Unreal Engine Beginner's Tutorial. Create your first cinematic scene with a Metahuman character

in this video i'll be showing how you can go from knowing nothing about unreal engine to creating a basic cinematic scene like this with an animated character using free resources i've set this tutorial up for absolute beginners so you might want to skip certain things like the installation guide also i've been using this software for about 18 months now and a lot of it has become second nature to me so if i miss anything please drop a comment below and i'll do my best to explain before i start there'll be a 30 second video promoting a paid unreal course through wing fox from a youtuber called js films he has a ton of great instructional videos which have often helped me and i get a little bit of commission from sales on that course here's the promo video and i'll see you back here for my tutorial in about 30 seconds [Music] these are the minimum requirements and also my system which is at the higher end you'll also need about 40 gigabytes of space just for unreal engine alone there are two different license options but for most it's not going to make much difference if you choose the publishing license you only have to pay five percent royalties if your product in other words a game which i don't use unreal for generates over a million dollars in revenue click download and install the software now you have the epic games launcher which defaults to the home page when you first open it but we're going to ignore the game menus and go down to unreal engine there are different tabs for things like news tutorials marketplace where you can buy assets and also which also offers several assets free every month but generally you'll just be in the library section i already have a few versions of unreal installed but when you first open it you'll have to select a version to install click install and then wait a while for it to finish on the library page you can also see all your projects with the unreal version shown and under those you can see the assets you have which can be added to projects or the engine itself or used to create new projects i'll be using unreal 4.26 for the tutorial just because it's the one i've used the most in the past few months there's not a great deal of difference between the versions as far as most functions go and if you decide to update your project to a later version that's easy enough to do although keep in mind that you can't downgrade a project to an earlier version launch unreal we'll be creating a new project and selecting the games category the reason for this is that the film category has some issues with pre-made levels crashing unreal after shaders have compiled each category will give you different base levels and assets to start with but they're all essentially the same select the blank template for future projects you can select any of the many other templates depending on the kind of thing you're making but the templates are just to give you a head start you can always create any kind of project regardless of which one you choose choose a name and a location unreal project files can get very large my biggest project file is over 100 gigabytes although this one we're making today is under 20 gigabytes so just make sure you have at least that much space available firstly i'm just going to go to edit plugins and scroll down to virtual reality and unchecked steamvr just to stop the annoying steam popup we saw earlier also scroll back up to all and search for hdri and enable hdri backdrop restart unreal for these to take effect the basic controls for moving around the view in unreal are hold down left mouse button and move the mouse side to side hold down right mouse button and you can move anywhere in place with the right mouse button held down a on the keyboard moves left d moves right s moves out w zooms in q moves down and e moves up you can also use the scroll wheel to zoom in and out restart and now we have the hdri backdrop available under lights drag that into the scene and position it you'll want to select the projection center it'll turn white and also position that until the backdrop looks correct and not as distorted the closer you are to the projection center area the better it will look next search for post process volume drag it anywhere on the scene make sure it's selected go to the search bar and search for unbound check infinite extent unbound this basically means that the post process volume will affect the entire level next go down to exposure and this is personal preference but i like to change the metering mode to manual so that i can control the exposure myself rather than unreal automatically adjusting it somewhere around 10 is usually a good starting point if you think your computer is powerful enough to run ray tracing next go to project settings platforms windows and change default rhi to directx 12. then type ray in the search box and check the ray tracing box under engine rendering you'll need to restart and then wait for shaders to compile you'll notice there's our lighting needs to be rebuilt warning on screen if you go to build lighting only it will build the lighting and the warning will go away but now if i select the light which is the default directional light you start with and move it at all the warning comes back you'll get this anytime you move a light which is set to static or stationary i generally set all my lights to movable which means not having to do any light building and no warning messages regardless of how much you move the light i'm going to delete the sky sphere since the hdri backdrop has its own and you can't have two sky spheres hence this error message from earlier directional lights are always fixed in position so their location can't be changed but their rotation can and this will affect the angle the light is projecting onto the scene like the sun this will of course also change the height and angle of shadows next we're going to download some assets automotive materials is free and available in the unreal engine marketplace download it and add to project select the project we're working on now it's quite a big file size so just wait for those to download and transfer to the project you'll now see the folder in the project content section go to materials and there are different sections for car exterior and interior materials we're going to pick a chrome material from the metal folder and drag it onto the cube since it's the first time using it you'll have to wait for shaders to compile but once this is done you won't have to wait for this again the next time you use that material on an object we'll do the same with the sphere and you can see they're reflecting everything in the scene just as real chrome would this is with ray tracing turned on if you don't have ray tracing turned on you won't get the same realistic results next we're going to import a car model this one is from home 3d which is a great resource for vehicle models if you don't have one of these you can download the free vehicle pack from the unreal marketplace which has a decent selection and if you're getting the models from that pack you can skip the next section drag the 3d model into a folder in this case i've made a new one in content called car i'm importing this as a static mesh and selecting combine meshes this is to stop it importing all the separate car parts since for this scene the car will be still without any moving parts you'll notice a lot of basic default materials are created we don't want this so when you import make sure to select do not create materials unless the model comes with its own material files drag the car model into the scene for now it doesn't have any material so it's just gray go to import materials and start dragging materials under the parts of the car the windshield glass will need to make some adjustments in post processing search for translucency and set the type to ray tracing max refraction raised to 1 and uncheck the second refraction box now we have the nice realistic reflections and refractions next we're going to add a metahuman you can make your own but for now i'll just use a pre-made one you'll need to download qxel bridge i've added a link and instructions for installation in the description i'm picking ada for now but for the scene itself i used a custom made one although the vivian pre-made one is pretty similar download which will take a while once that's finished click export and it will be sent directly to your unreal engine project make sure to click enable missing plugins on all these warning boxes and restart unreal again now you can go to metahumans the specific metahuman folder and drag the blueprint model into the scene it'll take a while to compile shaders the first time and while that's compiling if you double click the blueprint you can see how it's made up of the different elements like face hair legs etc any of these parts can be deleted or copied and pasted to another metahuman blueprint so you can mix and match parts next we're going to add a level sequence which is basically like an editing suite that controls animations camera moves and other events within the scene we need to add a camera so go to cinematic and drag cinema camera actor into the scene and then into the level sequence itself if you click the camera icon you'll get the camera view in your viewport and it can be moved around just as you would move your view normally there are a lot of different camera settings to choose from which replicate real world cameras i usually use the 16 9 film and 50 millimeter lens 50 millimeter tends to give a look that's most like the human eye 12 millimeter is a very wide angle lens that gives a very large field of view at the other end of the spectrum 200 millimeter lens magnifies everything greatly there's also a zoom lens which allows you to go between different lenses in this case between 24 millimeter and 70 millimeter but the 50 millimeter is a good middle ground so let's stick with that for now with ray trace translucency turned on you might notice some black in the meta human eye to fix this you can either switch to raster translucency although this will get rid of the nice windshield glass effect i'll go to metahuman head skeletal mesh scroll down to lods and disable ioclusion next we're going to add a custom hdri backdrop to replace the current one i have a video which shows how to make them from any location in the world using google street view or you can download ready-made ones poly haven has a lot of high quality hdris and they're all free so when you've downloaded the one you want drag it into a folder in unreal i've made one called hdri to put it into to apply the new hdri select the current hdri backdrop and drag the new one that's in your unreal folder under the cube map image now we have the new backdrop but it needs a couple of other changes to make it look good double click the cube map and click the arrow to open up more compression options change maximum texture size you'll be able to see at the top the maximum you can have for each hdri i downloaded this one in 4k so 2048 is the maximum put that in and hit return and then wait a minute for it to take effect unreal won't be operational while this process is taking place when that's done go down to level of detail and change mip chain settings to no mipmaps save and go back to your main viewport again select the projection center and adjust position until it looks right without any distortion for the angle you're going to be shooting the scene from with the center camera selected let's move around until we find a starting point we like you can either move using the camera view or deselect the camera view and move the camera as an object you can see the camera view in the smaller window bottom right also you might want to edit the rendered video in software like premiere pro to be a certain aspect ratio in this case i'm making it 235 1 which is the standard widescreen 35 millimeter ratio that's seen in most modern films and can give the more cinematic look go to perspective cinematic viewport can then apply a letterbox mask in whatever ratio you choose that way you know which parts will be visible and which parts will be cut off the grey mask seen here won't show up on the rendered video it's just a guide to help you in unreal so let's make sure that the car fits within the boundary and then go to the start of the sequence and adjust manual focus distance to get the car in focus press the key button and that's now saved at that point in the sequence click the key button on transform to save the camera position at that same point now go to the end of the sequence drag the time code right to make the sequence longer as well and while i'm here i'll set the frames per second to 24. that's the standard frame rate for movies and will give you the most cinematic look now let's position the metahuman get the camera up close and adjust the manual focus so that the face is in focus for the manual focus it will automatically create the key whenever you adjust it after the first time the transform will still need to be keyed manually each time there are different options for keys it automatically sets the cubic which replicates the smooth movement of a camera that gently moves from its place and settles linear would just have a sudden start and stop now we can go through the sequence to see how it looks the camera will follow its own logical line from the start to the end but you can alter its position at intervals throughout with more transform and manual focus keys to make sure everything remains in frame you can just stick with the metahuman but for this scene i've combined a meta human head with a body asset that's free on the unreal marketplace and here's how to put it all together so first of all we're going to find the meta human head material open that up and we want to change the material type to masked then import the png file i've left a few links below and hook that up to opacity mask and save and now if you open any of the metahuman face meshes you'll notice that the shoulders have been removed if you want to remove more of the neck just increase the amount of black at the bottom of the png now open the skeletal mesh of whatever figure you want to add the metahuman head to and then go down to lod and basically just disable every section that you want to get rid of so eyes head hair tongue teeth etc now create a blueprint open that up and drag the skeletal mesh in then go to the face folder of the metahuman you want to use and drag the face mesh in and then you'll need to attach it to the skeletal mesh um in this example it's showing as i'm attaching it to the neck but actually ended up attaching to the head if you attach to the neck then the metahuman head rotation will be dominant if you attach it to the head then it will copy whatever animation the skeletal mesh is using for the head when you attach it it will end up at this strange angle so you'll just have to adjust it and for this example you'd also need to adjust the scale just because this character just because this particular character has kind of a smaller head you can either adjust the size of the head to be smaller or make the body bigger the advantage of using the blueprint method rather than the previous one that i did is that it keeps everything in one place then open the metahuman blueprint and select the hair eyebrows etc copy those and paste into the new blueprint and then attach those to the metahuman face mesh then if you reset them to zero they should be in the right place for this one this has kind of a bit too long because um with animations the hair kind of goes through the body so i need a hair that's kind of shorter so it doesn't look weird so i'm just selecting a different hairstyle to add and now if you create a level sequence and add the this new blueprint to it and then attach and select the uh skeletal mesh body and then from there you can choose whatever animations go with that particular body one thing you might want to do is temporarily enable the head on the mesh just for reference to figure out what size the meta human head should be and where it should be in relation to the body and then once you've got it in the right place you can just disable the head again you might want to make a few adjustments to get this right just play around with it um you might have to change the angle you might have to change the scale and then test it out with the animations to see if it looks right if you notice any bits of neck sticking out you can just adjust the amount of black or where the black appears on the png here's the vehicles from the free variety pack i mentioned earlier and it's as simple as just dragging the meshes into the scene there are blueprint versions which can be animated but i'll leave that for now since they're just going to be static in the scene they have pre-made materials but you can also drag any other materials onto them instead if you want to add any objects to the scene quexilbridge is a great free resource simply search download and click export wait for them to load into unreal this one is taking a while longer as it has several different models included in the one set you'll get these error message pop-ups a lot in unreal but generally they can be ignored and closed out as you can see i've set a lot of camera keys for this scene if i skip to each one you can see where the different camera positions are and also where i've keyed the manual focus the character is also in the sequence with a selection of animations you can easily add them by going to track animation and selecting the ones you want it's a good idea to overlap them to avoid the jump you get if they're not overlapped you can just leave the face as it is if you want but if you're animating it as well you'll need to delete the face control rig and then add any pre-made face animations in the same way i have a couple of tutorials which show how to make these and i'll link those below one issue you'll sometimes run into in unreal is shadows and other elements popping in and out as you zoom the camera to stop this just select the item that's having the issue and search for bound scale it will be set by default to 1 set it to something higher like 10 and the problem will go away in this case select all items in the blueprint and you can apply the change to them all in one go once you're happy with how the sequence looks it's time to render it to a final video just click on the icon and you'll get the render movie settings most of this can be ignored you might want to change the resolution if you have ray tracing and a lot going on in the scene choosing 4k might crash or freeze your computer when you start the render and you might have to choose something lower like 1080p you'll definitely want to choose compression to avoid incredibly large file sizes you can also choose custom start and end one other quick thing engine scalability this has five different levels of varying quality setting it to low you can see that things look quite basic frame rate doesn't matter for making cinematics so it's not an issue that having it on cinematic can drop the fps down low but if you want things to run a bit smoother while you're working it can be useful just remember to put it back to the maximum before rendering i added a few point lights around the character moving them around until i like the look in reality only the main directional light and any light from the hdri backdrop would be creating light in this scene but i'm using a bit of artistic license just to add some nice light and shadow on a movie set it would be common to say this kind of technique of fake light being used anyway but for realism you might want to add an object that would be a light source such as a car headlight or a street lamp you can also change the color of the light and how soft the shadows are i don't want this third light in the whole scene so i'm going to drag it into the sequence and then you can either key in the intensity from zero to however bright you want it or add a hidden in-game section it will default to green which is visible and red when you turn it off and can then be keyed so it turns off or on at a certain point click capture movie to start the render process you'll get a small window top left which will show it rendering and when it's finished you'll get a link to the folder pop-up bottom right and that's it for this tutorial thanks for watching

Channel: Monoville

Views: 3,045

Keywords: tutorial, ue4, ue5, unreal engine, metahuman, metahumans, filmmaking, 3d animation

Id: I25mWfJlV0s

Length: 56min 18sec (3378 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 03 2021