Unreal 5 Secrets Every Filmmaker Must Know

Unreal Engine is great for film making but the last thing you want is for your renders to look like a video game so why don't your 3D renders look as cinematic as your favorite movies it's not because of the software it's because of your Technique all you need is Unreal Engine 5 and these three tips that you can start applying right after this video so if you're ready to stop playing games and start making movies subscribe to the channel and together we'll break down three unreal secrets to create cinematic photo real renders what's up my name is Josh tunin and for the last 8 years I've worked on Hollywood visual effects as an artist and supervisor on movies like Star Wars Dungeons and Dragons and across the spiderverse and I started using Unreal Engine 5 on set in Virtual production and to create animated films of my own so I want to share three secrets that I learned from an upcoming Mr free short film made entirely an Unreal Engine that you can use to immediately improve your renders now a lot of people have asked me how do I make my renders look cinematic and if I had to give the answer in one word it would be lighting now I've already made some in-depth lighting tutorials that you can check out but I want to share one of my favorite resources shot deck here you can find high resolution stills from your favorite movies and analyze why and where they place the lights if you look at all of these different movies you'll notice one thing in common all we have is a person standing in a room and yet some shots look boring and others look cinematic so what's the difference it's the lighting usually the more Dynamic the lighting looks the simpler the lighting setup is in this case it's literally just one key light that's lighting up this entire scene or in shots like this there's just one main light overhead lighting up his face and another one coming from the side so that we get this Rim light on the side of his forehead and across the back of his shirt so cinematic lighting doesn't come from putting a ton of Lights in your scene it's from putting one to three lights in the right places and often times you just want to light 1/2 of the face by making sure one side has light and the other has Shadow it's really important to create contrast between the brightest parts of your image and the darkest parts and the bigger difference between these two the more contrast you'll have so let's break down this lightting set up one light at a time the first light are these overhead lights creating a lot of nice backl and also fill light across the scene directly coming from these fluorescent lights in the background these are just images of fluorescent lights placed in the scene and plugging them into the emissive channel and letting that do all of the hard work the next light is this overhead key light which is really here to help separate Victor from the background we want to avoid a completely monochromatic image so getting a little bit of a warmer light in here helps separate him from the green background the third light is our Rim light and this is just brought in to get a little more punch and style and Edge out of our character and again you can see this really starts to light up the edge here and we want to brighten up Victor's face so our attention goes directly to him and then as an accent and to incorporate the glowing eyes into the scene I wanted to add in this red underlight which helps tie everything together we get a little bit more color and it almost appears like the light is being cast from his eyes onto the bridge of his eyebrows and with these four simple lights we went from a fairly monochromatic simple scene into something Dynamic and full of contrast and color but here's where a lot of people get it wrong right now we're looking at still images or photographs but if you want to make movies and Cinema then you have to make your images move and we can do that by adding movement into our lights let's jump into this scene with Mr Freeze and check out how the first technique was taking this rope simulation and adding a light to it by creating this simple physics interaction using a physics constraint and recording it using take recorder and by parenting a light to this simple interaction we get this subtle but effective light animation throughout our entire shot and you can see the Shadows move across Victor's face the other technique is animating cast shadows as you can see I didn't want to build a complicated environment but I wanted the impression of machinery and equipment moving in the background instead of building complicated geometry I just took this single Spotlight and pointed it at the background and then I found this fan in the quicka library and by placing this directly in front of the light and adding a simple rotation animation to the fan the shadow implies a huge environment beyond what we can see in this one shot but the environment itself is almost non-existent so I hope that gives you a couple ideas to get started to add some quick animation to your lights inside of sequencer but lighting is only one part of the puzzle when making a photo real image so how do you make a photo real render well let's break down the word photo realism you need your renders to look like a photograph meaning all the imperfections you get from shooting through a camera lens now a shortcut to make your shots look more cinematic I is to create shallow depth of field with your lens this is how we get the large orbs and bokeh in the background of our images now there's multiple ways to do this and I want to walk through both depending on your shot now in sequencer this is controlled within the camera I'll expand my cinic camera here and our two most important settings are going to appear right at the top inside of sequencer and that's aperture and focal length focal length is the amount of Zoom we have on our lens which greatly affects the composition of our frame and aperture controls the depth of field so the lower the number the more out of focus and the higher the number the more Focus will have now if you're looking for a magic number I usually start around two but you can always cheat this lower down to something like 1.4 but be careful as soon as you're getting into anything below one we're creating a lens that would never actually work in real life so we're stretching and breaking reality further than we really could so naturally it'll look less less photo realistic if we start breaking the rules now you should also know that the focal length will change the amount of depth of field as well the more that we zoom in here you can see how shallow our depth of field is and just remember a wider lens is going to have less depth of field and a zoomed in lens is going to have shallower depth of field the more you zoom in the more out of focus the background is going to be and to take this even further the best practice is to add in extra Dynamic particle effects and decals into the background so we actually have more reason to see bokeh inside of our shot so by taking these Niagara particle effects and moving them further in the background or closer to the camera we can increase or reduce the amount of depth of field they contribute and putting them really close to the lens can give you some really interesting results so try adding in snow rain blowing leaves or any small particles close to camera and try this out now there's two types of lenses spherical and anamorphic a spherical lens will have a circular bokeh and an Anam morphic lens will have a stretched oval bokeh spherical is a bit more true to life where anamorphic is associated with a lot more imperfections and a dirtier image this doesn't automatically make your shots look cinematic but it can dirty up your image in a way that most people don't associate with CG they associate it with Hollywood films so by mimicking these anamorphic qualities in your CG renders you can get more photorealistic results now changing between spherical and anim morphic bokeh inside of unreal is really simple just select your camera and then go down to the lens settings and this squeeze Factor setting and we can use this to squish down our bokeh shape so if we change this from 1 to two this will make our bokeh a lot thinner but it'll also stretch our image by twice the width so all we have to do is go into our film back go to your sensor width and then just divide this by two and you can see we'll get the same exact resolution we had before but now now we have nice anamorphic oval bokeh and here's a small tip sometimes if you're going really shallow on your depth of field you can start to break some of your materials in the background but thankfully there's an easy fix one thing you might notice if you have semi-transparent or translucent objects in the background is it might seem at first like they're incompatible with the depth of field system inside of unreal but fixing this is really easy here we have our translucent fog material and if I press on the brown box and type in doof for depth of field you want to make sure this translucency pass is set to before depth of field now when I apply this and we see the changes in the scene you'll see that it starts to react naturally like you'd expect through a camera lens now the last step to make a photo real image is compositing this is the last step of polish that we're putting on our finished renders to give them even more imperfections and mimic all of the qualities of a camera lens and it's really important important because if you skip a single step here your shots won't look photo real whether you use After Effects nuke or Da Vinci resolve all these techniques apply so let's talk about the three imperfections that you want to add to every single render to make something that looks CG and make it look photographic the first thing I always add in is lens diffusion this has the biggest impact and this one step can take images that look really CG and make them look a lot more photographic but what's the biggest reason the biggest problem to overcome with CG is a lot of things can end up looking perfect when they're created in a computer but by blurring our image we can get a lot more imperfection and Randomness that you'd expect coming through a camera lens often times with CG will get really crisp dark blacks in our image but when you're using an anamorphic lens often times you'll get this really soft glow coming from your light sources in a CG image you might expect this silhouette to be perfectly black and have no orange color contaminating some of these Shadows but because they Ed these dirty anamorphic lenses on the Batman we get a lot of light contamination coming from our sun source and all we have to do to recreate this is blur our image at different intensities some really small and some with really big blurs like values of over 300 and then just mixing the two together and now you can see we get some nice contamination into the Shadows while still looking very realistic and we get some additional colors into these dark areas where we had no information or detail before so on a shot like this a little bit of diffusion can go a really long way in terms of contaminating our blacks by adding Haze onto our lens and into our environment the next step is adding in chromatic aberration a lot of times when shooting with cheaper or older lenses you'll get some color separation infringing around your brighter areas and this is known as chromatic aberration essentially what happens is when light enters your camera lens if that glass isn't perfectly fine-tuned by the time that light travels to hit the sensor of the camera where the image is captured our different wavelengths between the red green and blue can travel differently and often times this is most notable around the corners of your lens now this is definitely becoming more widely known in CG but I think a lot of people are implementing it in the wrong way with chromatic aberration less is more but it's really important to know how to apply it correctly let's take a look at this still from the assassination of Jesse James and see how this technique looks when captured through a real camera when we go towards the edge of the frame you can see that we get blue on one side and red on the other but to really understand what's happening we have to look at each channel the red green and blue Channel if I compare the red Channel with the blue Channel panel if you look at this lamp or around the edges of the frame you can see that it almost looks like it's being scaled down slightly so we're not just offsetting our RG andb channels we're scaling them to different sizes so in Nuke my preferred technique is to use the god rays and then scale our image larger or smaller this will give us more aberration in differences around the edge and by using God Rays instead of scale we'll get more smooth imp Perfections compared to the traditional chromatic aberration from inside of unreal camera lenses will bounce around light and move things slightly differently as opposed to perfectly scaling the RG and B channels like you get inside of unreal but it doesn't take long before you start breaking your image so again less is more and you just want to make sure that you're getting some new colors introduced around the edges enough to get some new colors and some fringing without drawing attention to itself when you're looking at the whole image so make sure to scale your images don't translate them to get the separation cuz very quickly this starts to look like an anaglyph 3D movie instead of a nice subtle effect that will make your shots look more realistic and then the last thing I like to add are lens flares whenever you can it's always best to use real life footage captured through a camera lens and by mixing real life footage with our CG renders it's a lot harder to tell where one starts and the other stops and in my opinion adding in lens flares are the easiest way to add that last step of color polish and Randomness into your scene while still grounding your shots in real life and if you add these three things to any shot you'll remove that CG curse some of that digital Perfection that you get from making a virtual scene this is the exact method I use when creating the samurai sword fight for war of being by creating simple render templates I could apply the same lens effects to my entire film giving each shot shot a more realistic feel and by templating this process and making it extremely quick with just a few sliders you can spend all your time creating inside of unreal instead of waiting around for renders so if you want to improve your renders inside of unreal or even just use the same exact compositing template that I used here you might want to check out unreal fundamentals if you're new or struggling to learn unreal and you want to take your work to the next level then you should check out our 21-day unreal film making boot camp to go from a complete begin to an unreal filmmaker making your own animations and previs inside of unreal I've taken everything I've learned every cheat sheet every template and every resource and combine them all together in one place so take your future and visual effects and film making into your own hands and get started today and make sure to share what you create by the end of the course subscribe below if you want to see more otherwise check out our behind the scenes of Tessa's music video for war of being we show you exactly how we made this samurai sword fight using motion capture and reel engine step by step thanks for watching and I'll see you next time peace

Channel: Josh Toonen

Views: 199,423

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Id: 0Yc6qJSWet4

Length: 15min 3sec (903 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 27 2023