Unreal Engine 5 Beginner Tutorial Part 18: Animation & Sequencer Advanced

by the end of this video you'll be able to achieve crazy animation of your cameras and shots like this one right here wait for it boom check that out and this one right here so you'll be able to animate your shots as simple as that let's get started what is up beautiful people we are now at chapter 18 of our Unreal Engine tutorial series and we are going to dive deeper into sequencer what are we going to learn today wait a second before we get into that when you said almost there does that mean it's almost goodbye yes it is they made it all the way here but I'm going to miss you guys but they made it all the way here let's focus on the chapter actually you know what let's go I love you okay so today we're diving deeper into the sequencer which means we're actually going to take everything that we learned up until now and start setting up our shots so that in the next chapter we can go ahead and render them I remember precisely when I first started an Unreal Engine 5 I actually knew my way around Unreal Engine because I had used are the 3D software I understood the materials and things of that sort but I just didn't know how to render I had no idea how to render so the next two chapters today and the next video we're going to walk you guys through how we can set up shots animate our cameras and also teach you guys rendering so fud first thing that we are going to do is I'm just going to reduce the amount of lighting in my scene it's a little too bright right now so I'm just going to go ahead and just hide some of these guys now if you closed Unreal Engine since the last video up until now and you reopened it and you went went to your level you'll probably notice that your animations are gone so just make sure you go ahead and open up your sequencer again there's two ways you can do that one is you can find your sequencer in the outliner and then click open level sequence or you can just find it in the content drawer and double click it both of them will do the same thing they will load your sequencer as you can see the animation is here and you can pull it up if you don't see the window you can pull it all the way up and again if by any chance your windows are all messed up window load layout default editor layout okay so now that we've got this it's time to begin setting up our shots now it is absolutely crucial that you set up your cameras early on in your projects you don't want to wait until the very end like we did for this beginner tutorial series because technically when you set up your cameras then you will build the world that only your camera sees and that's all you need right cuz technically that's the only result you'll see in your renders exactly so what we're going to do is me and far already know our storyboard we know these shots that we want to put into the Cinematic that is going to be the result of this tutorial series now that has a couple of different shots right yes and we are going to render two of those shots with you guys so you guys learn the whole process and then you will go and plan the other shot yourself and share all the results with us on social media we don't want everybody to have the same exact result you can have the same result as the two shots that we show you but we definitely recommend you take this challenge learn it from us here and then go and create your own story with your own animations so let's begin with our first shot fire we're going to need the camera how do we bring it in the scene top left ad actor cinematics uhhuh C camera actor absolutely here we go okay so for our first shot what we liked to do is and this is not going to be necessarily the first shot in our cinematic but the first shot we're going to show you today so for our first shot we wanted to bring the camera in between the Stormtroopers and what we like to do is just take this to ground level and raise it up we don't care about the decal on top of the camera and what we wanted to do as the Stormtroopers are passing to the side of the camera we wanted to go Ahad and animate the camera to ascend up and see the door of the spaceship opening however if you notice right now our shot looks extremely ugly and that is mainly because we can't even see the full spaceship we can't see any of the other Stormtroopers and it's just way too close to the edge way too close to the edge of the spaceship we want to go ahead and add more distance for these Stormtroopers so if you take a look the only distance they're traveling is just this much we want to add to that distance and in order to do that we need to go ahead and change some of the values that we created in the initial animation chapter so let's pull the camera back cuz this is way too close so maybe I want to bring the camera somewhere here right and then if you go to the details panel of our camera right now it's at 35 we can go to 25 I might even want to go maybe 50 cuz yeah I'm thinking okay let's keep it at 35 for now for now so this is where exactly you play with parameters you will look at your scene you will change the lighting change the angle of the camera change the focal length and get that perfect shot absolutely and there's no right or wrong answer here right there's no way you can tell oh the right focal length is this much no you have to experiment for yourself the one thing we do know is that these guys are way too ahead of the camera so let's pull them back let's go to so this guy T pose right five and then we want to go to his transform his X location we want to pull it all the way back here to behind the camera this is where he we want him to begin and then we're going to key frame that and then if you look at what happens now he's just going to slide cuz he going too far right and that's okay for now we're going to take this guy as well and open up his X location X location and we're also going to pull that guy back all the way here just gonna make sure they're roughly the same they're not exactly the same but that's okay just just roughly the same and then I also want them to be closer to each other they're just they're too far away from each other they need to be friends so let's let's bring him here and perfect and also this guy let's bring him a bit closer his y here perfect we don't need to key frame that again we have no key frames on the Y we're just changing the entire y AIS location this seems to be about right right but now they're just they're on the airport treadmills okay all right so first of all we definitely have to go ahe and extend this animation cuz it's too short for them to have to make this entire walk here and then what we need to go ahead and do and say okay you are traveling too fast so the destination right this two markers right here for the end need to be pulled back so I'm going to shift select both and I'm going to pull them back just until 295 frames and let's see how that works they're sliding forward they're sliding forward now so we need to go ahead and pull our timeline the end of our timeline even more even more and then we're going to pull these guys to 450 right and then let's see the difference much better much better are they yeah they're pulling forward a little bit so let's go to something like 500 and then pull these guys again and then see that oh oh oh yeah this is good uh they're pulling forward just a little bit we to continue the animation yeah we will continue the animation don't worry I just want to go ahead and pull them again so I'm going to continue the animation make sure it keeps looping and then just a tad bit more just a tad bit more I'll pull these guys I should be good now yes and the animation as well okay cool let's see okay and now they're being pulled back so it'sit too much too much yes right here where is it okay perfect perfect perfect so now we have the perfect walking animation they're walking for a while and the great thing about this is that now that I have all of this distance I have enough time to set up different shots different cameras different angles that I can cover for the same walking animation right so let's just look at the whole sequence again these guys are walking the door of the spaceship is opening way too early right way too early so what we're going to do is going to pull this all the way back it is okay if this is happening if the flaps are doing this because in the first shot I'm not even planning to take the plane the spaceship so it's all right I want it to probably open somewhere around here as they're moving closer right we can go ahead and precisely make this change once we have our camera set up so let's go ahead and bring our camera fire hot this is our camera how do we add it to our sequencer track track select the camera select the camera track sequencer that's an actor perfect so the camera is there and as you notice this is the first time we have added a camera to our sequencer it does come with already a bunch of settings that we can change we can change it aperture we can change a focal length and we can change the focus these are some of the settings that you will commonly use right you're going to be changing the focal length is sort of like zooming in and zooming out and then the amount of blur and depth of field that you're going to have in this in this shot and then the Focus right of the camera where is it at but if you want to go ahead and control more parameters again always check out the plus icon the camera component is already there so this is where you're going to be you're going to be going to look for the parameters hit the track icon and then you can see all of the other options that you can add here for instance you have the film back setting which was our sensor width and height at the very top that controlled basically how wide our screen was was you can go ahead and change that if you want to while shooting right those options are there there's other things that you can change as well so I'm just going to let that stay as is we don't need to change that I'm just going to see what I want my shot to look like I'm going to eject this have it in my preview and I'm going to pin this so I can make the changes as I'm looking from far away so I have these guys walking very cool kind of like it but I need to bring my camera closer to ground level that was the initial idea right so let's let's take it lower all the way down to ground level and then let's have these guys walk I want to see the spaceship open up so I'm going to close the drop down of my camera and I'm going to bring this here and then let's see if this is my shot I'm going to pull this back and I want the the action to happen at the same time the door opens and these guys are walking I think the door should open a little a little bit later a little bit later right I agree with you so let's say like this yes and then like this you know what one thing that is annoying me is that all the action of the plane is happening way too fast so I want to teach you guys how you can go Ahad and slow down or speed forward an animation and in order to do that we're going to use the properties of an animation so these are animation layers as you can see if you want to go ahead and change the properties of an animation you can go ahead and right click on the animation layer so open it up go to an animation layer right click and then here you will have some options in the properties tab the one that we're looking for is play rate so play rate is the speed of your animation let's change it to half to make it double time so let's change it to half to make it slower slower we can make it slower if we change it to 0.5 that's half the speed and as you noticed did we see a change here yes so I'm going to hit contrl Z to see the difference and control y to redo so now we have double the amount of animation and we're going to bring this in let's just see what it looks like so imagine if we can pull this back that's too much so check this out these things have opened up already and the door opens boom that was pretty cool we can even bring this further way and check this out even more okay I think this is right o yes we're almost there we're almost there okay so now let's go inside our camera view okay and let's go ahead to our camera I'm just going to test this okay I'm not sure about these variables and these values I want to go to my location I'll just go all the way to zero and then I'm going to hit key frame on all of my transforms everything and I'm going to hit the viewport hit G to remove all the overlays and then I'll come to maybe somewhere around here and then I'll raise the camera higher okay so I'll go to just I'll do it from here so I'll go to my location and I'll okay I'm controlling the floor for some reason I'll go to my camera select it here and then I'll raise it up this is good yes it's perfect so once I raise it up I have to go ahead and press my transform again and then let's take a look at the animation wow so in our sequencer we are animating the door of the spaceship the Stormtroopers and the camera now yes I don't like how I'm starting slow and then going fast one option is to go to the material sorry go to the graph editor and fix that or when it's actually accelerating I can just pull this back so that part is happening before we even start our uh first frame and then it's already moving by the time we open our shot so check this out see is already moving and I kind of like this this is good yeah so the next thing that we're going to do is actually go ahead and play with our Focus absolutely cuz right now I don't even know where my focus is it's probably at the spaceship I want to change that so I want to go ahead and bring my debug first so by clicking on our camera we're going to go all the way down to our Focus draw debug Focus plane and then let's bring this all the way forward cuz technically speaking our Storm Troopers are going to be walking there and then I'll turn off the debug I like how blur it is but I want more blur which means I want to go ahead and lower my aperture value right there okay really cool so now maybe let's try to make this a wideangle camera I don't know if it's going to work let's give it a try maybe go for 25 so the next thing that I'd like to do if you see our shot right now these guys are passing by which is pretty cool but I'd like to change it to a little bit of a wide screen if you guys remember how we did that it's through the film back settings so right now is 23 13 I'm going to just change the numbers again I'm not exact with this right now I'm going to get the exact numbers that I want from the internet later on but something like 34 14 is pretty wide okay but because I want to go ahead and increase my stretch squeeze factor to two to get the anamorphic lens effect I'll have to increase this number to get the wide screen again so right now it's more of that anamorphic lens effect and I'll have to play with my focal length again because now it seems extremely wide okay so this is the kind of shot we wanted and then let's try to play this again and see how it looks that's even more wide screen ooh this is getting good okay this is becoming bad we need to animate the focus too right because at the end you want to have the focus on the spaceship yes so I'm thinking I'll even make I'll make this even more out of focus something like this okay in the beginning and then I can actually manually do the focus myself so I can go ahead and key frame something from this right here from this button by the way if you didn't know I can go ahead and press that key frame and then it creates one right here and then I can say okay let's go forward to here okay this is pretty cool I can go ahead and change the focus to something like this and then key frame and then go forward and then key frame again I kind of like how they go out of focus though maybe I won't see if I I want to see the yes no I I kind of don't last one can we can we just have the spaceship in Focus no I don't want to do that I kind of don't want to do that let's see how it looks so right now we've got a really nice Bas do you see from the spaceship and then if you play this shot look at what happens guys mind you that we are animating so many things at the same time camera Stormtroopers the door of the spaceship and our Focus I'm really starting to like this shot okay and one other thing I'd like to mention is that here okay okay whenever you're creating new shots this is going to be absolutely crucial you have to change your lighting almost all the time so it's not like you create one set of lighting and it works perfectly for every shot even in real life you have a lot of fake lighting and when you're watching movies you think that oh if they're in a house and in that scene they're just staying in the house that the lighting Remains the Same for every angle every shot that's not the case they always switch it up to match the mood match the vibe and also Al to make each person pop out according to the background and things of that sort so in this case we are not touching any of the lights yet but every single time we actually set up a new camera we go ahead and change the lights almost completely sometimes so be very careful with that once you set up your shots then go Ahad and start playing around with the lighting which is also the most enjoyable and pleasant part because they're reacting in real time and you get to really set the mood of your scene so right now I'm almost done with this shot I just want to make a few more adjustments maybe I just want to check this a few times the one thing I do not like is how this proportionate this white square is I believe I have to make it move a little bit so I'm going to press that select these guys and then move it I got to select this guy as well am I moving the yellow one I think I'm moving the yellow one okay let's go out of this camera view yes don't don't move this yellow one I move this to like the middle go back to my camera move it here what do you guys think about that yeah that's that's a little bit better right it just didn't feel like it's centered okay now the other thing that you need to know and I think we neglected this up until this point is that if you go ahead and save you've noticed that once you added your first camera to the sequencer you have automatically added this thing at the top that is called camera Cuts right and it's basically showing you a strip a film which has all these images but these images are actually the exact frame that you have on your screen when you look through your camera and at the top it's reading out a name which is C camera actor that is your current camera so far what do you think this camera cut is for this is basically giving you the ability to have multiple cameras and multiple cuts from different cameras into the same sequencer absolutely because technically we have the same walking animation now we want to take another shot from another angle and then when we hit render we want it to render in sequence and change the camera angles and this is one of the biggest questions when people start on new Ling they just don't know how to make these different camera Cuts this is how you do it let's try a second camera and then bring the cuts here absolutely so I am going to go out of my camera remember one way to do that is by hitting eject or you can go ahead and hit this button it's highlighted now so we're going to unlock the camera which means we're going to eject out of it so we have our first camera the next camera that we're going to put and honestly I'm just going to show you some of the shots that me and far were thinking about so let's go ahead and bring our second camera I'm going to go ahead to cinematic C camera actor drop it in and then I'm going to go to perspective pilot this guy now pull this down and hit G so we don't see the overlays and then make sure so for some reason that blue Mark is not there that means I'm not seeing the proper camera angle so I'm going to hit this and now it's correct okay let's go up one of the camera angles that me and F really liked was right here because if you watch any movies like Dune or Star Wars if they want to really show you how Grand the scene is they have a shot like this and it's from behind a spaceship and things like that and then you see the Army this is technically that shot and you can go ahead by the way to if I search for C camera act I want to change the settings to the camera and then play with the focal length a little bit make it even wider and just look at this beauty again we haven't played with the lighting yet we haven't added any effect yet any animation here but it just looks so freaking cool but there's one problem far do you see what happens to our Stormtroopers when I move my camera oh my God the shadow is getting disappeared yes which is so weird because technically if I want to take a shot from here this looks so freaking fake where is the shadow underneath my Stormtroopers call the console command absolutely so this is actually happening because there is a term called R tracing culling culling C ing is basically I believe another word for that is cutting so technically it's saying if you go too far away from an object you can ignore its rate tracing Shadows which helps you save on your GPU cost and it helps your performance but we do not want that at this point we need the Shadows if we're going to pull our camera this far away so the console command to help you fix that is R.R tracing doing space z so we're going to copy that contrl c we're going to leave that in the description box below as well put it down here look at the Shadows underneath here hit zero and they're all back now you know what's interesting found out if this was path racing you wouldn't have this issue path racing just actually shoots out all the Rays and you don't have any issues with these Shadows so this is only for Lumen now this was one shot that we really liked another shot that we really liked was actually placing the camera right here which these are all tips and chit codes for you guys for your cinematic later on yeah actually it's a good one as well cuz if we go to the sequencer I don't have my sequencer let's pull it up let's see what happens when this thing opens up imagine you have a camera angle right here right and then you're seeing the Stormtroopers from the right and left side and you can put some light here maybe you can composite some fog and then see this or some smoke and then see this thing open up and when it opens up you're going to see the Stormtroopers walk in towards the spaceship you can even animate this to go further check this out so once you render out the first shot you can actually come back here and actually change this so that as it's opening up you'll see these guys walk towards you right this is just another shot now let's go to the shot that we want to show you guys actually in this video wait listen did you know that you can create highly photo realistic scenes with photogrammetry by taking in what exists in the real world into 3D we've been using polycam to do exactly that using our phone and drone yes that's right and guess what they sponsor this video to give give you guys 30% off their Pro Plan so you guys can go ahead and try it for yourself use the code bad decisions in the link in the description back to the course so farad what is the point of this shot so the second shot is going to show and represent the crowd that we have in the scene we want to show how many Storm Troopers are there How Majestic they look and we're going to focus on the two who are walking in the middle that's right absolutely and in order to do that we spent a good 1 hour just moving our camera around finding that right angle and we figured out that we can be somewhere around here and start with the Stormtroopers in the middle walking and we'll just sides scroll with them as as long as they're walking we just sides scroll with them and we'll pull in a very very long lens so something with a high focal length and then really zoom into them have a really big blur in the background and it's just going to look super good so just watch this and you will learn exactly how we're going to do it we're going to jump into our camera okay I'm going to go to cinema camera actor 2 and then right now I'll use the sliders to be exact where where I'm going I'm going to make sure I have my camera selected I'm going to use a z-axis just to come a little bit maybe higher and then on the x- axis I want to move a little bit to here maybe I want to start a little bit ahead of the Stormtroopers and the next thing I'd like to do is make sure I'm tracking the Stormtroopers so far how do we do that enable look at tracking enable look at tracking and use the ey dropper to select our Stormtrooper absolutely so right now when I hit enable look at tracking it just snaps to a random side so actually you know what before I do that let's disable that let's contrl Z okay let's use the eyoo tool to First select the actor so it doesn't snap to a random location so eye dropper and I need this guy right yeah okay select it enable boom okay it worked we're tracking him but guess what it's tracking his foot for some reason it's tracking his foot now luckily Unreal Engine has a solution for that and that is called relative offset so according to the track you can go ahead and offset your axis so I know I need to look up that is my Z axis so I'm going to go ahead and play with this value until I'm looking and tracking the right oh Oh wrong axis the right location so I'm going to lift this up and 150 should be good yeah I'm happy with this right now okay cool so if we move this sequencer you'll notice since the camera's not moving all that's happening is that we're following the Stormtroopers this is cool cool too but we want to move the camera we want something is really Co this is really cool too but we want this is cool okay no but move the camera okay so you know what let's set the camera first okay to set the camera settings we wanted to look close to our first camera so we know that our first camera was a wide wider screen camera so we're going to change these value to something like 34 14 for now okay pull this down and then you can see that it's good but we don't have our anamorphic lens effect so in order to add that squeeze Factor must be at 2 now we have to go ahead and change our height again I'm going to go for something like 24 again this is temporary I might change this at my render time but for now it looks great but once you do the squeeze Factor your focal length kind of gets messed up it's too freaking wide now so we're going to push the focal length even further I want something like this yes I want to completely cover my shot with Stormtroopers like there's just too many Stormtroopers in the shot and I love it okay we're going to bring down our aperture to make it even more blurry so we're going to do this look at that okay everything's super blurry right now so far what should we do next Focus absolutely so I'm going to turn on my debug Focus plane and pull in my focus to I want the focus to be on the second Stormtrooper so I want the first guy to be slightly bluish I think that just looks a little bit better so I'm going to pull the focus even further something like this should do going to turn off the debug and let's just see how this plays without us moving the camera o I think if you change the focal length a bit oh this looks good actually just look at the amount of Storm Troopers wow this is really good Okay cool so this is not actually the shot we wanted we wanted to move the camera move the camera too yes so in order to move the camera and I want to see it from far away so I'm going to eject and then I'll keep this preview by pinning it and then let's go up here so fire I got my camera now I want to animate it so let's track the camera inside our sequencer okay act the sequencer add in the camera first thing on the first frame let's add the key frames for the transform right cuz we're going to be moving the transform so I'm just going to key frame all transforms perfect now move the camera all the way I'm going to move out first so I can clearly see where I'm moving my camera I'm going to pin this so I can see the result and then I'll go all the way to maybe here and then I'll pull the camera to here slightly ahead of them yes yes and then let's go ahead and put down another key frame and then let's see what this looks like cuz I I actually have no idea okay this might look really good or might look really horrible let's go to C camera active 2 and then press play this is good [Music] wow okay this is good this is good but I I I just want to make a few more changes okay so first of all can we go back to our track look at tracking inter speed is still at zero which is a really harsh track let's change this to four just to make it a little bit more delayed and then let's watch it again much better this is much better but I just don't like how fast this is moving so I'm going to make this even slower by just pulling this actually you know what I'll make this linear I'll make this linear okay I'll turn all of this by right clicking hitting linear which means they're going to start with a constant speed and then they're going to get slower later on and then I'll pull this even out so we're starting ahead okay this is much [Music] better wait the decals God yeah did you see that turn off the decals okay they turn yellow because the decals are impacting the character so let's go ahead and select the character let's go to the details panel search for decal receive decal turn off same thing for this guy turn it off and then let's watch that again now at this point by the way before we even hit play you are more than welcome to try anything else you can go ahead to your camera right and then go to your focal length to be like okay you know what I'm going to open this guy up and then Play It Again check this out okay oh I love this much more this is a completely different look I love this right boom as you can see we just taught you how to set up your your shots animate your cameras and create really cool scenes like this one and this one now it's your turn to go and set up other cameras and create different scene so in the next chapter we are going to teach you more about lighting and render setting see you later ciao

Channel: Bad Decisions Studio

Views: 9,033

Keywords: unrealengine, unreal engine 5, unreal engine, ue, ue5, Unreal Engine Tutorial, Unreal engine for beginners

Id: YBNUC6GD5ho

Length: 30min 14sec (1814 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 15 2024