This Can't Be Unreal!? | The C4D To Unreal Workflow

what up what up when boys here and today I'm going to answer the question I get asked the most how do I bring my Cinema 4D projects into enroll engine well I'm going to show you right now [Music] for those that don't know me my name is Jonathan wimbush a multi-award-winning motion graphics artist based out of Southern California I've worked with places like DC Marvel and Warner Brothers to name a few but most of you guys know me from my YouTube channel where I teach my tips and tricks from working in the industry today we're going to look at how we can export our Cinema 4D projects bring them into unreal and not only that I'm going to show you guys how we could get that red shift look inside of Unreal Engine so without further Ado let's jump right into it and if you want to follow along with this tutorial you're going to want to make sure that you download the cinewear plug-in for unreal this is brand new through the Maxon website with this you're going to be able to install stuff like cameras materials lights and animations so make sure you go to maxon.net and you install this plugin it's called cineware for Unreal Engine and on top of making sure you have the brand new plug-in if you want to follow along make sure you download the project files using the link in the description below and for those of you that are wondering what we're going to be creating today this is the actual final result that is rendered out of unroll engine so if you guys are ready to build something like this let's get right into it and as you can see right now I miss out of Cinema 4D this is the latest version 2023 this is actually the project file EJ has sent over so if I play it through you can see we have this nice cloth simulation playing here we have this cylinder kind of colliding with the cloth we have some effectors in here as well some turbulence and it's looking really nice right like you see it's nicely flowing in here and the big concern was he had built this out with redshift but we want to bring it over to Unreal Engine so the first step from here is I'm actually going to take this cloth deformer right here and I'm going to take these three planes that he has inside of an all here and I'm going to bring these out and this is because Unreal Engine doesn't like for this to be in the null it lights for it to be in in its own separate layers and so I'm just going to hold down the Ctrl key on my keyboard while I'm left clicking and I'm just making duplicates here and I can actually get rid of these redshift tags because we can't bring redshift over to unroll anyway so from here I'm actually going to take this cloth right here this little plane I'm going to drag it under the cloth surface right here I'm gonna take this one right here drag it under the second one then I'm going to take the third one here I'm going to drag it under this one here so each cloth surface has its own individual plane and then I'm going to come back over here or we have a cloth tag I'm actually just going to select all three of these I'm going to come down here to cache and I'm actually going to clear my cache because I'm just going to start over a whole new simulation here so I'm just going to click on Cache scene and I'm going to let this ready out as right now you can see it's at zero percent and I'm just going to wait for this to finish out now assimilation is finished I'm just going to play it again back one more time and we can see it's as elegant as it was before but I just like doing the first simulation especially when I do something like this just to make sure everything is on the up and up so the next step from here I'm actually going to come over here to create and I'm going to make a null and I'm actually going to name this one no underscore position because I want to make sure I have my exact position of my classroom right here so I'm just going to actually drag it right here under cloth surface and I'm going to come down here to coordinates and I'm going to zero everything out so my XYZ and my rotation is all zeroed out and now I could bring it from underneath my cloth surface right there and we have the same exact coordinates from a null position and my cloth surface and this is just so when I bring my Olympic file over to unroll engine I have this as a positional reminder of where everything should be so now that we have our class sim simulated I'm actually just going to select everything here these six pieces and then I'm going to make sure I'm on my first frame I'm going to come over here to file and I'm going to come down here to export and I'm going to come down here to alembic ABC I'm going to click on the gear right here and in the export settings I'm going to make sure I have selection only selected because the way that I like to work is make sure that I'm only export is stuff that I have selected there and then another caveat is for animation where it says start frame you want to make sure you're on start frame one you don't want to have it on zero because unreal gets kind of confused when you have it at zero is so we want to make sure we're at one and everything else is good to go so I'm just going to click OK and now I'm just going to save my file here so I'm just going to name this one cloth and click on Save and I'm just going to wait for this anemic file to export out so now that we're done exporting that I'm just going to delete my costume right here like so but I'm going to keep my null right here now a couple of things that we don't need we don't need the turbulence and the rotation and all this stuff here because we already did our class sim so we don't need that but the one thing that we're going to bring over we're going to bring over all these items right here over the unroll engine now there's a couple of things that we can bring over from Cinema 40 to unroll engine such as materials lights and cameras but for this right here he's using redshift Lighting in which that's not going to work in Unreal Engine and for me personally I like using in the light all inside of unreal because they're native and they're going to give us the full potential power of lumen and Ray tracing so with that being said what I'm actually going to do right here you can see we have our red shift lights for a key background to fill I'm just going to come over and I'm just going to actually make noise for each one of these so I'm just going to hold down control left click and drag and what I'm going to do is I'm going to use these to give us the position of these lights inside of unreal so I'm just going to come down here I'm going to zero everything out for my XYZ and rotation on each one of these lights right here and everything should be good and I'm also going to rename these as well so I'm just going to zero everything out and then right here under key I'm going to name that one key I'm going to name this one background and I'm going to name this one fill now once I have these nulls as my positional data here I'm just going to actually select all three of these I'm just going to drag them out and then I'm going to come back over here to my lights and I'm going to delete these as well and then I'm going to delete this target here because we don't particularly need it and then what we're going to do from here is I'm actually going to get this camera set up to bring over the unreal but first what I'm going to do is come right here under render settings I'm going to make sure I'm under standard because we can't bring redshift stuff over and since I can't convert this camera over to a standard camera I'm just going to create a standard camera like so and then down here under the attributes window I'm just going to select all my positional data down here I'm going to right click animation copy track and I'm going to come up to my camera and I'm going to paste that track in there and that should give us the exact keyframes that we need so if I actually look through my camera there we go we have the same exact position going but we don't have the focal length in which this one's at 42 millimeters for the focal length and so I'm just going to come back over here and I'm going to change my focal length right here to 42 instead of 35 now our camera should match exactly as we should have it so now that we have our standard camera I'm going to delete this redshift camera and then I could look through this camera right here and same thing from a cylinder I'm actually going to delete this redshift tag I'm going to delete this redshift material and I'm going to delete this collider tag and then everything that's underneath here I'm going to delete these as well so now we have a pretty basic scene set up here I have my cylinder I have my camera and I have my positional noise right here so now that we have our standard scene set up I'm actually going to hit Ctrl D on my keyboard down here my project settings I'm going to come down here to cinewear and I'm going to save polygon cache and then I'm going to save animation cast I'm going to leave materials off because I'm going to do all my materials inside of Unreal Engine so what I'm going to do is come over here to file save project as and I'm just going to save this one as his own separate file so I'm just going to actually name this one unreal project underscore UE so I know this file that I have here I don't want to save over my original but this is just going to be your standard Cinema 4D file so I'm going to save this and then I'm going to get Unreal Engine booted up here to import this in now this is unroll engine 5.1 and if you're not familiar with it if it's your first time seeing it make sure you check out my course on School of motion where I show you how to get acclimated with everything here but the first thing I'm going to do is actually come over to my outliner here on the right hand side and I'm going to start by deleting some of this stuff in here like the players start the sky sphere and Etc so I'm just going to leave these three things in here I'm actually going to make a folder I'm just going to name it FX and I'm just going to drop these things in here and then I'm going to import the cinema 40 project file so I'm going to come up here to this little plus sign come down here to data Smith I'm going to come down here to file import and then I'm going to look for my project file my cinema4d5 that I just saved out I'm just going to actually open this and it's going to come up with this window right here I'm going to drop it in my content folder I'm going to click OK and that's going to bring up the data Smith import options in which I'm just going to leave everything on that default then I'm going to click import here and watch everything just import into my scene and once that's imported you can see that it made a project folder here for us this name the same thing as our Cinema 4D file you can see we actually have the Cinema 4D logo here we have a folder for our geometry which we have all right here and then we also have our animation timeline that was brought over as well so if I double click on this one it's going to bring up our timeline in which an unroll engine is called sequencer I'm just going to say this here but if I actually look through my camera here you can see that it's completely pitch black and that's because the exposure kind of gets messed up when it's brought over from Cinema 40 it's an easy fix I'm just going to come down here to search I'm going to type in ex just for my exposure and right here where it says exposure metering mode I'm going to actually click this off and now we can see everything through our camera and so if I play this through you can still see we're at 24 frames per second I brought that over from Cinema 4D and we have our full animation with our cylinder and our camera now the one thing we are missing is our Olympic file in which if I come down here to my content drawer and I'm actually going to dock this into my layout so it's always there so I'm going to hit Dock and layout now I have my content and folder here I'm actually going to come over right click make a new folder I'm just going to name this one ABC I'm just going to drag and drop my Olympic file right into here and once I do that you see that it comes up with this little window right here the import options I'm going to make sure everything's selected right here for my import type I'm going to come down here geometry cache for my frame start I want to make sure it's at zero even though we exported it at one we want to make sure we import it at zero here and then if I scroll further down here we have recompute normals I'm going to click this one on but ignore triangles I'm going to click this one off now the last thing we want to make sure we do instead of our conversion here is set up for Autodesk Maya I found I had better luck when I do 3D Max and then I'm just going to hit import and wait for everything to import into our content browser and once it's done importing you can actually see it right here and I can actually just left click and drag it into my scene in which we see it right here and if I come over here to my outliner I'm just going to click and drag it underneath my position and then I'm just going to zero it out so if I come down here in my details panel under transform I'm actually just going to zero everything out now everything is properly aligned but if I come to sequencer and play it's not working so what I'm going to do is actually take my class and I'm just going to come over here drag it back out because I already have the position now and I'm going to left click and drag it into my sequencer and now we can see the layer is down here I'm going to make sure I'm on the very first frame and I'm going to click on track here and then right here where it says geometry cache I'm going to click this on and now I should play back inside of our viewport in which if we look at it everything is playing back nicely and elegantly and everything looks really good here so if I go back now I'm actually going to do one more thing to my camera I'm going to disable the depth of field because I want everything to come in sharp so with my camera selected I'm going to come down here under my lens settings right here under Focus setting and for Focus method I'm going to disable it now everything should be super sharp now the next thing I want to do from here I'm going to bring this some textures from Mega scans so if I come up here where we have a plus symbol I'm going to open up quicksil bridge and for anybody that's not familiar qixo bridge is where we're going to have access to the mega scans Library so I have some stuff already downloaded if I click on this little icon here you can see I have all the stuff downloaded that's on my hard drive here but what I'm going to look for and so I'm going to look for some cloth and then we'll look for some metal so I have this metal still right here I'm just going to actually left click on this I'm going to come down here to high quality because I already have this downloaded and I'm just going to click on ADD and it should add it to my project file which you could just see it made a mega scans folder and we have our middle material right here now I'm going to look for my cloth as well so I'm going to scroll down until I find this dark fabric I'm going to take this same thing high quality and I'm just going to add it and now we can see it's over here inside of our content browser so that's all I'm going to need from quicksil bridge and so I'm just going to exit this out and then I'm just going to left click drag this onto my cylinder and then I'm going to come over here to fabric go ahead left click bring it onto my cloth and then if I scrub this through on my timeline you can see now everything is on there and everything is looking good now the next thing I want to tackle might be the lighting so I'm actually going to pop out of my camera here by hitting the eject button like so and you can see I have my camera selected in my outliner and that's going to bring up our preview window right here but if I click off of it then it's actually going to disappear so if I want to have this preview window always here there's a little pin button right here if I click on this now if I click outside of it it's always going to be there and that's going to help me always look through my camera as I'm navigating through my viewport so what I'm going to do is actually bring in some lights from Unreal Engine I'm going to click on the plus button come down here to lights and I'm just going to use rectangular lights so I'm going to take this one and then I'm going to drag it underneath the nose that I have here so the first one is going to be the background right here so I'm going to bring it under here then I'm going to come down to my details panel and I'm just going to zero everything out so now you can see that and all that we brought over from Cinema 4D is actually giving us the position that we could put our light in here in which it's going to be up top here I'm going to do the same thing for my other lights here so I'm actually just going to right click and I'm going to come down here to edit I'm going to duplicate and I'm just going to drag this under fill same thing I'm going to zero everything out in here so now this is going to be underneath that fill no right here which is down here at the bottom then I'm going to do the same thing for the key light which I'm going to right click come down to edit duplicate bring it under key after I come down here and I just zero everything out so if I double click on this again and now we can see it's in a position that it needs to be into and if I just scrub through here and you can see all the lighting is happening real time instead of my camera view but this background right here should have a material on it which I believe was gray so I'm just going to come back over here in my content browser I'm going to right click make a new material and I'm just going to name this one gray and then we're going to double click on this and that's going to bring up our material node system right here so what I'm going to do is actually hold down the shortcut key three on my keyboard I'm going to left click and that's going to bring up this RGB node in which I could just put that under my base color and then if I double click on this black box right here I can actually just change this to gray like so then we're going to click OK and I could probably make it a little bit darker gray somewhere around there and now I'm going to make a note for my specular and my roughness in which I'm just going to hold one on my keyboard left click and that's just going to bring me a value node in which I'm going to drag it under specular I'm going to drag it under roughness and now this is going to make it pretty dull so I'm just going to click on Save here and then I'm going to drag this onto my background so I'm going to exit this out then we're going to left click drag it onto my background and now you can see it's already looking really good inside of my viewport there so if I click play or actually I just drag it through you can see this is looking nice and elegant there inside of my camera now the one thing I do want to add in here that we didn't have in redshift is actually volumetric fog which gives it an extra particular look and it's going to make it look more photo real so in order to do that I'm actually going to come back here to my plus symbol come down here to visual effects and then come down here to exponential height fog I'm going to left click on this and actually let me look through my camera see we can see what it's going to do here so I'm going to go back to my camera and I'm going to click on this to look through it and then go back to my exponential height fog and then I'm going to look for volumetric fog down here under my details panel so if I drag down all the way down here to about the Middle where I see volumetric fog I'm going to turn this on in which we can see a hint of what it did but if I really want to exaggerate it I'm going to come back here to the top where we have fog density I'm actually going to make this one just so we can really see what's happening so you can see we have real time fog inside of our viewport here which a lot of dccs can't even handle so this is cool that we're getting this real time inside of our viewport but I'm going to pull it back a little bit maybe to like point one but I just wanted to show you guys how the volumetric fog actually works real time within our viewport here so far just to recap what we did was we brought our Olympic class simulation into unroll engine and then we also took our camera animation in the cylinder animation from Cinema 40 into unroll engine and then we did all of our lighting with real time lights inside of Unreal Engine now with a little bit of tinkering with the lighting and everything I want to show you guys the final results of what I came up with for this project file now I did want to bore you guys with all the art Direction and tinkering that I was doing to achieve this but this is the final result that I got here using the same methods that I just showed you guys so I have all the materials that I brought over from Mega scans I have the lighting positions from Cinema 4D and everything is just playing back here inside of real time I'll give you complete access to this file so you guys could go ahead and backward engineer it and then I also do a bonus tutorial where I dive deeper into this if you actually get my course on School of motion but let me show you guys the real-time rendering here so with the original file we were actually getting around one minute per frame and now it's rendering out HD but I'm going to show you guys how we can render this out in 4k in about 60 seconds so now that I have my project file all set up here I'm going to to come down here to my clipboard I'm going to left click on this then I'm going to come here and I'm just going to set this up so I'm going to click on jpeg here I'm not going to do a sequence I'm actually going to export this out as Apple prores I'm just going to do 422hq and then I will also come down here the game rides overrides because right here under cinematic quality settings if you turn this on it's going to give you the highest quality settings for when you render it out and then down here under output I'm just going to actually name this one colossium so right here where it says sequence name I'm just going to actually change this here actually I'm just going to do cloth and then output resolution instead of HD I told you guys I was going to do 4K so I'm going to multiply this by 2 3840 by 2160 then I'm going to leave everything else as is 24 frames per second then I'm going to click accept and then right here this is what everybody always loves to see right here where it says render local I'm going to left click on this and I'm just going to let this render out now you can see we're getting started here everything is rendering out in real time if you look down here under estimated time remaining we have about is it a little bit over a minute but it's going actually pretty fast so again this is just estimating but you can see everything is running back really smoothly and we did this at 24 frames per second at 4K and you see how fast it's rendering now so basically in a minute we're able to render out the entire duration 240 frames at 4K 24 frames per second when we use the offline render it was taking about a minute per frame at HD now this is what the final result looks like it's nice and elegant again this is at 4K 24 frames per second you can see how smooth everything is and it looked pretty photo real and this is used in Lumen and Ray tracing so this is looking really good now if I take this still and I can pair it side by side with the render that EJ did on the left hand side you can see the one that I did inside of Unreal Engine on the right hand side you can see the one that EJ has set up using redshift out of Cinema 4D you can see that I took the Liberties to do a little bit of my own color and get my own flavor to it on the unreal one but if you would put these up side by side you couldn't tell me which one was Unreal and which one was redshift and they both look pretty good now in this short video you can see the power of unroll engine and how s is 3D and Motion Graphics artists how we could utilize this power for what we do and if you're interested in taking it one step further make sure you check out my course here on School of motion where I take you from complete beginner all the way to a pro and everything is Project based so at the end of each chapter you're going to have stuff like this that you can actually show off and put in your profile you can put it on your resume and you just have something tangible at the end of the day so if you like content like this make sure you sound off in the comments down below let's go emotion note you want to see some more unreal content and also if you can visit me on youtube.com Jonathan Winbush I give a lot of tips and tricks on there as well and until next time stay fresh keep creating and I'll catch you guys in my Unreal Engine course I'll see you next time take care foreign

Channel: School of Motion

Views: 35,203

Keywords: unreal engine, Motion Design, Motion Graphics, After Effects, Tutorial, Tips, Tricks, Technique, Learn, Basics, Design, MoGraph, unreal engine 5, unreal engine 5.2, unreal engine 5 tutorial, unreal engine 5.1, unreal engine 5 demo, unreal engine 5 realistic graphics, unreal engine tutorial, unreal engine 5 realsitic graphics

Id: ZcdQQQRbCqY

Length: 21min 40sec (1300 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 26 2023