#UE5 Series: Using Camera Rigs in Unreal Engine

hello everyone Reza here and welcome to another Unreal Engine tutorial in this one I'm going to explain how to create camera rails and crane rigs to produce smooth sweeping shots for your cinematic inside this amazing application to be able to follow along you need to have an understanding of the CNA camera actor and you need to know how to create camera animation within level sequencer we have covered both topics on this channel so it should be easy for you guys to just follow along it's going to be a very fun session and I hope you guys enjoy it so let's get started [Music] thank you as usual I'm going to start with the scene that I'm going to use for this tutorial I've downloaded this scene through epic games Marketplace and it's called Wild West City all credits to sidearm Studios this amazing scene offers anything and everything I want and it's just the right fit for this project so I've already added this to my brand new scene and I'm going to switch back to Unreal Engine 5 so we can start with our tutorial all right here I am inside the application I would like to focus on the camera rail first and the camera rail sort of emulates a camera Dolly system in real life so if I were to sort of move the camera like this in an arc fashion and create um a cinematic like that one way of doing this is to create a cine camera and keyframe it over time multiple times create a level sequence but you have a lot of keyframes to go through a lot of tangents to play around with and it's just a headache still possible but it takes time that's why we have a camera rail which is quite popular in cinematography in real life and cinematographers actually use that to create these type of movements all right enough with that let's create our camera and hopefully you all have watched how to create movies inside on real Engine 5 on this channel so you know how to create a camera and how to put that on to our level sequencer so I'm just gonna go in here and create a folder new folder called this cinematics and that's going to hold all the shots first shot is going to be a level sequence shot one let's open it and create our cine camera all right I'm piloting so I can just zoom back and sort of fix the angle maybe something like that is what I want I'm going to play around with the composition ever so slightly something like this is good enough um 16 by nine is the film back Universal Zoom you can use let's say 30 millimeter if you want with um 1.4 aperture size but for now that should do the trick you can go in here and change your focus settings for example have this door in focus and just play around with depth of field if you want but for now um I don't mind you can do all of this later I just want to have a camera right click on it I'm going to rename that of course F2 does the exact same thing shot one cine cam that is all sorted let's bring in our rail to bring a rail you go to create you go to all classes and you create camera rail there we have the camera rail even the shape of it looks very similar to a camera Dolly system in real life so great job on this unreal I'm still piloting I would like to move around without messing up my composition so I'm going to click on this eject button and snap back to my working camera and let's find my camera Rail and here's my actual camera so if I press f that is kinda accurate we're getting a little bit of artifact I believe from the landscape yep that is landscape I'm just going to hide it for now no distraction we want to render it we can always search it in the search bar bring it back and it shows up in the render and of course a little bit sidetracking here but you can of course enhance the engine scalability settings set it to cinematic chances are it goes away anyhow uh it won't show in the render so we don't really care now with this camera rail if I frame it you can see that we can change the length right now the length is not really working for us what we want is some sort of an arc looking shape so you have two points to to play around with start point and end point and these are on Unreal Engine blueprint splines so as soon as you hear the word spline you need to know that it comes with in and out tangents you can change the interpolation by selecting the tangents very similar to how you change the function curves inside a graph editor or animation curve editor so that is good this means accuracy wouldn't say no to that now let's extend the length of this because right now it's just very very short at any point of time we can hold down alt on the end curve and create a second point but I will show you a better way of doing this so I'm going to extend this further and further and further I can line it up and you can see I'm not really touching the Z axis up Axis I want this to be on an imaginary plane extend it ever so slightly that is good now this point right here if I zoom in this point right here is actually not a middle point it's a tangent so I can select this and point the tangent out you can see that's a quite an interesting way of changing or adding to the curvature like so again I'm not really touching the z-axis trying to really work with this imaginary X Y plane so kind of getting the arc that I want but it would be nice to have a point right in the middle and of course you can have that right click at a point here voila I'm going to just move this out ever so slightly and with that now I need to go and fix the tangents right here so select the tangent and Point selecting the tangent and getting this out fantastic beautiful so that's all good there are two steps I need to make to put this camera on this rail because right now this camera is a separate entity this rail doesn't even understand the camera doesn't know the camera is even here so first step I need to attach the camera to the rail in the scene in the outliner via the outliner second step is I actually need to put the rail in my sequencer because how on Earth I'm going to access that if it's not in the sequencer first step to attach the camera left click drag onto the rail and guess what it's done so the indentation you can see that rail is now holding the camera and if I select the camera scroll up and freeze its Transformations you can see it actually snaps right at the beginning of the rail now sometimes you actually do see the rail itself in the view which I think is going to be the case I don't see it here weirdly enough but I should if that happens not to worry going here and show rail visualization turn it off so all you see is just a vector really easy to sort of toggle this on and off it's just a visibility in the viewport and if it gets underway then why not I'm going to turn it off to be safe I'm not going to gamble on that the rail itself has got this current position on rail zero is at the beginning of the rail and one is right at the end of the rail right here how cool is that but before I get too excited on this let's put the rail into the sequencer so I'm going to select the cam with the camera selected I'm going to go to track attach new binding because I want to bind these two together inside the sequencer and let's find our camera rail there you go our camera rail is now officially part of our sequencer how cool is that so that actually allows me to see the attachment inside the camera cinecam so you can see I can um fit that to the whole sequence right here say I'm going to increase this sequence to 300 and if I go in here I can now extend this shot all the way I can extend my timeline all the way I can extend the camera to fit and as soon as I do that you can see the attached rail actually tags along without me doing really anything How cool is that so that is really handy remember two steps one is to do it within the outliner and the second one is to bring it and bind it to the camera so you get to see it in here and you can actually keyframe it because we're about to keyframe it now let's see how actually it functions because we actually didn't get to see that so if you go under rail control current position if I remove that you can see it actually moves now this is really cool and this icon in here tells me that I can actually keyframe it so I'm going to go to frame 0 and set a key and you can see current position on rail is here here and frame 0 then I go all the way to the end frame and bring this one back to the end result and set another key that looks cool I like that I'm just gonna snap or lock to the camera to just look what I just did and I'm gonna go and play looks cool but I have a problem with this and that is the camera doesn't actually Orient or Bank the way that I want it just fixated on a position or a point and doesn't rotate wouldn't that be nice for this camera to just stay locked at this door or look at this door well there is an option on your camera to aim constrain your camera to an object if I click on this camera the first roll out is look at tracking settings you can turn this on and you can actually specify what you want to look at add to the track you can actually pick the object manually and if you have no idea what object you want to pick you can actually select this eyedropper you know what I want to pick this r chair use three click and that is right here so now if I play you can see how it stays or stairs rather at the door as we move how cool is that I love the movement I'm just going to rewind and redo that again now in the next chapter we are going to explore camera crane so this is more like an x-axis a next one that we're going to introduce actually do up and down and gives us the z-axis up and down type of movement so let's go to the next chapter and see how we can bring in a crane rig into our scene [Music] all right we are going to continue with our tutorial and add our camera rig crane into this scene and we are going to attach our camera to the crane now the camera recrain actor in Unreal Engine 5 is there and is used to emulate a boom arm or camera jib system in real life which is used to create a crane shots in in movies and cinematics so we are going to make use of this actor inside on real engine to get the same effect which can be pivoted along horizontal and vertical axis so in this case we are going to Target Z but we can actually have that side to side movement as well now to add crane rig to our level wealth first things first we need to create our level so I'm just going to go in here cinematic level sequence I'm going to call that shot 2. double-click to go inside the sequencer and create our cine camera I'm going to right click and rename this really quick Shot 2 cinecom and we're good to go we have the camera ready just going to fix that naming a little bit all right the camera is there let's add our cream I'm going to stop piloting and go to all classes same location camera rig Crane and there we have our crane there are two main attributes in that crane if I frame this one is the horizontal movement which is crane yaw and the other one is crane pitch which is up and down or vertical movement um I am going to actually rotate that let's see probably bring that into our scene right here all right it is close enough let's attach the camera to the rail so just like the camera rig rail I'm just going to left click and drag and drop it into our crane you can see it's now attached I'm gonna go and freeze transformation on my camera so you can see the position of my camera has changed the camera is now positioned properly and the good thing is if I select my crane it now moves with my crane and that's what I want excellent now with that out of the way it's time to actually bring the camera into my composition so I can set up my keyframes so I am going to select the camera and give myself a little bit more frames for example 300 should do the trick I'm going to extend the timeline and then with the camera selected I'm going to go to track attach new binding and I'm going to find my camera rig crane fantastic it's attached if I zoom back and scroll down you can see camera recurring is also connected to our level sequencer under shot 2. so we're good to go um the only thing that I need to do now is to actually lock my camera because right now if I just change the pitch to have that up and down movement maybe I'm not going to get really what I want because the camera is not really locked on a particular object so maybe this building is what I want my camera to look at at all times so enable look at tracking is on and I'm going to pick this hotel to be the object of Interest so this camera is going to track it at all time now I can go to frame zero and select my camera rig and maybe move it up ever so slightly something like 35 should do the trick and I'm going to add a keyframe you can see keyframe has been added I'm going to go all the way to the end frame and lower this value to something like minus 20. and add a key and don't forget to turn that into linear again we discussed these tricks in the previous video when we talked about level sequencer so I'm just going to make that keyframe linear and that should do the trick I'm just going to lock my camera well of course I can actually lock it to the camera itself now we're piloting and let's play you can see the type of movement that we're getting just to showcase the asset or assets that may we may have in the scene now you can give that a slide up and down and a little bit of left to right as well so I can kind of go from here to here so for probably 20 to minus 40. so let's do that I'm just going to move that here set that to -40 for Crane yaw I'm going to assign a keyframe or add a keyframe I'm going to go in here and set that to 20. and add a keyframe I'm going to set that to linear so I don't have any ease in and ease out and let's rewind and play again you can see we are getting a slightly more interesting results I may actually overwrite the pitch so I'm going to go all the way to minus 30 maybe minus 35 I really like this bridge to be included in here and I'm going to go to the very first keyframe and maybe I will go to something like 40 and insert the keyframe now let's rewind and see again yeah that's definitely a much better angle I can even go to minus 40 or minus 30. and insert a keyframe gonna go in here and 45 insert a keyframe yeah that looks a lot better I'm going to select all of these guys and do another round of yeah that definitely looks good something is not right actually in here probably because yep my guess was right I inserted two keyframes instead of one so this one was -30 this one is -20 so I'm just going to include that minus 30 it is good now let's check this one last time so it's a sort of a diagonal movement that I have in the scene [Music] perfect it works just fine um now our job is done I'm just going to create a cinematic call this master and then I'm just going to go to shop track and bring in my shots shot one and I'm going to give myself maybe 600. and that should do the trick and the end will go all the way here now I put the frame head at the end and let's produce put in the second shot and go to the shot Master to view the whole thing and I'm just going to rewind and play again so this is shot one and we're now moving to shot two I believe shot one is a little bit um too fast compared to shot two maybe that's something that we can definitely look into and fix so I'm gonna go into the position of the crane for shot one maybe the timing should be a little bit more so 500 that now it's not 300 it's not 500 it's 400 something but it it's going to move slightly slower that is a lot better so probably in our Master shot now I kind of need to think about it if I extend it like so I can just move that here and adjust my non-linear editing workflow so you can see how easy that is to create something like that also while I'm at it I can add a fade track now the way fade works is actually really simple you go to the very first frame and uh your fade is set to one so it's pitch black and you move forward and you keyframe it and you set it to zero so again of course I can go in here and set that one also to linear now if I play you can see we get a fade I'm gonna lock and watch everything now we have a fade shot one and shot two so you can see movements like this can take a very long time if you want to manually keyframe it and hand animate it but with this really it's not taking much time and you're having fun and you have lots of flexibility at your disposal I'm going to render queue these two shots and then I'll bring it into Adobe Premiere and export it out and here's the result I hope you found this video useful and use a camera rigs in your projects and enhance the quality of your cinematic thank you very much for your support and until the next video see you guys later

Channel: SARKAMARI

Views: 26,434

Keywords: ue5.1 lumen, camera rig in unreal engine 4, camera rig in unreal engine, camera rig unreal engine, camera rig rail unreal engine, level sequencer unreal engine 5, level sequencer ue5, level sequencer unreal engine, no active level sequencer detected ue5, unreal engine 5 tutorial, unreal engine 5 demo, unreal engine 5 fortnite, unreal engine cinematic tutorial, unreal engine cinematic animation, unreal engine cinematic camera, game engines for beginners, unreal engine 5.1

Id: vs3K9ZckMZ4

Length: 27min 6sec (1626 seconds)

Published: Sat Feb 25 2023