to me so I'm just going to go ahead and Export as it is so now that we have that exported I'm not going to worry about these other skeletal meshes because they don't I I can do stuff later with them and you'll see what I mean so I'm going to drop that out and bring this back up okay so here we are back in character creator 4 let's bring in that character just did I'm going to go to create character up here on the top left and I'm going to find the exported character which was uh tell me what was again oh yeah that's right ancient gollem thank you thanks for being so helpful I'm gonna go to uh creature because uh he he's different cool here's our guy now what I want to do is make sure to go to customization uh over here on the right and there's our bones cool Co cool now what I need to do is uh assign these bones to uh to just basically tell the system how to retarget it so I'm going to double click on the hips and click on that I'm going to double click on the bottom spine and click on the first spine column and then I'm going to do this little drop down here and continue up the spine there's another spine continue here that's going to go to the arms there's no clavicles meaning the shoulders um I don't think so anyway and then I'm going to get out of here and then we're going to click on this little down arrow under the head for the neck so I'm going to grab the bottom one and I don't know which one the neck is going to be I'll assume the lower one neo1 good saves time and then and then I'll double click on the head back it up and then I would assume this is the head which is the head node yes we're we're getting lucky here okay now now that we got this let's uh we're going to make sure everything's uh symmetrical so I'm going to click this little button here here to uh select symmetrical bones so I'm going to click on the uh right upper arm and then see how it's selected on the other side there we go technically this is left but I'm just going to say right for now cool did the hand perfect and then now we're going to do the fingers or the fanges there's a word for you if you've never heard that before um then this right here will automatically assign the child fingers so it'll assign the rest of the Bon so I don't have to do more work than I need to see how it just goes yay happy bones there we go double click and there and now they should be assigned on the other side how fast was that very fast awesome fast and then now for the legs we still have to do the legs even though they're not being used uh just for retargeting purposes because there's certain other things that we can do with this which will be cool um do I need toes I don't care I'll put them in there I'm sure those are toes yeah to base all right and now that we've got that all of that is good see that little Green Dot right there that means that it's ready to uh retarget but I need to put this character in a decent T pose so I'm just going to grab these arms here and just kind of like put it into a t- pose a t- pose is exactly like it sounds use your body to create a te- pose right and let's rotate these arms like so looking at the hands I'm just kind of get the knuckles to be straight I grabbed the wrong one that's fine and I could have made them symmetrical but it doesn't really matter I don't care we're going fast and then here I'm just going to grab these elbows or the forearms and I'm just going to straighten those out as well good enough this does not have to be perfect just as perfect as I can make it and it looks like this arm can come down just slightly you could look at these values over over here and and really tweak them perfectly if you wanted to but I'm not going to I I am I am on a time crunch right now all right now that I'm done with that I'm going to hit active and this should drop to the floor yep that's because it's got no other mesh and it assumes that that's just where it is it's smart it knows what to do and I'm click off the uh characterization now here's our character and let's apply some motion to make sure that he's going to work properly so uh we're going to go to um body let's go to Arms okay looks good looks good I'm happy with this yes yes and the fingers work beautifully my friends we have retargeted [Music] yay no worries all right I'm gonna go ahead and remove that and now what I'm going to do is I'm going to go to my custom folder I'm going to go to my actor character and then I'm just going to save him here so hit save and I'm going to say um Gollum I shouldn't say golum let's ancient golum there we go and hit Okay the reason I'm doing that is because now it's going to be automatically oh jeez uh I could have adjusted this thumbnail but uh you know what I don't I'm not going to do that right now I don't need that right now so what's what this gonna do it's going to save it into the entire reill usion Suite so what's going to happen is now I when I CL close this I can now open up uh iclone which is a part of the religion suite and iclone will now have that character saved into it as a default character that I can apply any animation that I have to it across all of my characters imagine Like A retarget system that can take any animation you've ever had for any of your projects and be able to apply it to any character you've ever created like that it's so good like I can have him be million different things act a million different ways okay let's uh apply this to the side perfect now whoa there's a lot happening oh hang on it was loading bring this over there there we go that was that was odd wasn't it all right put this on the side what are we looking on time we're looking I think we're half decent okay and I don't need that and this is our timeline let's drag our timeline over here in fact let's do this we're going to change the window workspace here and then just do uh just standard and that should that should just just clean it up a little bit all right now let's go to custom and in custom let's go to our character and here's our character I'm just going to drag it right in boom there's our there's our there's our dude right there perfect and then uh his offset let's I'm just gonna I'm just going to zero him out so now our character is at is at World zero so when I go to export him into an real engine uh he does he does exactly what I want him to do all right so what are we talking about here we talked about having him um he he was he was just going along the bridge and then and then the camera surprises him because he hasn't seen anybody in Millennia whatever you know like so so let's have him uh walking forward floating is boring so maybe he's just like walking so what we're going to do let me get rid of my face here uh we're going to go to motion puppet and this is just going to grab some quick motions uh as I said before I could just go into my previously made animations folder and use any of the animations I have ever made I actually have more than that but um like like look at this I just want to show you really quick like how fast this could be um this was taken from radical motion so this was very quick uh uh radical AI so if you go to radical motion.com you can create this using your webcam uh this animation this is a this is just killing my time right now so but I need to show you this example because it's a pretty cool example once it actually loads Come on load go faster you can do it right oh my gosh no spinny wheel of death this is weird this never happens of course it happens now all right so this this animation here was created with my webcam and you can do motion uh map with your webcam as well for characters like this like I could technically use this actually if I wanted to he's like yes hi how are you doing have a yeah whatever oh this is when I had a broken arm cuz I'm wearing my cast well I could use that map if I wanted to but that's not what we're doing anyway that's that's what I mean by you can use any map you have all right so let's uh get back on the non track here I'm just going to undo and go like that and now what I'm going to do is I'm going to click on the character I'm going to go to this little running icon go to motion puppet and let's find a motion that works for us so let's go to like move um and just I'm just going to grab like a random moving motion like how how would he walk if he was he's too happy right no he's not running I feel like he needs to walk was boring a boring life I'm just here all the time by myself okay so we got that I like that and we can we can change the way like if he's if he's slouching or if he's upright or if he's turning uh we can do uh the how how much he moves how little he moves and we can do the speed of how how he moves shoulders up shoulders down that only matters if you have a clavicle which he does not have clavicles elbows in elbows out let's see let's try something uh oh he's having a great day I'm so happy by myself he's just the happiest guy oh you know what let's just do I don't know this this seems a little silly but you know what let's be silly how about it so what I'm going to do is uh I'm going to be really silly I'm just going to keep this one I'm going to hit record and hit space bar and what this is doing now is this is uh it's it's kind of like burning the animation into that okay there it's baking it down so if I hit this button here uh it's it's just it just baked that animation right here so now if I go back on this timeline you can see that he's moving so now we're going to move forward just a frame or two don't necessarily have to and let's do one where he's like whoa like this is where we've run into him right um maybe a [Music] mood surprise there look surprise let's do a surprise ready [Music] and there okay so that's where he's surprised now let's do one one where uh he gets really angry he's he's angry about it like here let's let's do this one huh he's so mad at you you've just ruined his day he wanted to be by himself now I'm here all by myself what about what if he gets mad actually like here's another angry let's see this one you scared me yeah so what if it's like the other way around and then and then he just turns around and go away like that this is the weirdest short film but hey again this is it's about finishing right now and we've done this in a pretty short period of time so far so uh what I'm going to do is I'm going to mix these up um how am I gonna do this how am I GNA do this how am I going to do this because we have so here he is he's walking and then he gets scared he's like uh so let's I'm going to grab this part right here and I'm going to break it so that's where I want it to start so I'll grab this bit right here delete it and then I'm just GNA do that and see how it it did a transition here Watch What Happens he's walking and then and then he slowly brings his arms down but I I want him to get mad a little bit sooner so let's get rid of that and then where's I feel like that's after he's been mad right this one he [Music] goes so let's do this let's grab it from that point break that uh grab this move this over here so he goes react how could you so how could you and then and then yeah then from here he I'm just shortening it up making it faster then here he like he yeah see that works that's silly isn't it all right grab this one here and I'm just going to bring in a little bit more let's see because I feel like there's like a lag right there see darn it darn it still a little bit faster darn it h maybe there's a little maybe maybe let the lag be let it let it play out and that doesn't even be perfect ah darn it take it back of Tad darn it okay this so so still I feel like this could be maybe a little bit shorter this is me being a little little bit picky but you know what I think I got the time to do it I think I'm okay we've got 34 minutes oh my gosh we're past halfway all right let's move forward moving on moving on I don't want to be too piggy all right here we go he goes H darn it and then H and now he just turns around and and and goes away and I know that just Loops but whatever no big deal I'm just going to end the animation there like that close it off and then now that's it guys I'm going to export this as it is I'm not going to do anything else to it um because why not why just just we just leave it like this right so I'm going to go to uh file I'm going to go to export fbx and uh bring this over here and let's go uh 30 FPS that's fine whatever range and this is between the little bracketed range will you like that and we're not going to add any of this other stuff in we're just going to leave the model as it is because the textures already exist in Unreal Engine so now we're going to do uh ancient golum cool let's do skore ancient golum so it'll be like my own and then underscore o1 I just put 01 it's because just what I do whatever uh and actually will we'll create it under its own um thing so its own folder there we go yep there and now that that that's exported um I don't really care I'll just delete this because whatever this is a speed thing really I should have saved it that have been smarter but I'm I'm I'm in a hurry here all right and now we're going to go back to uh a new folder I'm going to create a characters folder so characters this is my own stuff and then I'm going to do ancient golum and then I'm going to uh import the character here so let's go back to our character which is this is where I saved it it was um in the yeah here and then exports and ancient column and there it is and I don't need the Json file that's if I'm creating a brand new thing uh but yeah there's that already exists in this project anyway I'm going back here uh import mesh yes skeletal mesh yes I'm not going to select the other skeleton I'm going to import the animations and then I'm going to hit this Advance button here and then I'm going to verify that a couple things are here and also I'm hitting this Advance button under this I want to make sure that uh I'll just click that one I don't need t0 as reference pose because he's not in a t pose from the beginning uh I'll leave the rest as it is as you can see there if he had face shapes I would put that but he doesn't I'm going to do uh import normals instead of compute normals and good and then for here custom uh sample rate I'm just going to put 60 because that's what I do typically uh saves a little bit of time and do not create new material materials because the materials already exist in the project and now it's going to import as you can see here it's well you can barely see now you can't see 80% it's it's taking all of the keys and bringing it in and just like that we have our character in the scene and uh the reason that it came in so fast is because they put a sample rate of 60 if you leave that at zero it takes a lot longer so let's double check this make sure it works and what do you know our character is moving as it should and should go ah at any point now let's make sure what it does I love it and uh we're gonna I'll just delete this because you know we don't need it that's if you're going to like do any other like retargeting stuff or whatever but I'm not going to and this I'm just uh this is me being uh a little picky I like to make sure things are Done Right onecore anim because it's an animation stay in the habit of having a good naming convention for everything you do it will save you in the long run if you get lazy your project will be messy and gross and you will find yourself having a harder time so now that I've got this in here uh what I'm going to do now is I'm going to create a blueprint to make sure that I can bring in those other elements inside his chest that are spinning and doing all sorts of things so I'm going to go to here with in here I'm going to right click I'm going to go to blueprint class I'm going to go to to actor and then I'm going to say BP for blueprint underscore ancient golum great I'm going to open this up and now that I have that open uh I can now go to the content drawer let's actually just drop that up there oh it's already there look at that I'm going to grab the content drawer and what I'm going to do is I'm going to drag this uh skeletal mesh in just like that and now I'm going to go back to those other internal pieces which are in the ancient Golem folder from the original right so here's our ancient golum we're not going to bring him in we're going to bring the pieces so I'm going to grab this piece and that piece those are both skeletal meshes just drag them straight in and then this is where it gets tricky and it might get a little messy and hopefully not too terribly bad uh we are going to make the body the parent of the other two things in other words we're going to child these right so I'm going to grab both of these and I'm going to drag them onto there so so how this moves is how those move now notice how these are not in the right place we need to move them but I need to tell them what part of the skeleton they're going to move with otherwise they're just going to move with the root and it's not going to be good so um as an example just very quickly uh we'll go ahead and open up that animation and see how the animation's all the way up there it's because it's assuming that there are feet in the scene and as you can see these other things did not follow right uh so what we're going to do is we're going to take the moving wheels and that I guess that's the the chest and that was uh spine three I think that's right I think it was spine three so I'm going to go to parent socket spine three of this character so that's what it's asking for so it's already it already knows that it's there so I'm going to spine three put it right there it's in the wrong axis here so that green arrow is our Y axis we're going to change the y axis this to 90 maybe minus 90 and uh looks like it's sitting a little bit high so now we're going to take the um the Z axis and just kind of move it oh which one is it then no back ah there we go so I'm taking the x axis in this case and I'm moving it down and it also looks like it needs to move back a little bit so that would be the Y AIS I think that looks pretty good compile and let me stop this animation because I'll get a better view really I could just grab it from here now and just just move it I'll take off the Locking stuff because there's like it'll be really choppy if I try to do that oh wait I grabbed the wrong thing there there's the wheel let's move it so it it's right it's about right huh is this the bottom is it easier on the bottom to see it oh yeah yeah so yeah we'll just do it like that so move this back and it looks like it still needs to be rotated oddly there we go so it wasn't quite minus yeah does that feel right to you I think that feels pretty right to me it's not perfect but um I don't know if I have the time I don't have the time I had to take one break because I had to make one phone call but it was not a a big big deal all right and yeah there we go cool yeah the break I took earlier I was just like like sorry I don't have time came back to this so yeah but disregard disregard and then let's take the the head now and we're going to do the same thing is we're going to take the head and where we going to attach it to Noggin so let's grab to let's grab the head where's head head head there's head there we go and then it's off so we're going to bring this over here and it looks like a Halo from our picture and this right here my friends is why I'm keeping this open so yeah it just kind of sits up there like that that kind of goes in like that okay I think we got the bottom part right yeah it looks great all right and then yeah so the head oh that's pretty centered so now we got to do is just go up with it let go up until it stops that's what it looked like great and what I'm going to do now is I'm just going to apply the animations to these already just to give them more life uh and so I'm going to go to over here with the wheels selected I'm going to go to animation asset on this side and you can see it's already there and it's going to start moving I want it to play faster though so it's more noticeable because it that that looks cool as it is but like I don't know let's let's do more with it so I'm going to go to advance and then play rate let's just do two there see it just moves faster moves more and it just does it without me having to do anything else same thing with the head um the head it it'll also do animation because we saw that it does do that and I think that's fine that speed is fine I'm not going to mess with that so there we go I'm going to hit save in case something crashes and we got to restart the project um we looking decent on time not great now we have the to do all right got all that good I'm happy with it and um let's one more time verify that if I put animation to this that it all moves properly look at that my friends it's good yes I'm happy with that done save close character okay now I'm going to get rid of this character now we really have to move friends we really have to move uh I'm going to go ahead and bring in our ancient golum here uh ancient Golem we wanted it it um twice as big right so I'm going to hit two for the scale that looks great and then I'm going to create a new level sequence so I'm going to go to content movies right click I'm going to go to cinematics level sequence call it LS not KS LS uncore um quick that's fine all right and we're going to first add this character to our scene there he is I want to control the location of the character and also the animation of the character's bodyx body so inside the blueprint we know that there's a skeletal mesh so I'm going to go here and we see SK golum we want to control that we want to control the animation so I'm going to just select the animation there we go and we're going to control the position of this character so uh now with that I'm going to go to the transform of the blueprint and the transform is the position the location rotation and scale of where this kid this this character is in 3D space perfect okay and let's actually start him back over here like this and let's take this scene here see this green line this green line is the an the green the pink purple whatever Line This is the animation we're just going to go ahead and say that the animation that we're showing is that long all right going to the front here let's make sure the character is walking in the right direction let's go minus 90 on that and that's going to be the right direction the character floats above do you think think the character should be bigger let's change it to three I feel like maybe uh having the character more noticeable on the bridge would be nice because like you can get a really cool epic looking shot from here good fine great uh let's go ahead now and oh actually he's sitting too high that's all I'm just lowering him down slightly I think it's weird that he's like walking like he's moving his body like he's walking but all right so I'm going to do that and then I'm going to take this first key frame I'm going to click that and then I'm going to hit linear so basically saying like as soon as we start this this video it's going to be going there's no like slowo it's just it just goes right uh now we're going to add a camera just a basic camera nothing crazy uh let's do I'm going to do a 24 mm on this cuz I just wanted to be big and wide and then we'll just start it from here right we'll do like a like just a a trucking shot where it's just like it's it's following Trucking I think is what it's called please disregard my use of film stuff and then um just so I can control the um the focus better I'm going to take this little uh actor I just grabbed an actor out of there and I'm going to call the actor um uh golum uncore focus and then I'm going to Simply take this and I'm going to attach it to and I'm going to select our golum and that way the focus is always on the golum and I'm going to um I'm going to zero out the location of the actor and then I'm going to bring it up so that it's close is to the actor's head and that's fine I'll hit G so you can see it uh up here well you won't be able to see it it's right there see so the I'll have the camera focusing on that specifically all right realizing I'm still in the camera mode I'll just leave it like that I'm I'm not going to try to get perfect with this because it's not about perfect right now it's about getting it done so there um let's begin the process my friends even though we're in the middle of it uh oh camera uh we need to tell it to focus on that so I'm going to go to Focus settings M change it from manual to tracking and then tracking Focus to that thing so I'll just type in Focus so the camera will always focus on that actor and that's going to save us a lot of time and then let's change from 2.8 to like 1 Point 1.8 why not that's for the aperture so that we have more depth of field that'd be kind of nice looking um great okay so let's move forward uh where does he get scared right [Music] there so we need the camera and the character to meet at the same spot so let's say uh he walks all the way over here like this right and that should have created a key frame oh I didn't click this make sure you click this before you move stuff all right and with that selected now when I move this it'll automatically create a key frame to that point right there and I'm going to make this again linear so yes we're good and then the camera is going to be right here let me see if I can slow down the camera I'm just going to use the score wheel and the camera gets all up in his face like he's just like so let's take a look at how it looks it's G to be a little sloppy but we'll adjust it so so here you see the camera's trying to turn what we're actually going to do is we are going to just kind of like keep the character in that position or the yeah the character in that kind of spot so it looks like this cool and now the camera is going to try to turn and pause right there this is half let's go halfway between this key frame and that key frame and we're just going to like turn it to keep him again into that one position so as it turns H so right here the camera jumps back a little bit imagine if we have a drone and we jump back a drone would tilt its head back a little bit this is a little tricky still getting messages maybe that's a little bit excessive see there I feel like that heat that like could have been a little bit slower getting a little distracted and then he's going to turn around so now right here yeah I think the character turns so yeah yeah given time it's 53 minutes in uh let's go ahead and turn the character around now and uh 180 oh so I looked down with the camera okay so I'm GNA get out of the camera now and then I'm just going to make the character walk half the distance between between this column and that column so like right there so boom like that right uh and then what I'm also going to do is oh I just got to move because I still have to render I guess I'm not going to do audio I could do audio and then also let's take a look at the goleem character here and I'm actually going to move the rotation a little bit uh and I'm going to take this linear off here and change it to uh just Smart Auto is fine I got to check my phone again sorry now right here I think he starts to turn and also this turn here let's make it uh like that I feel like the turn needs to be a little faster so right yeah right there he starts to turn because it's like comical that it gets upset and I feel like even faster yeah that works and then I think this can be yeah that's linear that's fine but I think this actually might want to go a little bit further not not up back I'm just grabbing that red there like that now now we just take the camera h doesn't he feel like he's not quite all the way around does that feel is it is that just me oh it's the way he's walking it's just the it's the walk but that's okay so let's go now to the end frame and let's say the end frame now is just to the other side and now we put the character on that side let's see what that looks like and let's take off this little bit here just see how that looks so let's give it let's actually give this a minute so if I bring this back do we really need to go out that far though I mean I don't know what this short film is about it's just it's just a guy doing a thing and maybe it doesn't need to go out that far at all maybe it's just like I mean I don't know unless it's uh one of these kinds of things and then let's let's put like uh how much time we got 57 seconds or minutes 57 minutes in um let's go to the cathedral I saw blueprints I saw no not that and let's go building Parts Cathedral front Tower let's just do that and we will create a couple of them right so this is what like where he's walking back too bring those like that and then we can put we can fake this that looks like a door that looks like a door we are going to call that a door that my friends is a door it is now close that off all right whatever doesn't have to be perfect so here's our our short film of whatever I feel like he needed to be walking back from further because look how much he's moving ah he definitely needed to be going from further back so this character I think actually starts off back there which means the camera has to start right here and then right there and then that looks good let's try it let's see it feels like it needs to be a little bit like more surprising to the character and it's almost like this needs to come in just a tad bit later let's take this make that that camera linear that feels good right here is when we're getting all up in his business and this actually could come back a little bit more like that for yep and that's our short film so there we go um we are a little bit overtime but um yeah that's that's that's what we got so my apologies for going slightly over time all right um we did do a lot of explanation but let's go ahead now and Export what we have um some things that I'm I'm uh looking at that uh earlier I'm slightly concerned about is uh the the foliage so let's try something um no guarantees this is going to work but we'll see we're going to go to render this thing out let's create a new uh thing so I'm going to go ahead and go here and let's go I don't want a JPEG I want um I'm just going to do a p& sequence that's fine and uh no and then what I'm going to do is go to um brain uh let's go to anti-aliasing and then for this I don't I don't really care I'm just going to go eight no big deal that and then keep it at 1080P and then um yeah create a new uh render folder for it so u5 renders is where I like to render some stuff new and then golum little bit of time blindness on my end uh and there we go okay so actually with that I'm going to save this because my gut tells me to save it see 1080p it's fine and let's save all good 10 108,000 P whatever doesn't matter and be actually before I get started on this let me make sure if I ah are you sure you want to play an editor if the following blueprint FY cancel okay so that means we've got some blueprints I'm going to go and click on that and it looks like it's a oh it's a level blueprint so we have a thing here in the level blueprint that looks like we would have some stuff happening so what I'm going to do actually is just grab everything this level blueprint and delete it because we're not making a video game here we're just creating something else so now that should resolve our potential issues uh that we're going to have okay now that we got that let's go ahead and well let's let's play it if it plays it's fine cool I'm happy with that hang on um yeah something's something's funky all right let's do that something's funky we should be good [Music] oh so now all we got to do is wait I saved everything yes I did save everything okay there we go right and we have a crash scatter buffer size so the scatter buffer size is is is is interesting all right well this is embarrassing I was like I'm gonna do this in an hour and it's going to be so much fun and then it's it's over an hour hour and five dang it well there's the actual time if you want to see my actual time 1039 all right all right well this is this is actually good if we're going to have this kind of problem let's have it on the stream I want to show you that like you know what doesn't matter how long you've been doing this or how much you think you know you're always going to have to learn something new it's just like sometimes things happen but like don't let it take you down like let it let it teach you something let it like give you a lesson if if there's something you don't know it means you have an opport opportunity to learn something new like be excited like I'm excited right now I feel like I've had this problem before and I feel like it is grass we'll find out all right so let's go back to this I'm going to select the only sequence that we have go here and then I'll change this to my 1080 th000 P right uh and I'm going to do a console variable and then I'll do um no do I need a console variable for this I don't know if I need a console variable for this what do I do what do I do how do I do this game override the flesh grass stream let's get rid of these two because what happens here is when it starts up when it starts up it's trying to call all of the grass at the same time which may be a part of that problem problem and also I didn't mess with the postprocessing um since we have the time I'm just going to render out something crazy cool looking so uh let's actually change well this is going to be me you don't have to do this you can render it out as it is but I'm going to change this to um Ray tracing CU why not and then rate tracing I'm going to change all of these ex I'm going to go brute forest and I'll say 10 just because I'm crazy and I change this to three samples because whatever and there's no Reflections and this is just me you can do path tracing you can do whatever you want um 30 FPS this is fine this matches my current thing whatever I don't even need to do that really all right well let's yeah let's just render so there we go now this should work because it's not having to do all that work on the the grass solved and it's moving pretty quick so we got 3 minutes and you know our two two and a half minutes of render that's that's not too terrible we don't have to worry about the focus the focus is already perfectly in it's not the most beautiful shot in the world I wish I would have actually brought the camera over a little bit but you know again this is about speed um it's about getting something done and while we may have been just a couple minutes over the 1 hour thing here we are now it's like what kind of sound would you want to put into this what kind of things would you want to do audio wise I still feel like he could have been moving faster considering how how much his arms are moving got some nice little God Rays there and then I'd be like whoa I would too I'd be the same way buddy be like dude you're all up in my [Music] face and then cross his arms and turn around like people getting all up in my stuff and there he goes back in the other direction for whatever reason this didn't have a story per se this just had a um a thing like we just did a thing that's all we did we did a thing but you know what we did not do we did not do a we did a something I'd rather do a something than a nothing we overcame a problem we got it done and you know what that could be a quick laugh somewhere that could be like you could post that on Tik Tok Instagram YouTube shorts whatever as a as a silly little thing as long as the sound effects work on it you could it could it could be really fun so now we got that let's just say we're done in Onre engine guys that's it all right close our close that down now I'm just going to go into um I'm going to go into uh D Vinci resolve these are my tools this is what I use and in D Vinci resolve if I can find it resolve there we go D venci resolve that's going to pop up I'll have to bring it over to the side so you can see it and then we're just going to take that IM image sequence that I've created and just throw it in there and you know like I said before there are so many things that you can do to uh make things even cooler let's see um uh quick call it quick I don't care bring that over there great and then I'm going just go to this little thing down here I shall hide my face I'm I'm starting on this little folder here I'm going to go to where that that render was which should be under uh ue5 renders and then right there the image sequence already exists it says here it's 24p it is not 24p we will deal with that in a minute now what we're going to do is we're going to go to this little thing down here right go to Media pool we already see our thing we're going to create a brand new timeline instead of just throwing it straight down there we're going to right click go to timelines go to uh create new timeline and then here we're going to click off this uh use project settings and we're go to format and then 1080P or whatever size your project is and I'm going to change this frame rate to 30 because that's what I had it set to because this stream that you're seeing now is being recorded in 30 so I want to keep it clean great and now we're going to go back up to this we're going to right click on it clip attributes and change it from 24 to 30 and that's going to play it at the proper pace so now let's play that back and that looks pretty good my friends I'm happy with that we have one frame here where the guy is uh he's disappeared and the reason the reason the character is disappeared like that is because when the animation starts it's just he's just being brought into the scene so I'm just going to delete that first that's not an that's not a that doesn't happen every single time but in this case it it did so there we go uh with that frame deleted we can now just export this I kind of do want to do some sound and stuff though but okay listen technically we did this whole thing in Unreal Engine 5 in about an hour would you agree so can I go over a little bit of sound with this yes thank you you're so generous by the way thank thank you so much for subscribing if you haven't subscribed already you know what to do okay let's go to epidemic sound epidemic sound sound effects we hear wind wind wind sounds I need my headphones for the wind sounds dark wind okay hang on a second uh I had a major error I didn't actually record my computer sounds so this entire process of putting the audio to this video didn't actually turn out you could just hear me and not the sound and everything I'm saying would be completely pointless to you so I'm just going to fast forward this part until the end and then yeah all right there we go so I'm just going to go ahead and say that's good and render this thing out and then I will uh put it at the end of this video so yeah whatever um but that's it [Music]

Channel: Daydream Studios

Views: 81,612

Keywords: Game Development, Unreal Engine, Unreal Engine Short Film, Unreal Engine Tutorial, Unreal Engine VFX, Unreal Engine Animation, Short Film, Unreal Engine 4, Unreal Engine Cinematics, Short Film Production, Unreal Engine Speedrun, Short Film Making, Unreal Engine Demo, Unreal Engine Projects, Unreal Engine Showcase, Short Film Creation, 1 Hour Challenge, cory williams, daydream studios, unreal engine film tutorial, unreal engine 5 for filmmaking, ue5, unreal engine 5 tutorial

Id: F22yYx6qDAo

Length: 74min 37sec (4477 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 19 2024