#UE5 Series: How to Make Movies in Unreal Engine

hello everyone my name is Reza and welcome to another Unreal Engine tutorial in this video I'll show you how to use the sequencer tool to make movies inside on real engine 5. the good news is Unreal Engine has got a very robust cinematic tool to produce animated and cinematic sequences you can pilot cameras to create level fly-throughs animate lights move objects animate characters render output sequences and so much more guess what that's exactly what we're going to focus on in this tutorial it's been suggested by many of you in the past couple of months so without any further Ado let's get started [Music] thank you all right let's talk about the scene that I'm going to use in this tutorial uh this scene is available inside epic games you can just simply navigate search for icvfx production test in the search box have access to the scene and download it so you can follow along it's a great scene by the way and works really well with what we have for this session foreign [Music] cinematics and animation inside unreal we need to start with a level sequencer now level sequencer in Unreal Engine is a tool that allows us to directly animate characters cameras properties even actors over time first question how can we create a level sequencer we have two ways of doing this one is through content drawer so with the content selected I'm just going to right click create a folder and call this cinematics I'm just going to double click in there to create my level sequence I'm going to right click go into cinematics and level sequence so that's one way of creating that non-linear editing environment the second way which is a kind of easier way is to click on this button and this little arrow left click add level sequence no matter what way you go you still need to name it and save the asset so I'm just going to click on it and I'm going to go into cinematics and that's why I created this folder I'm going to call this CI VFX underscore level sequence and I'm going to save there we have our level sequence window with the help of this level sequence window we can create camera animation we can apply animation to our characters we can animate lights in the scene and we can enable particles at this point I'm just going to focus on camera animation but there will be featured videos on this channel to talk about other ways of using a level sequence inside on real engine 5. now first things first how to create a camera now normal cameras inside unreal are called cine camera actors and we have just like any other functions inside on real engine we have multiple ways of creating the same node let's see how we can find and create cine camera actor first one is to go into add and then we go to cinematic and we have cine camera actor next method which is my favorite is to Simply click on this little camera icon and that creates a new Scenic camera actor for us let's see what's going to happen if I just click on it couple of things just happened first things first we were actually in the camera viewport you can see it says pilot active CNA camera actor the second thing that happened that we have a cine camera actor enabled and it's under camera cuts and that camera Cuts it's like a big container and that holds all the cameras that we have in this particular scene well that's cool let's have a look at the second way of creating this so I'm just gonna delete these guys I'm just going to go and create cinematic cine camera actor click on it and there we have our camera but this method you may have noticed that we don't have anything in here which can be quite surprising we have a tiny viewport of the camera in here so the camera is not set to Pilot as a matter of fact I can just select the camera and press f and sort of rotate around it there we have the camera and this icon right here is our level sequence so I can just select the level sequence move it aside so we have the camera and we have the viewport and there is no camera Cuts because every time you just put an asset into the viewport you have to attach that to your camera Cuts with the camera selected I'm going to go to track actor to sequence and because I've already selected the camera Unreal Engine is smart enough to know that all right probably I want to connect this item to my level sequence if I click the same thing happens the big container camera Cuts will get produced and then underneath that we have our cine camera actor number two and again it's set to Paladin so you can see same thing we we deal with the exact same output at the end just slightly different ways of creating things so you either click on this or you go into cinematic cine actor camera and then you have to connect that to your sequencer all right now the next thing is how can we jump out of the pilot mode because right now it's set to Pilot this is actually we're looking through our camera how we can jump out very simple first way of doing this is just by to click on this little icon there and all of a sudden we stop piloting right now so if I zoom back there we have our cine camera now if I want to jump back to Pilot again I can either click on this little lock Cena camera icon to jump back into the piloting or I can if I just zoom back and rotate I can actually right click and say pilot cine camera actor 2. so two easy ways of doing this I'm just going to jump out one is to click on this lock and the second one is to actually right clicking and go pilot camera actor now believe it or not there is a third method and that method is my favorite and that is Ctrl shift p for pilot now if I just select the camera Ctrl shift p now I'm piloting Ctrl shift p again toggle back pilot ink and stop piloting so you can see the shortcut is actually the easiest one to use and if I go in here again with the camera selected right click on it you can see Ctrl shift p is there as our shortcut and so that's how you actually look through your camera or jump out of your camera to be in the working environment now another thing and actually common question that I get from students is every time you select your camera so let's say I'm just going to go in here and select my camera I get this viewport now it's a sort of a double-edged sword where some artists actually do need that window some artists actually don't need this window when they are in the working area they just don't want to have any clutter and they want to make it smaller or at some point they may want to have it actually bigger but you can see there is no way to resize this window that's another sort of a hidden attribute that I would like to show you to how to resize this and that attribute is not actually in the viewport it's in the settings so you can go to edit and then editor preferences I'm just going to bring the windows here inside a level editor we have viewports if I click on it and under look and feel look what we have camera preview size so if I somehow bring this little guy over here so you can sort of see both of them I can just click here and go six seven and hopefully you can see how this viewport gets bigger or I can do the opposite I can go in there and just put in for I notice that any value below 4 makes this viewport really really small for example if you go three it is really tiny and I barely can see anything so it kind of defeats the purpose but again that's something that you actually can do you can see it's more like an icon now as opposed to a viewport the default value is five you can of course at any point of time set as default um or you restore to default if you feel like you're not quite sure you want to set back everything back to default or if you wish to continue with your preferred viewport size that's how you do it all right I'm just going to close the edit preferences window and let's have a look at the camera attributes itself I mean if I select the camera and look at the right hand side in the details window you can see a lot is going on here actually [Music] now I'm going to sort of scroll down we can see we have film back as our first rollout and that is pretty much the preset for our camera bodies so you can specify a sensor width and height properties in order to sort of emulate the selected camera body and based on that cameras the field of view will change the aspect ratio will change we've got some presets for example you can go to Super 8 millimeter and you can see how aspect ratio is now changing you can go six to nine film you can go to whatever you have for example IMAX 70 millimeter and all of a sudden your aspect ratio will change to that so basically it changes the sensor width and height and sensor aspect ratio that's that lens settings is probably uh one of the useful ones that you use all the time and that gives you a list of real world preset camera lenses to choose from so if I go in here we actually have accurate a camera lens prime lens which will affect the focal lens will affect the f-stop because you can see f-stop 1.8 for example where the aperture gets really wide these are very expensive lenses in in real life F 1.4 30 millimeter it's actually that's what I have at home with my R6 camera so you can see these are actually accurate lenses so I can sort of Select that and all of a sudden I get 30 millimeter prime lens 1.4 aperture I can go and do tele105 or 100 millimeter Prime f-stop two point or two 2.4 or 2. so this is really cool you have access to camera lenses and that really increases the accuracy of what you're doing uh for now I'm just going to set it to a very popular 85 millimeter Prime F 1.8 there is one 1.2 which is about four or five thousand dollars so 1.8 ah I'm not too crazy about it but we'll get the job done then we have Focus settings so if I Collapse that we have Focus setting here and that Focus setting is pretty cool let me just uh get into the piloting so I'm just going to go in there Ctrl shift p to Pilot and if I just move the camera you can see if I for example go in here let me just do that you can see I can play around with depth of field so the cool thing about that is it actually controls the depth of field and your focus settings and you have few options the first one is do not override which basically disables the depth of field altogether so everything is in focus and then we have manual which is quite useful I can just play around with the depth of field and you can see how accurately I can just specify the range so near ground is out of focus right now and then I can lower this and now near ground is in Focus so at any point of time uh there there's a lot you can do for example if I go in here again I can change and you can also sample it with this eyedropper click on specific items and bring it in Focus but it's um it's really easy to just uh play around with this attribute and just get this done there is a visual way of doing this as well using this debug Focus plane where you can actually see how much of it is in Focus you can see this color tells you that this portion is in focus and the remaining of it is out of focus so you can kind of see that visually how this works again if you have problems with that you can just use this eyedropper click on certain objects and sort of sample it I can just move around go into another area and just bring the camera ever so slightly closer so we have sort of a near ground middle ground and background now it's actually quite easy to see how this plane visually speaks to us so you can see only this portion is in Focus which is quite useful so make sure to sort of enable the camera oriented transparent plane in here to be able to see what is in Focus what's not in Focus or alternative videos this eyedropper we've got crop settings and as the name suggests it controls the crop settings here you can actually crop your screen based on the aspect ratio that you have I'm going to set it to no crop but probably the biggest selling point in here is the post process built in inside the camera and each camera gets to have a an individual post process which overwrites your overall post process volume within the scene which is really really cool so I can just go in there and go to for example color grading and go into Shadows and scroll all the way down and say you know what I'm going to go with gamma and I'm going to sort of reduce that gamma and I'm going to get slightly darker uh Shadows for my own scene now this will not have an impact on the scene itself you only see that in this camera you can go in there and change all of these attributes you can say all right you know what I'm just going to use a different method of lighting for this particular camera so you have that level of control over it you can just say all right for Reflections I'm going to use Lumen and for this particular camera I would like to use a much higher quality of reflection so when you render from this camera you'll be getting a much higher quality for your reflection so it's a really camera based type of attribute that you're dealing with and it's just absolutely amazing you can just increase the global saturation for example here coming here increase the global saturation ever so slightly change the global gamma ever so slightly add grain at offset and at temperature change the white balance per camera all sorts of things that you can do per camera so that gives you as a user great deal of flexibility where you really don't need to hit the nail on the hill with your post processing volume you can always tweak things further per camera believe it or not it's actually fairly easy to animate your scene I'm gonna go to the very first frame now you position your camera wherever you want I can actually zoom in ever so slightly and I feel like I can do much better with my lens so I'm just going to go in here and switch to maybe 30. I think that works a lot better for this particular scene and maybe bring back the post process so I think I changed a few things in here namely saturation so I'm just going to bring that one back that looked a little bit unusual so with that out of the way I have in my level sequence a rollout called transform and guess what that is in charge of translating rotating and scaling any asset on this timeline in this particular case I'm just going to change the position or location of this current camera so I'm just going to bring everything into the very first frame and I'm going to go to locate and add a key then I'm gonna go move all the way to the last frame of the sequence and just bring the camera closer now you can either press enter But enter is going to sort of keyframe the selected Channel which is transform this will add a keyframe on location rotation and scale still okay but I prefer to manually click on the location again and I have a start frame and I have an end frame location so I have a brand new keyframe so that's what I'm getting if I play you can see the camera moves now it's a little bit fast for my taste so at any point of time you can select your keyframe you can delete it snap it to frame or re-key I'm just going to delete it and this time I'm just going to move in bring this to the center ever so slightly I don't think I want to move too far and do another keyframe location keyframe now I'm going to bring it back and play and you can see I have a decent pace but it's speeding up and slowing down we call that ease in and ease out if you want to see the transition you can actually click on this button which shows the curve editor I'm gonna go in here select location and you can see X Y and Z we have ease in Andy's out so it goes slowly speeds up and slows down and it happens in X in Y and Z one way of doing this or fixing this rather is to select the tangent and just middle Mouse bring this down or add another keyframe if you're not sure what you're doing this may lead into some inconsistencies a much easier way is to select all of these guys right click on it and go I want this to be linear now if I go and open the curve editor location you can see our X Y and Z do not have any easing and ease out anymore single click job done let's play that again so if I play you can see it works beautifully there is no ease in and is out fantastic it's that simple you do the exact same thing when you rotate the camera we usually don't scale the camera but of course if you have an object and add it to your sequencer then you can keyframe the scale using the same method let's go to the next chapter now in this one I would like to show you how to add the second camera because you may say well res I know how to create the second camera now I'm just going to extend this scene right here so I can just go in here and extend this scene I'm gonna put the cursor right here and I'm going to create a second camera now the first thing that will catch your eyes is what just happened because for the first camera I can actually see the track but the sequencer did not actually add my second camera well first things first let's not get ahead of ourselves let's just go ahead and fix the second camera right now I'm piloting the new camera let's actually go in here and rename I'm going to call that cam 2. and the first one I'm just going to call that cam one now right now cam 2 has not been used and because I just created using this button cam 1 and cam2 look absolutely identical so they are positioning exactly on the same location I so don't want that so I'm just going to move in and I'm going to pick another spot Maybe this door right here I'm gonna Zoom back so again I have a sort of a near ground element I would like to have a near ground element and sort of frame my composition something like that again I'm going to go in here and play around with the depth of field a little bit cool now the door is in Focus I'm happy with the second camera but again the problem is still there where is the track because I created the first camera I can see the track I can see the thumbnail where's the second one well that's the thing every time we create a second camera you actually need to go into camera and you need to add that so go to camera and that gives you the second track now here's the thing if I go and Rewind all we see is the second camera where is the first camera well always look at this lock icon so right now we're locking into camera two you can lock into camera one which in that case you're not going to see camera 2 instead or you can log into the big container which is our camera Cuts if I do that now I see both of them so if I go in here actually why don't I select the second camera and do a little bit of an animation so that's going to be really really simple I'm just going to go into the first frame I'm gonna go into location and add a keyframe I'm going to go all the way here and I'm just going to pile it and just keyframe it location keyframe select both keyframes set it to linear now we're talking Let's Play Now using the lock for camera Cuts so I'm just going to rewind that is my first camera and then we cut to the second camera simple as that now I still need to show you one last trick before I show you how to export this as a video and that is to use shots in the master sequences of course this is totally viable you still can continue with that the problem is if you have more than a couple of shots then it becomes a little bit of a headache you can see this is not really sustainable um this timeline this camera Cuts timeline is getting really stretched and we just talked about non-linear editing and everyone thinks okay so it's like DaVinci and Premiere but it's not looking like a DaVinci or Premiere when you have track so let's go to the next chapter and see how we can make this workflow even more efficient foreign let's look for a more efficient way of creating or producing shots the way that I approach this is I consider each level sequence the shot and then I'll import them into a Master Level sequence hope that makes sense so I'm just going to go into this level sequence now I'm going to open this up and I'm going to create a camera let's say that's the camera I have and I'm just going to transform it so I'm just going to go and key it and I'm going to adjust the depth of field foreign to the end and ever so slightly I'm going to zoom in and enter or set a key for location so I have other keyframes for rotation and scale I can get rid of them selecting these two and have linear so if I go here I've got a very simple shock cool so that can be one shot I can go in there and say um you know what I'm just going to rename you to shot one let's produce another shot going to cinematic level sequence and I'm going to call this guy shot two double click on it and I'm gonna produce a brand new camera now I'm gonna reposition that I'm gonna pick a different spot obviously this time um maybe the good old door that we used in the previous chapters I'm just going to zoom in and and by the way if the gizmos and reflection and blockers and all the light gizmos are on your way you know what to do you can press G to hide them right but for now I really don't mind just so you know that option is available to you I'm gonna do a quick animation in here too [Music] so if I go and zoom back and press space that's the animation I have and this area is in Focus so I have shot to ready let's produce another one so level sequence I'm going to call that shot three I'm gonna open it I'm gonna produce a camera and let's pick another area maybe a zoom in of one of these guys and this time I'm going to ever so slightly Zoom back so I'm going to go in here zoom in a little bit and playing around with depth of field just a little bit I can sort of Zoom back a little bit now I go to here switch all the way into transform and key going to the end and zoom back ever so slightly and location key select both linear let's have a look not too bad and that's my third shot so we have one two three let's put these three into a master camera sequence why not so I'm just gonna go here and I'm gonna create a level sequence called this master seq for sequence and let's bring them in here now to bring them as shots I go track and produce a short track and then this shot asks for number of shots and guess what I have shot one shot two and shot three I'll bring shot one there we have it shot one is there I can extend my timeline so I extend my timeline quite a fair bit so I can go all the way in and extend it all the way to 600. now shot one is there let's go to the end of the frame and bring in our second shot now you can see it's kind of similar to what we have in Adobe Premiere so you can actually go in here and select all of these shots and go from one shot to another shot let's bring our third shot so I'm just going to go into shots click and obviously I need to be at the end of this guy go into short and I'm going to bring my shot three which is the close-up one so again I'm gonna lock it to shots as you can see and if I zoom back and Rewind and play shot one shot two and shot three so um I personally think this is a much cleaner way of working you can actually bring this guy out and if you have a second monitor you can actually use that as your second Monitor and have total control over a number of shots and that gives you a much cleaner workflow and much easier way of working now with that out of the way let's see how we can export what we have and turn it into a video the aim is to go for Quality when we want to render it so first thing I'm gonna do I'm gonna find my post process volume well if you are actually editing the built-in post process volume Within These shots then that's fine but if you don't overwrite your main post process volume then it's a good idea to just Target the scene post process volume so I'm going to type in post process and it's inside rendering post process volume and within that we are going to change a couple of a couple of attributes so if I just type in Lumen because finding things can be quite difficult with Lumen Global we have a final gather quality I can set this one to four scene details I can set this one to four lumenscene lighting quality I can set this one to four you can see we're sort of cranking up some of these attributes because at this stage how well the scene functions doesn't really matter because we want to actually bake everything into video we also need to look after reflection so if I go to reflection enable quality I can set this one to four but again these things are going to work in a condition and that condition is we kind of need to have a ray tracing on in our scene to do that we need to go to the project settings so I'm going to go to settings and then I go to Project settings and under platform we need to check one thing chances are it's correct but just in case under platform Windows you just need to make sure that your default r h i is set to DirectX and that allows you to enable Ray tracing now because it's just such a long window and I don't want to freak you out I'm just going to type in Ray tracing and use Hardware Ray tracing when available on the Lumen can be turned on perfect we can now close the window sometimes the engine asks you to restart everything which is totally fine and you can see right away that we see a we have a much better vibrant result right now now let's see how we can render our project to do that you can either go to Windows cinematic movie render queue and bring your movie render queue window or alternatively you can click on this icon and bring your movie render queue now it says I'm going to for now only render Master sequence which is exactly what we want you don't want to render only shot one only Shot 2 only shot 3 you would like to render all three now um we have settings we have output now if you look at here it says inside your project directory you have a folder name saved and inside that movie renders that is going to render everything for you so this is the um main project directory inside that saved and within that it's going to basically render everything in there now you may say okay so what about file extensions resolution so on and so forth that's where this setting comes to play and it says unsaved configuration meaning that you haven't changed anything so if you're happy with the default then go ahead and render but usually you kind of don't know what's going on so you better click on this first and it says all right you're about to render jpeg sequence you may say well I don't want jpeg in that case you can turn it off go to settings and say you know what I want to get PNG instead or you may want to get exr which is well High bit depth much more accurate result you're gonna get with this but I'm happy with PNG and again in the output is where you specify the resolution so 1920 to 1080 which kind of matches the um with a high ratio and the sensor width and height that I specified for my cameras and you go in there and you say frames handle frame count zero and you can use a custom playback range so you have a sort of start frame and end frame if you just want to render chunk of your animation uh the output frame rate is 24 per second you can use a custom frame rate um I live in Australia and it's usually 25 frames per second so that's what I'm gonna go with so if I go accept not much is going to change but basically it's going to apply your changes to all three shots as you can see the sequences that it's going to go through is the master sequence and everything is ready to go you specified the output directory and if I bring this guy over here and say render so uh let's wait for this to be finished well it's already finished um I can close that if I go in here there is a movie renders and if I go in there you can see I've got the sequence is all ready to go so if I bring this guy right here you can see that I've got the frame sequence all ready to go so let's put this in Adobe Premiere really quick and render this out all right here I am inside Adobe Premiere all I need to do is just to right click go to import and bring the whole thing as an image sequence I have the sequence I need to create the timeline so drag and drop it in here to create a sequence I'm going to press backslash to have that framed and there we have it I can play now you can see the animation plays and I have all three cameras in there camera One camera two and camera three I can select this timeline press Ctrl M and output the result I'm gonna go with the default 1080 HD I don't have any audio so I can turn this off I can go and save it on my desktop under master sequence and export and here's the result that's pretty much it I mean I hope you found this video useful I hope you guys use these techniques in your own projects and enjoyed this video again thank you very much for your support you can always follow me on Instagram Twitter Reddit and other social platforms to keep up with the upcoming video tutorials do make suggestions and please leave feedback I always would like to know how I do and have a great rest of your day stay safe until the next video see you guys later

Channel: SARKAMARI

Views: 121,020

Keywords: ue5.1 lumen, ue5.1 path tracing, unreal engine 5.1 tutorial, unreal engine 5.1 lumen, level sequencer ue5, level sequencer unreal engine, rendering in unreal engine 5, rendering in unreal engine, rendering in unreal 5, product rendering in unreal, how to animate camera in unreal engine 5, how to move camera in unreal engine 5, how to set camera in unreal engine 5, how to animate camera in unreal engine 4, how to move camera in unreal engine 4, unreal engine 5 tutorial

Id: 07WeQroJFtI

Length: 42min 41sec (2561 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 08 2023