Unreal Engine 5.4 Made Me a Motion Designer, and Now I Can't Stop

we're going to build this project from scratch I'm going to show you how to make your own custom effector to be able to change the color and we're also going to build everything here in Unreal Engine so stick [Music] around hey how's it going everyone my name is Brandon Clemens and let's go ahead and jump straight into our project how we're going to create this is using Unreal Engine 5.4.0 uh preview version if you actually don't have the preview version you need to click up on the engine versions here and once the list pops up you're going to want to scroll all the way up to the top uh you can see I already have all the newest versions installed and if you don't see it you're going to want to go all the way down to the tray and windows rightclick exit and restart the epic games launcher now it's going to take a while to install but once you have it we're going to go ahead and launch the engine okay so once everything loads up I'm going to go down to games I'm going to choose a blank template project uh then I'm going to do ray tracing Des top maximum and then we're going to put in a name called mograph example and we're going to go ahead and create our project all right so now we're in the engine first thing we need to go it to the plugins which is the top right under settings plugins we're going to type motion design and we're going to go ahead and enable that hit yes and restart now okay it should only take a few seconds for that to compile and once it does we're going to go to our content browser I'm going to hit control shift in in to start a new folder and I'm going to call this Maps we're going to jump in here right click create a level and we're going to call this uh mograph and then we're going to double click in it and hit save and then we can also come to our project settings under maps and modes we're going to search for our mograph which is right here and what this will do is so when we load up the engine it will open this map for us automatically and then uh big thing that's going to change right here is this motion design button it's going to change your whole interface and this is great because it gives us everything we want we have the motion design outliner the operator stack we have the sequencer remote control and we have a new uh template here to start dragging and dropping and creating items if you don't see any of that um you will you will have a button for operator stack remote control material designer create default and transition log logic right under the motion design mode here so you're usually in selection mode and we have all these fun modes you're going to want to be in motion design for most of this tutorial and then we're going to go ahead and create defaults and what this will do is create a null object with everything outlined here and I'm also going to hit control shift W uh for YouTube I'm going to go ahead and uh make this a little bit bigger for everyone so we can see okay now that we have our giant interface what I'm going to do is drag in a rectangle and I'm also going to create a another window under window and then we're going to go to viewports and create a separate viewport here and what this will do is allow me to kind of move around I hit F on the keyboard to frame the object and uh you're also going to want to make sure that this does not have cinematic control so once we create our camera and drag it into this area and create our camera cuts for our sequencer this is attached to our level which is new in 5.4 I actually really like having everything attached to the level we can go ahead and move this clip back and kind of make some area for us here and you can see that once I expand this it's our camera our component and all the different transforms and Camera component attributes that we'd want to key okay so right now that threw me into here so I want to make sure that I'm not in cinematic control I can actually jump out from piloting that camera and then I can come over here and make sure that we're in the motion design viewport so you can use your middle Mouse to click and drag and move everything around and I'm just going to make sure that everything kind of lines up for my background exactly how I want it so I'm going to move these up and down you can click on the you can left click on the corners and just make sure they move up around the boundaries of the frame and that looks pretty good I'm going to go ahead and rename this to background and I'm going to hit control shift s to go ahead and save all and let's keep going okay so now we're going to create the shapes the Triangular shapes that I showed you in uh the beginning so let's go ahead and drag out a regular polygon and I'm going to push it off the wall just a bit and we're going to change the color to a nice blue and this is just a simple material we're actually going to create our own material uh later on and then we're going to go ahead and hit 200 by 200 and we unlocked that that so now we have this shape and we're going to create three sides and that will make a triangle for us okay with our triangle created I'm going to click on the polygon I'm going to come over to our operator stack we're going to add a modifier called a plane cut and I'm going to set that to zero and it's going to create this kind of uh rectangular shape for us and we're going to use this we're going to add one more which is going to be an extrude we're going to scroll down and just put that at 10 cm so we have a little bit of depth and then we're going to add a null so I can just actually uh select the object and hit Control G on the keyboard to add a null actor I'm just going to move it right outside so that I won't affect the transformation of this object and I'm just going to pull the pivot to the very right corner now I have my snaps on uh and I can actually show you my viewport I have my snaps on I have it set to 10 but I'm going to do something I'm going to set it to one I'm going to drag once and then up once so one unit and then I'm going to put my polygon right under the null actor contrl D to duplicate drag this out before I drag that out I'm going to actually set it back to 10 and then I'm going to do a rotation around uh 120 degrees and then move this back up to the side we can actually zoom in with our motion design viewport we can use our scroll wheel to zoom in really tight and then we can make some room and uh we're just going to turn off the bounding boxes so that we can see we have this nice little strip and this was because we actually moved and offset it one unit in the y direction and one unit in the Z Direction so let's continue hit contrl D we'll make another copy and we're going to move this up rotate it another 120° negative 120° it was telling me and then we'll move it down just right there and move it back so we may need to adjust our snaps to five perhaps even one to get the exact look we're going for and uh we can also change this to unlit mode so we can kind of see this just a little bit better okay I'm going to go ahead and say that I am happy with that I think that looks pretty cool okay so now we have our shapes I'm going to go ahead and put this back to LIT mode and uh kind of make this a little bit bigger for us and there we go so this is the shape that I'm wanting and I'm going to go ahead and pull all of our polygons out from being children to the children of the world and we can go ahead and get rid of our uh placeholder null actors and then I can select our polygons once more hit contrl G to group them that puts it under another null actor and uh then we can add this to a cloner so I'm going to go ahead and left click on the cloner icon and then I get this uh widget in our viewport so I'll left click again to add a cloner we'll zero its position and then we'll go ahead and delete the cube we'll go back to our cloner sorry I actually zeroed the position of our triangle mesh so we'll pull that out just a little bit go back to our cloner and we're going to throw this underneath the cloner so that gives us copies of everything so we're going to have to change our cloner to a circle and I'm actually going to go back into our null object and just spin this down just just like so 90° we can hide our background if we want by using the i in the outliner to toggle its visibility and then we'll go ahead and type in six we get this cool pattern we'll bring the radius in to yeah let's do 180 that looks pretty cool and then I can spin the cloner back up to uh let's say 90 there we go and let's look at what it looks like in the camera view looking pretty sweet so the the only thing we need to do now is just create duplicates of this cloner uh we can't in this version of the engine create clones of a clone but hopefully in the future we'll be able to do that this is all running on Niagara in the background which I'm going to show you in the shading portion once we get into the affectors we're going to create our own custom affector and uh it's going to be pretty neat so definitely stick around for that um I'm going to hit contrl D to duplicate this cloner and uh then we're going to go back to our snaps with this interface being kind of tiny it's kind of hard uh we actually can't scroll our Mouse wheel there but we'll go back to 10 units and uh we just want this to look cool in our camera view okay so let's say we move that into position and let's go back to our camera and pilot that so in order to do that uh we are already in the camera Cuts right here but if I just go into the camera itself it gives us this pilot actor uh highlight and this is is telling us that we can actually move this around if our camera is unlocked okay so we'll pilot this backwards and we can turn our background back on okay looking pretty sweet we're going to need a bigger background so let's go ahead and scale that guy up just to make sure it fits the camera view we can actually move it maybe reposition our camera a little bit cool looking good so let's go ahead and duplicate this and before I forget I need to lock my camera and we'll toggle this back to the camera track and let's continue I'm going to go ahead and keep duplicating the cloners and uh I'll Speed the video up once we get back we'll talk about how we can actually add some animation okay so as I was recording this video I actually stumbled across something interesting the fact that we have to change all of the components on these cloners like all the attributes cuz I forgot to do that when we started copying them but this leads me to a great teaching point of what we can do with editor utility widgets so I'm going to go ahead and I created a folder called editor utility widgets so you can rightclick and uh this this is this is going to be a tool that we're going to create like our own little panel uh a few buttons just to go ahead and change everything for us on the fly yes I would rather script than go through manually and change things because later on you may get to a point where you want to change things and you're not going to want to click through all those cloners since we can't clone cloners right okay so editor utility widget I'm going to just do the uh stack box uh that's just the style that it's going to give me so as we add it'll just kind of like add it for us all the elements in there so I'm going to call this uh material 2 cuz I've already got one created here and when you double click you'll come into the actual editor uh so this is like umg editor and uh I'm just going to add some buttons I'm going add a button I'm going to add a checkbox so I'm going to show you guys how to do something pretty cool with this um to make up for me forgetting to set everything properly before we duplicated it and then I'm going to use something called a uh let's see details view details view this is the details view is going to allow us to select a material from our content browser uh we're going to use the checkbox to say do we want to change the color and material of the selected actor or all the actors in the level and then the button will just actually execute the function for us okay so I'm going to set this to to fill I'm going to set the checkbox to fill and we're going to set that to fill as well so I'm just going to call this one materials view uh materials detail view just because and checkbox will be selected actors checkbox and this will be not the help menu this will be uh set material button and then we're going to add some text in here so we actually know from a user interace standpoint what these do so this will be set material oh I'm going to go ahead and scale up my interface maybe not that big sorry so this will be set material I'm going to drag another text box for the check box this will be selected actors question and then this will just uh this will actually make it make sense once we see it in context uh and then we're going to choose properties to show um okay and the properties to show we actually need to go to the graph real quick to add a Vari variable so we're going to right here add variables and we're going to call this new material and this will just be of type material and we'll compile that and we need to come back to our designer and then as we go to our details panel we're going to say properties to show new material so if we compile uh we'll go ahead and save and run you can see that it's Define because we have not set it yet so let's go over to the graph and on the event construct let's go ahead and just set it real quick uh we need to come back to the designer materials view is a variable that way we gain access to it here and we're going to say set object and uh we're actually going to get a reference to self okay so we'll do something like that compile and run and there we go we get this cool little handy dandy uh material Setter okay uh this will be uh is it selected and then we actually have a button to run the function okay let's go ahead and stop that and uh we need to go back I hate switching back and forth between these views but you know it is what it is uh this will be a variable and also our checkbox will be a variable so on the check boox I'm sorry on the button let's do the button button first uh we're going to come to the onclicked event so when we click our button we will get the editor uh what's it called an editor forgot what it's called editor actor subsystem there we go and we will say we'll get selected level actors and then we're also going to do a branch and we're going to say get all level actors yeah we'll do that so but our uh our Branch from our checkbox uh let's go ahead and make sure we get on state change we're going to promote this to a variable and this will be uh selected actors question mark okay so that's set when whenever we click the Box uh by default we're just going to check it make sure it's not selected and by default it is not selected right there cool okay so let's get this we're going to Branch so either we go left or we go right either we're true or we're false if we're true selected level actors we'll get the selected level actors false get the false okay and we're going to do some for each Loops for each we'll do it up here as well and then we're going to do a select node here okay so this select node will say um if our selected actors is true which we need to switch these so if our selected actors is true these are our selected actors so that will be B so this is false this is true uh right there and then we're going to do a cast to Ava shape actor so we're casting and this execution wire can come from uh both directions right because we can be on this execution line or we can be on this execution line um with our selected or just get all the level actors of type shape actor Ava shape actor and if this is true we're going to do something to it okay so this is kind of weird we're going to get actually let me show you in the editor what what I'm referring referring to and I'm actually going to hide my face okay so here in the level if I select the regular polygon you can see that um I have a material drop down and it says asset and then it allows me to put in an asset there by default it's going to say simple just like this background is right so it says simple and solid well where the heck does that even come from because uh this is you can see of class Ava shape actor right and that's what we're casting to but we somehow need to get these properties well these properties live on uh a little bit of shape mesh component and a little bit of Ava shaped rectangle Dynamic mesh so shape component and dynamic mesh uh which if I hover over this you can see that um let's see uh don't tell me about the root component tell me about the shape component let's see U Dynamic mesh component is a mesh component similar to procedural mesh yada yada yada it's not showing me what I want let's go to this here there we go so again uh shape component and a dynamic mesh component but on the shape component it says uh notice in parenthe shape component and dynamic mesh component so I feel like these two are very related in some ways they're both components so they live under this mesh or uh sorry the Ava shape actor so okay with that in mind I just needed to show you that so you know if you're on your own Journey you need to be able to figure out your own problems right so that's kind of a way to look at things uh so we need to get something from here so we want to get those components and if I type get and I go down to variables I can see Dynamic mesh and I can see shape mesh component so let's get the dynamic mesh heck we'll get the other one as well cuz I think we're going to need it later on okay so Dynamic mesh now that we have this there's something in here called uh it's under mesh so get mesh datas this is super weird right now this if you haven't seen it before is a map uh and what it is is if you look over here on the left hand side under details it takes an integer and then it takes a structure so this is a key and then you get a struct here um so a bunch of different attributes live under our struct so I'm going to do a clear and this will just wipe this information away from here so this will have no map at all so we'll clear and then we need to add Okay so so we'll do this and we're going to make it pretty by double clicking you can add a reroute wire and if you select the line you can hit Q on your keyboard to line them up if you're OCD like me so we'll right click and split the struct and we're going to change this to type asset and then we can actually go ahead and get our new material and pipe it into here so we're going to get the new material and then we're not done yet we're actually going to get the material from here get actually you don't need a get we just need a set so set material and uh there we go set material and pipe that in there and of course wrestle with this to make it readable and pipe this into there so it should look something a little bit like this oh boy nothing like tuning in to watch me uh wrestle with these things right okay so let's uh double check real quick so uh we're going to check a bullan here uh to make sure either we're getting our selected levels or getting all the actors of type let's Loop through them and we cast to the type here of Ava shape actor we need to get the mesh Deltas clear it and then we're going to put our own map into there with our own material and we're also going to do that for a shape component okay let's see if that will work all right here's our handy dandy little tool I'm going to say m graph and I'm going to try and turn this background selected red all right no dice let's figure out why okay so there is one thing that I forgot to to do and this is kind of my uh inexperience a little bit with the dynamic mesh and uh these shape meshes uh we need to drag off from our shape mesh and notify that it has been updated so notify mesh updated we'll do that okay so yeah we could do something like this here we go nice and neat huh comp file we'll stop we'll run all right let's try to turn that background red mograph selected set material and okay so uh this object this is not what I want so whoopsie let's drag off of this and say select and I just want this bracket here so my bad my bad let's put that in there okay compile run L graph there we go and uh I forgot to tick selected so uh the other big thing that I forgot to mention with this is I think this is just something with Niagara and the way it's set up right now in this current preview version uh the way that we're going to be able to see our changes is just moving a block here it's just something like that and then I can do save all uh so now that I've adjusted the level and made the change notice if I come down to here uh and unhide my null actor you can see these are red uh but the cloner is not updating and even if I force update the cloner nothing happens uh if I take this out and put it back in there we go it's updated I'm not going to do that for everyone so what I'll do is I will control shift save control shift s to save all let's reopen the editor okay and as you can see everything is now red so you come here for the thumbnails and the promise to learn you stay for my tangents I'm sure that's what it is it's got to be okay so uh let's actually create some materials here we're going to need uh a few of these so I've already got one uh let's call this one instead of mograph let's call this one on background we're going to open this we're going to change we're actually going to convert this to a parameter we call this color and uh maybe we would want to adjust the specular and roughness we know it's not going to be metallic because this is just the background so for roughness we'll go 0 to one for now we'll have it at 0. five we'll have this at 0 five Z to one okay so we'll apply save and then we will create a material instance from this so background instance I'm going to create another folder call it Mi I'll save before I Chuck it in there so I like to have my actual materials living outside in the material instances in their own folder inside and then we're going to call this one uh clones clones mat background mat why not we put the mat there so we know it's a master material and uh and everything's all good to go okay let's uh let's go ahead and uh go into our material instance uh we're going to use our tool that we just made because we spent a lot of time doing it right so let's open uh let's run let's make sure we have selected actors we have our background selected we're going to say background instance so uh if we actually try to go and use our material slot you can see that it's not the correct type um so what we can do is in our tool we'll just open this back up and we'll go into here we're going to actually change the uh type of this variable to material instance so this will be an object reference material instance we're go ahead and change the type here and uh the blueprint Checker will go through and do its thing uh we're going to hold control move that wire up so now when we actually uh let's go ahead and uh run this once more once more so now we have our background instance here uh so just another uh learning thing here for different material types and different data types I should say so we're going to have that as selected we're going to grab that and we're going to say uh set material we can change the color so we'll change this to like a orange something like that that looks good and uh let's close and then for the Clones we're actually going to do something really interesting here uh we're going to use a another type of tool that's in our toolbox and it's going to be our material parameter collection okay so I'm going to go ahead and just get rid of that so we can start creating our material parameter collection uh I'm getting to the content browser by control shift if you were wondering uh right click and let's go to material we're going to create a material parameter collection this is going to be called uh let's call it mograph NPC mograph so we'll open the material parameter collection up and uh let me explain what a material parameter is a material parameter collection uh an NPC is something that kind of lives outside of levels uh so it's not like an actor it's a data uh asset essentially it's a data asset uh which is very similar to what data assets are in Unreal Engine but uh it it can live outside of materials outside of levels and you can control the colors and the scalar parameters from here so type Vector is a color or r uh X Y and Z so you can have XY ZW or you could have U any any four scalers that together make a vector four or any three scalers together make a vector three which could be colors um and actual locations uh or rotations so I think you guys get the idea so we'll go ahead and we'll name this color with a Capital C that's important uh and then we're going to set the color to like a purplish and let's go ahead and create another Vector uh this will be color two let's do color two and we'll name this a color one okay so color two will be pink and blue and then we're also going to have another scaler in here uh we'll call this one actually no we won't do a scaler we're going to do a vector and I'm going to call this uh let's call it LO for location okay and we'll save okay awesome so that's our location and our two colors and we're going to drag that into our material so as we drag that in we can now gain access to color one I'll copy and paste color two and our location okay so these are very powerful to be able to use outside of a material I just want to make that like abundantly clear that uh you can you can do some pretty cool stuff with um creating your own different types of applications so I am thinking about what I'm going to do here and what I'll do is for the location I'm going to do a component mask and we are just going to get the G Channel okay so and the reason being is uh let's go ahead and create some affectors okay so with all of the cloners selected I can come down here and I'm actually going to hide my face just in case I mess up here so and show you something you actually can't see uh let me go ahead and scale this back up real quick uh I'm going to add an effector right here so I can spawn a linked affector uh by clicking on that and you can see as I had everything selected uh it it created too many effectors for me so I'll just go ahead and get rid of all of them but one and uh of course they are not linked anymore so let's just go ahead and with all of the cloners selected again I'm just going to grab the affector here and this affector will change to a plane so you can see now as I move this along on the G notice I'm coming back to our Point here uh let's go ahead and maybe scale up the thickness so you guys can see it there we go so as I move this along the G notice it's the Y XYZ RGB the G um it's going to move the position of these guys okay so that's kind of cool we'll pop them out right right uh using that uh let's go ahead and create another effector by controll D and uh maybe we'll scale this one down so they're not Z fighting as much and this one will do instead of the location let's do like rotation on this so this will flip them and I'm going to take this and and place it just drag and drop it underneath and this will be called aor rot for rotation and this will be vector or location and uh this is not in effect quite yet so we need to select all of our cloners again uh we could create another button here uh it's kind of funny that these are stacked on top of one another we could have created another button uh to go ahead and select all of our cloners uh that's something I think you guys could probably figure out on your own just from doing the uh the little run through that we did before but I need to add another index in here and add the rotation okay now we get something kind of interesting and uh let's just make this a little bit bigger so we can concentrate here so now as we flip these around they create another really interesting shape in pattern okay so awesome looking really good let's change linear to uh maybe bounce out we'll try that on both of of them bounce out and remember you got to grab the parent there we go and they kind of like bounce into place in this like really interesting kind of way so super super cool okay and uh let's go ahead and finish up our material that will drive the color as we push this through so uh we're going to look at G right so we're taking the location of our affector which will soon be the affector and we're moving it on the G on the Y and uh I'm going to throw down an if statement here uh I also need a particle position so particle World position so this will give us the absolute cordinates and the reason I'm getting a particle is remember this is Niagara under the hood so uh we actually need to get the position of each particle which is the cloner um because yeah it's all running through Niagara and let's go ahead and copy paste this one so so I just need the Y position of the Clones of the particles the position of our affector and let's do some if then right so this is the fun part so if the position of this we're going to compare it to B then it needs to be this color so if a is greater than b you'll be this color if the particles location is greater than this location be that color that's what it's basically saying okay so with that in mind we can take this and do something else with it as well so I'm just going to copy this again and we're going to do the exact same thing A and B if this then that that's all the logic is and I'm going to use this to drive the uh roughness and also the metallic and then I can create um some parameters here so I can just hold one uh with my left hand on the top row key of the numbers and left click so that will give me two scalers go ahead and plug those in we'll go zero and one okay and that will be for roughness and metallic and uh yeah there we go so you can kind of see uh it's kind of funny that it does that uh but you can see that the roughness goes from zero to one so blue is rough and pink is shiny and it's metallic okay so pretty cool let's go ahead and apply that we built our setup here um one thing we need to do to finish out our material is we need to go ahead and uh let's go ahead and make you could go ahead and right click and make these parameters if you'd like uh but I'm just going to keep them as is uh since they do drive two different um parameters here but you could do something like aurp like a linear interpolate plug that into roughness plug that into uh metallic you could do something like that and then you could have a um roughness for pink roughness for blue metallic for pink metallic for Blue uh and maybe we'll do that maybe we'll go ahead and do that because yeah I've already done it why not this will be color one's metallic color two roughness and roughness okay so this will go 0 to one actually let's select all of them and make them 0o to one uh we're going to make the metallic of this one there we go and the roughness of this zero and the roughness of the blue we'll go ahead and set it to point4 okay so our blue is kind of rough and then this looks metallic okay that's actually pretty sweet so let's go ahead save that we're going to create a material instance of that save it we'll throw it in here and uh let's go ahead and do a save all okay and we need to run our script one more time uh you can see where this comes in handy right so let's do instance let's call this uh cloner what did we call our guy clones of course so let's say clones material instance and we're not going to do selected actors we'll just say set material it we'll take this one select actor we'll do background set material and uh let's just kind of move something real quick there we go we'll move that back a little bit save and uh let's restart start the engine real quick okay we're back so you can see we are now greeted with something actually pretty cool uh we're getting a lot closer uh our final step of this is we need to create a uh we need to create a blueprint so we're going to go into a folder I've created one that's called blueprint uh we need to create a new blueprint class and we need to inherit from a class so if you're not familiar with inheritance and programming it's basically like we want to take an effector but we want to change some of its properties but we want to keep most of what makes it unique the same right as any other thing so let's uh let's type in affector and you can see here there is affector actor motion design actor we'll select that we'll call this bpor effector very generic name you can name it whatever you'd like uh but we're going to double click this guy and you can see when we open up the blueprint editor uh that we have a lot of different states basically of what this could be so we have a sphere inner and outer box inner and outer and then plane inner and outer uh what I'm going to do by default is I'm going to set this to a plane and uh we'll change our state from uh I believe I did something like uh I think it was this right out bounce I don't know doesn't really matter we'll go ahead and change that and what we'll do is we're going to come into the construction script so if you haven't used a construction script uh it's a really great tool to run blueprint logic inside of the editor um so you can use it to create like level design tools uh all kinds of stuff really I I cram a lot of things into the construction script and expose the variables uh so that you can see them in the details panel and you can just like change things around super nice to have in the construction script and then in the event graph this is during runtime so essentially whatever we create in the construction script um this is not like a 100% you know uh rule but whatever we create in the construction script we want to make sure that it happens at runtime as well just for this project okay so um we need to somehow connect this effector so let's go ahead and throw it into the world there we go and uh I'm going to place it under our location effector and go ahead and zero out its uh transforms and then uh let's see if we can actually scale it scale it up right so that's us right there we've got it in the world let's call it uh let's call it BP underscore Factor so we know what it is and then we're going to grab all of our clones and I'm going to hide my big fat head and we're going to add another an array element here and this will be our BP affor so make sure that you add it uh that's something that you can easily easily forget we'll go back to the blueprint editor okay so in our construction script let's go ahead and uh let's get a few variables that we know that we want to work with so I'm going to go ahead and get actor location and uh let's break this so that we can uh get a reference to a material parameter collection of course that we've made right so let's create a variable we're going to call this material parameter collection material parameter collection object reference there we go let's rename this to NPC because it's a mouthful and compile save we need to change this to our mograph material parameter collection and we'll get it we're going to get this and we're going to set a uh set the vector parameter value that was named um let's see let's promote this to a variable the name of that is uh well let's go look at it right so double click this L all right so let's copy this put it in our parameter name and this will be uh we'll just rename the uh variable to L okay the variable variable name can be whatever you want it to be whatever makes sense to you and then the actual string value that goes in here has to be the exact same it has to be the exact exact same okay all right so that's pretty much it this will run in editor of course we need to uh split this out and do RGB wh RGB hold control to move the knots in and out and uh let's go ahead and copy this let's put it on the event graph during uh we're going to do it during tick okay uh you want to be careful with event tick just as a rule of thumb uh if you're new to unre real engine and you're getting into uh programming and uh scripting tick runs every single frame and I'm not talking about seconds I'm talking about frames so if your game is runs at 120 frames a second uh essentially this is going to run every single time the editor is ticking so every frame essentially this logic's going to happen but we want that to happen when we render out our video because we want this to keep up uh and look really really nice you can actually change the editor tick interval by you can just select uh the actual blueprint itself and then you can change it here so if you don't want it to tick every single frame you could do 0.1 01 05 uh Etc so I'll just go ahead and leave it at default just want to mention it to you guys okay so let's see what happens when we move whoa so that's pretty rad um one thing that we need to do uh actually let me show you an example so we'll go back to our camera remember our camera that we set up wow was a long time ago uh so if we were to drag this into here to animate so let's go ahead and drag it in we're going to get our transform on frame zero we'll set a key frame on frame 60 why not 60 we'll change the location you can change the uh the generic kind of default key frame I'm going to set it to linear CU I hate the I hate the cubic for most things things nothing happens what the heck why doesn't it happen I just saw it happen in the editor well you need to come into your blueprint class you need to go to class settings and you need to tick where it says run construction script in sequencer compile save and uh if we actually animate it that would have been a good example if I actually animated it there we go and uh move this back there there we go okay so let's hit play and of course I do not have auto key set so that would help we'll move this back and then we'll play Okay so let's see if we go over here and we play this forward okay so we got it almost there it's not quite working it works in the editor it doesn't work when we scrub we have uh our blueprint is set to run construction script and sequencer so well the only thing that's left to to do is actually add it to the sequencer so uh it's easy it's as easy as that right easy so let's turn this into game view we'll hide actually we can do game view down there uh I'm still getting used to some of these buttons uh I love them but yeah I'm not used to him being down there okay cool so yeah everything's working uh the only thing we need to do now is just change up the lighting a little bit uh so I'm going to do uh I'm going to delete this direct light and uh I'm just going to go ahead and start adding some let's go to motion design mode just going to add some light real quick We'll add a light to the scene we come up here rectangle light we're going to do this pretty quick I'm going to move this over here this is actually one of my fun most favorite things to do it's super duper fun I'm going change this to EV uh so that we can get exposure values I'm going to kind of set this up here like it's hitting the uh the back there wow and uh yeah something like that and I'm also going to change the uh type here the shadow type to cast R Trace shadows I'm going to set that to enabled and and uh I'm going to make this pretty large so we'll do like 256 by 256 something like that let's see we're watching over here just to make sure everything looks good and then I'm going to actually turn the attenuation radius up so that it actually casts pretty far into the scene so something like something like that move it away from the wall yeah lighting is actually super fun to do in Unreal Engine you can kind of get lost doing it uh as you can see I could spend just a ton of time here doing stuff so let's say seven let's go down one stop so I think something like five maybe six Okay cool so let's move on we'll move this over I'm going to change the rotation of this this will kind of be like almost like a backlight type thing okay let's do like there we go nine okay awesome since we moved our wall back we got to scale it up okay I'm holding middle Mouse to just kind of pan around looks good okay and once we're happy with this we can save it we'll go ahead and do a save all and then we need to set up our render so I'm going to show you that really quick uh you can do different crops here so you can do 16x9 you can also do the uh a custom crop so you can set it to [Music] custom and uh let's see if you did like. 59 I believe is the ratio for 9 by 16 so if you did 9 divid 16. 56 uh 25 so we'll do that so now we have something for social media maybe we change the focal length of that cool awesome yeah so we get like a swipe going uh also on the camera itself I want to make sure that the uh the motion blur so we're going to do this on our postprocess volume make sure that's turned off but on my camera I'm going to go ahead and turn it on and I'm going to set this to Target FPS 60 uh 0.5 is good and this will give us better motion blur if you put the motion blur on the camera trust me on that you won't get any errors or anything that's you know something historically that has happened in Unreal Engine with me in the past uh so let's go ahead and let's create our own config we'll do jpeg why not we'll do anti-aliasing we'll do uh we'll not add any console variables and uh uh I think that's it so anti leing we'll do two and I don't know 24 that's pretty high um but it will look pretty sweet our game overrides should basically add in uh all the Cinematic settings that we need so it should turn off all the game stuff make everything look really pretty uh we'll do we need to do camera cut use camera cut for warmup render warm-up frames and uh I'm going to put a lot of warm-up frames in here because remember the cloner System is using Niagra and we need to have some warmup frames to make sure Niagara appears on screen and then we'll do 1080 by 1920 and we'll go ahead and save it to we'll save it to the default directory which is the movie renders folder and that should be good let's go ahead and hit accept and let's render it okay okay one more thing I I forgot to mention this is a really important thing uh under the anti-aliasing I set this to8 I need to make sure that I pull this back to at least 128 so we'll pull that back further and uh let's go ahead and render again so now you see the warmup actually finished and all of our particles are in the scene view so this should work nicely okay so I went ahead and threw this into djv just so we could look at it and it's way too fast fast it's uh shouldn't be that fast but it looks pretty cool and uh I hope you guys learned a lot on how you can use uh inheritance with inheriting that affector blueprint class and making your own kind of blueprints uh with affectors it's kind of uh an interesting way to go about messing with some of the motion design tools in here and then also I hope you guys found it interesting to be able to create your own editor utility blueprint widgets uh which allow you to kind of automate and script things you know if we had a really large scene where we needed to update these cloners and the state of which the engine is in right now and the motion design mode isn't really capable to refresh all those cloners all at once and we can't clone clones so uh you have to figure out ways to get around that and you can totally do it pretty easily within the engine uh there's a lot of really great scripting tutorials that are out there if you want to jump in and learn blueprints I highly recommend you do just to kind of understand how the engine works I think it will go a long way in your motion design Journey just using Unreal Engine here so if you guys have any questions please be sure to leave them in the comment section below I do read every uh comment and answer every question that I get so definitely leave it down below if you guys have any questions or recommend what you'd like to see in the future I'm always happy to read those as well so thank you guys for sticking around this long in the video I really appreciate it and we'll catch you in the next one take care

Channel: Glass Hand Studios

Views: 16,037

Keywords: Unreal Engine 5.4 tutorial, Motion Design Mode, Blueprint scripting, Animation in UE5, Custom tools in Unreal Engine, Game development, Motion graphics in games, UE5 animation tutorial, Scripting for animators, UE5 Motion Design guide, Unreal Engine for beginners, Advanced animation techniques, Unreal Engine 5.4 features, Creative animation in UE5, Learning game development, motion design, motion graphics, after effects

Id: OWmVyvvgfZk

Length: 57min 2sec (3422 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 24 2024