The REAL Reason Unreal Engine VFX Looks FAKE

did you know that the Unreal Engine cinema camera has a problem that makes everything look fake this is something that affects anyone who wants to make films or visual effect in Unreal Engine and I've just spent the last 6 months coming up with a solution for this and I'm really excited to show you what I've come up with because once you see this problem it's almost impossible to unsee so let me lay this problem out for you when we make CGI we're told to steer clear of perfection We Gather real world reference imagery to keep us grounded we use high quality textures or photos we make sure that lighting is motivated and camera movement is natural and we use highquality Photo scans to make sure that our 3D models are basically real objects and let's say you've done all of that everything you can to make sure your image is as beautiful and as realistic as possible then you have to look at it through un Real's cine camera now the cine camera don't get me wrong is an amazing tool it's got loads of flexibility and it's a great thing for filmmakers and animate as working in unreal in fact it's perfect which is a problem it's just drawing geometry based on its field of view it's not actually focusing light through lenses in an aperture and then exposing a sensor plane it's just emulating these things and producing an image which is clean sharp crisp perfect this is where you would normally take your render and throw it into your editing software and add lots of 2D filters to dirty up your image and otherwise make it more realistic so you'll be adding Distortion filters radial blur maybe a bit of goian blur some Bloom perhaps and lens flares and all of this is an aid of just trying to get a semblance of reality are we just supposed to accept that we're just putting a Band-Aid on the problem so I spent the last 6 months solidly working on my solution and here it is I decided that the cine camera needs lenses real but virtual lenses that actually focus light so that we can get natural aberration Bloom natural Bloom not just a post-process filter I wanted the real thing so I created a 24 mm a 30 5 mm 50 mm and 85 mm fully 3D modeled triplet lenses and they work I've compiled these together as blueprints so that you can literally just stick them on the front of the cine camera in unreal you can still use the cine camera to set the focus distance and the aperture but the lenses create realistic aberration it's very gorgeous let me show you some of the effects you can get with these lenses I'm in my own real engine project here in you can see I've got four cine cameras all set up here and each of them has its own lens I really like the 35mm let me show you I'm going to go to my perspective menu and select my 35 and I'm in Lumen right now so it's not going to work it only works in path Tracer because the light rays need to be accurately traced through the glass and create a focused image let me switch to path tracing what you can see here are a whole bunch of effects this is really cool so first of all the most obvious is Bloom now that's happening right here across this highlight and it's also bleeding outwards you can see here I've got the Starfield background and the Boker are starting to warp off towards the edges because of the real Distortion that's happening and because there's a subtle vignette they also start to get cut off as well like a real Boker wood you've got fully circular Boker in the middle and then ones here with a little bit of a cut off which is all happening because of the lenses there's some spherical aberration which is where it gets softer towards the edge it's not very very strong but it is there I've also added lens dirt to the front element of the lens which isn't very apparent in the image but it is in the Boker you can see these Boker are actually dirty Boker which is really cool let's switch to the normal pth tracing mode and see just how much of a difference this really is the first thing you'll notice is a change in exposure because when we're using the lenses we have real lens elements in the way which lose us about a stop to a stop and a half of Light which is fine you just have to compensate in your post-process volume now you can see in this image there's no Distortion there's no Bloom there's no it's just it's exactly what I've been describing it's very sharp Tac sharp boring crisp nonsense let's turn that back on I'm sick of looking at it now because each of the lenses is a blueprint I've exposed all of the material parameters to the details panel and we've got controls for two different apertures that I've got in place lens dirt and lens bloom the most fun here is lens Bloom but I'm just going to quickly show you the apertures first and we'll move down the list sharp aperture is an aperture plane placed right inside the lens which allows you to get a custom Boker shape so you could change that shape out to a heart an oval or a circle whatever you want and those shapes will be very crisp now at the moment I'm not using that aperture I'm currently using my swirly aperture which is giving me a lot more swirl around the edges of the image so we Chang them out by changing the lens aperture IO option which is currently set to one in swirly aperture so I turn it off with a zero and I turn my Sharp aperture on with a one now you can see those Pentagon shapes are a lot more pronounced here I've also got some settings for lens dirt which changed the opacity and the tiling of that dirt texture and also you can change that texture out as well and now we're on to the fun one which is lens blue I love this effect very much I've got two controls I've got Max roughness which I've currently set to 6 if I set it to one it's going to be stronger and I've also got roughness contrast the higher this number is the less Bloom you're going to get and the lower the number is the more foggy the whole thing's going to get let me set this down to five so you can see there's a lot more kind of haze going on lots more Bloom but the image is not terribly soft it's soft but it's still retaining detail so it's not just a question of making the whole thing more blurry it's a question of Bloom and I really like that about this I'm going to set max roughness to one you can see that really coming up there so a vintage lens and I've got a bunch of old ones here Bloom just like this and that's why I really love this effect because it's exactly what I expect from a lens that say sat on a shelf for a long time I think I've come up with something fairly unique here and I am selling these on my website right now I'm giving away the 85 mm blueprint completely for free and all of that can be found at the link in the description below there's a ton of information on the page there with before and after comparisons and FAQs so have a read have a look I'd love to know what you think the movies that inspired the look of these lenses are absolutely the Creator and Rogue one and not specifically the VFX I just mean the lensing it's gorgeous and of course they had to match their VFX with their lenses and they did such a beautiful job cuz the bloom and the softness is just pure Cinema the next step for me is clearly to model a bunch of anamorphic lenses if that's something you'd be interested in please pop a comment below I'd love to hear what your thoughts are and I'll see you on the next one

Channel: Joshua M Kerr

Views: 225,222

Keywords: unreal engine 5, unreal engine filmmaking, rendering unreal engine 5, ue5 filmmaking, rendering unreal, path tracing ue5, virtual production, unreal engine path tracer, unreal engine path tracer render, unreal engine 5.3, unreal engine 5.4

Id: 2SsTk657Uw0

Length: 6min 58sec (418 seconds)

Published: Fri May 24 2024