UNREAL 5 Fimmaking Is Now 10x EASIER

we're heading out of the studio to do a virtual production test and I'm bringing a secret weapon it's kind of a virtual production Swiss army knife and I've got it running on this phone but before we get where I'm going we need to skip back a moment so I'm at the point of doing some previous for a short film I've built part of my world in Unreal Engine so now it's time to start testing out some shots I can set up a master wide near the pavement a medium wide at the back of the car and a close-up for the talent it doesn't feel anything like real location scouting where you can wander around look through a viewfinder and discover things and that's kind of important cuz I think working in this way my choices are a little safe to make this a bit more like real location scouting you'd need to break out some tracking equipment attach a Tracker to a monitor that displayed the Unreal Engine scene which would mean getting video output from Unreal Engine into the monitor which also means things like capture cards and cables basically gets too complicated too quickly for something that maybe should be really straightforward it's a bit much and that's where lightcraft Jet Set comes in it's an app that runs on the iPhone phone that allows you to load in your Unreal Engine scene Walk around it and record takes but it is so much more than that and I'm proud to say they're sponsoring this video today I don't take on sponsors very often but I think we found something pretty unique here Jet Set uses the time of flight sensor on the iPhone to scan the real world environment so you just tap on one of the grids that it offers you in the app and you can set a ground playe and from that point your environment will spawn around you and you can have realtime camera tracking in six degrees of freedom the tracking quality is surprisingly good I'm actually very impressed it's robust I haven't noticed any slipping and sliding and although it's not a subpixel track the developers have told me they've got some tricks up their sleeve for down the road that's a bit exciting it's great to see some good keying options within jet set as well it defaults to the depth map-based rotoscoping which uses the time of flight sensor on the camera and AI to identify people within the image can also identify random body parts like hands so it's very useful but it's really only useful for preview because it's a very jaggy edge but it also has green screen or blue screen options you can literally select your key color and you can also then adjust sliders to improve the mask so a cool feature of Jet Set is the ability to add scene locators which allow you to quickly hop from one part of your environment to another I'm currently in the Trench Run scene on the iPhone app which is just built in by default and it's a lot of fun I'm a massive Star Wars fan as you can probably tell this allows you to basically hop from say the origin which is just down on the ground up to perhaps a TIE fighter cockpit there you can see the x-wings out the front but then of course I can hop over to an X-Wing as well and one of my favorite modes which is the 100x mode it's basically a scene locator that's scaled 100 times which means I can get sweeping drone shots and movements around a large environment so my city scene needs some scene locators before exporting out the Jet Set app so I'm going to add one empty actor into this elevator right here and I'm going to call that scene loore elevator the scene Lo prefix is how Jet Set knows it's a scene locator so that's the important bit I'm also going to parent this scene locator to the elevator because it's an animated object that moves down the building and I want the camera that attaches itself to the scene locator to move with the elevator I'll also add another scene locator down at street level and another one inside this car which is another animated object and one more Scene locator up in the sky which is going to be a drone shot so I'm going to scale that by 100 times to get a much more exaggerated camera move so what needs to happen now is my scene needs to be exported from Unreal Engine in USD format then I'm going to use another piece of software called autoshot which is going to convert the USD into a USD Z file which is going to be read by the jetset app on the iPhone jetset already have a ton of really detailed tutorials on their website which are really easy to follow so I'll link them in the description below wow we need to take this outside so here we are wide open space this is what I wanted to do now my scene is a city so I wanted to see if I could go for a walk around it not something that I can do in a home studio it's dumb I know probably no one is going to do this but it was my first thought can I walk around my environment so I'm going to load up the app let's have a go I've come a long way for this but this is probably the point where it crashes come on oh okay I think we're good so now I can have a look around it'll scan the environment the grid gets bigger and I should just be able to tap on the grid that sets my ground plane and yes we are in my environment but I'm currently at the origin there's basically nothing there so I'm going to select a scene locator and put myself at street level and here we are so there's my cabby car all the buildings all around I can just look around and there's a really cool little slider here called the ghost slider which I can just slide down and go half and half between the real world and the virtual world if I just put it right on the edge of half and half I can basically get a bit of a replacement which I quite like I like that if I don't want to be facing in this particular direction I just need to click on origin and I can just spin that around with my finger there here we are there's my car it's right here and I can just peer through the window I'm just go for a walk down the [Music] street wow you can just see how the environment and the buildings in the virtual world just stick track together that's great to look at I'm going to go visit a shop we'll be right back now you'll see this is not displaying the lighting information from Unreal Engine this is more like unlit mode with preview materials the meshes are full quality which is amazing and these are kit bash meshes by the way so these are really dense and I'm quite impressed that they're playing back on a phone in the first place but the point point of this isn't to do things perfectly and to see everything in full quality it's to iterate quickly come up with shots do takes and then when you want to see them in full quality you can get them from Jet Set over into Unreal Engine to play back or do renders with path Tracer this was really worth it but it's very cold so I'm just going to go back to the studio the nice warm studio and load these takes into Unreal Engine it's good to be back in the warm now obviously you don't have to leave your studio if you don't want to that's not what this is about I just know how easy it is to get a bit too cozy being outside in the real world with the phone in onetoone scale with the virtual world start to make it feel a bit more real and I started to get that Vibe of real physical location scouting again which is a nice feeling and it only really occurred to me since I've been playing with this app that I get some of my better ideas when I'm out of the confines of the studio which means that if I have an idea and I want to test out a shot or change a focal length or just play I can just pull that phone out and try it and I don't have to fire up the full Studio to do it and I know what some of you are thinking you're thinking Josh this isn't new there are apps that already do lots of these things but I haven't really scratched the surface with this yet actually I've just been talking about the basic features they have a whole other tier called Jet Set cine which takes this from a fun previs tool into something that Studios can use in a pro workflow and a superpower by the way that I haven't seen in any other virtual production app now if you're interested in film making with unrealized engine or virtual production in general then watch this video next cuz I break down the process from start to finish and the end results will give you an idea what's possible in a really short space of time see you there

Channel: Joshua M Kerr

Views: 20,064

Keywords: virtual production, unreal engine, virtual production unreal engine, virtual production setup, iphone virtual production, iphone camera tracking, iphone 3d tracking, virtual production technology, unreal engine iphone, unreal engine iphone camera tracking, unreal engine iphone virtual camera, virtual production at home, virtual production unreal engine 5

Id: 4ZedAk4K4AE

Length: 7min 40sec (460 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 17 2024