Unreal Engine DMX Input Tutorial

welcome to will part three of the DMX for Unreal Engine virtual production mini course this is building on part two where we went over the very very basics of DUP to how to get the show file loaded in and a very brief interface walkthrough now let's load up unreal 425 presently it is on beta 7 so let's load up a AV template film television and live events just a blank one content or retracing and we will call it dmx sample and then create project here we are project file is out of date would you like to update it go ahead and update that is likely just because unreal has had some patches since the template files were updated go ahead and allow that then create a new folder called Maps to stay organized ctrl + click different assets to multi select then drag and drop to move them into the folder so hopefully that recorded okay before we get too far I'm going to disable real-time on the editor for me as well as going here Oh FPS overlay with stat FPS and here in this case again so it doesn't kill the recording you are dot B sync editor 1 you don't have to do this I'm just doing this to enforce a 30 FPS vsync app with my monitor set to 30fps to reduce recording load so that should be all set hopefully this recording should be okay now so next we want to go to window no edits plugins which brings us to the plugins tab which I had already open then go to media TMX engine tick the box message pops up hey this is a beta don't worry about it click yes DMX fixtures enabled a message click yes and restart the editor and here we are again writes we move to the default map you not currently set to default so let's fix that by going to maps and modes editor startup map and choosing I believe it's main is the one we were on and if we go to recent and reload DMX sample gonna prompt us if we want to yes I could just open the map but this is also a way of validating that change we just made worked really the longest part of this is really getting the project initially set up so now we have a project with the DMX plugins enabled time is still off I believe I need to rename the editor vsync though so let me just double check that yep I need to turn it on every time I open the editor because I have not put it in a engine config file yet our dot B sync editor 1 caps up to 30 fps perfect okay so now that we have done of at and again the recording should be good we want to do a few more things I always like to add the content folder and the DMX your content folder - favorites by right-clicking I can jump between them fairly quickly also be sure to click view options in the lower right and enable go plug-in content next get some better contrast when we actually have our lights in here I like to grab em aspheric fog sky sphere and skylight you can either delete them or you can simply check actor hidden in-game and they will not be rendered likewise there were the default touched joysticks on by default in this template so we can go to and it's I believe project settings anjuna and then input and then mobile always show touch interface uncheck that and now is a good time to say ball and it's asking about the project being out of date again I'm gonna click update that also that might have something to do with Epping just added plugins so because those are referred to in the new project file which is just a text file if you didn't know all right so we have that nicely configured got a nice clean background they're a bunch of bright stuff behind where our lights are gonna be and the touch dry sticks are off next yeah there's a small checklist of things that you need to do when to your project when you first start up but uh next we want to go to DMX fixtures content you will only have to do this once per engine version basically if at all there's a small bug under DMX fixtures content color wheel key underscore color underscore lavender with texture asset by defaults has some in current settings relative to the other sibling textures it has by default it is set to normal map at the time of recording so you want to set it to default the reason - fixed is because I fixed it already don't want to check us RGB which I might have missed before and then text your group instead of overall normal map which yours is likely to be you should set it to world and then say Vyasa is important because when you actually get the movers the sample moving head fixture actually talking our at the lavender option on the color wheel which will also show up as lavender in the lighting software that will show up as yellow because it the texture is being interpreted as a normal map so make sure to fix that hopefully the plugin developers get that fixed for future releases we will see that is most of the setup I think there's just a couple more things [Music] yep just two more things both of which are in project settings actually now one more thing in editor preferences this is something that with the a/v coding I've noticed that I tend to do it a lot more or I have a bunch of windows up and blame to the editor so there is a option for used less CPU in the background I like to uncheck that because otherwise when I click over to another window unreal will throttle down to like 3 FPS which in some cases is helpful but when we're dealing with other software talking to unreal we don't want it throttling down just because we changed context so looks like I already had that set but make sure that is untucked if just for the best experience there you don't have to but that's what I would recommend so jumping back then we also have to wrap up two more things in project settings so go to edit project settings the first one is again under maps and modes game instance class should be VP underscore DMX underscore game instance and then all the way down to plugins DMX plug-in right click to expand all and we want to look at communication settings in this interface IP address field change that to the IP address of your computer that you set up earlier that should be in either the ten dot something range or the two dot something range if you don't know what your IP address is I mean you should have said it unless you've done they like unless you've converted your home network over to issue addresses in that range automatically which is somewhat more advanced configuration and in terms of actually setting that up you should have set it manually as I showed in the dot two portion of this but if you set it and you forgotten you can very easily in windows open a task manager which if you hit the Windows key and start typing task manager it will pop up for you so you can have task manager here and by default it might be the small list if you don't use task manager that much so click more details then it will give you this view which I find to be much more helpful and then you can go to performance and then there will be listings for all of your network interfaces so click your Ethernet one and it will tell you that here your IP address is 10.0 to zero to five or whatever it is in your case they're just it may work if you leave it a zero but if it's something other than zero like say if you set the IP address as it's gonna be a certain thing and then you change your mind later and have it be something else if that old setting is in there that's not all zeros definitely won't work I'm not sure I I haven't tried it with just zeros but for good measure just put your IP address in there that way it's listening on the right network card especially if you have multiple network cards DMX isn't too heavy on the network compared to some things but in general if you've got Ethernet you should use it it's much more reliable and stable from a latency standpoint so that covers that so file save all so next yep this is really kind of the meat of it next we need to wait a Phoenix library asset so we'd go to our content browser just start normal game content is fine if you want to put it in a folder you can we don't have to much else going on here so I'm not gonna worry about it right click go to the DMX category and click DMX library to create a new BMX than outside and I'm going to call it simple DMX the library using camel caps okay so there are five tabs here controllers extra types fixture patch monitor and output console so for purposes of this tutorial I'm only going to cover building the defaults moving head which can be found in the DMX fixtures content folder as BP underscore moving head we're actually going to want to go ahead and open that up right now actually to be referencing it in just a moment there's a DMX name map under the variable section in this beeping moving head and each of these have named properties which we're going to want to reference in a moment likewise if you haven't already or you don't have it open from the last portion of the tutorial they're going to want to go ahead and open him a - I've already done so here in another screen region so I also have it open on the laptop which is actually going to be outputting the artnet but I also have it here on the desktop in session for convenience I believe I went over sessions in the last section as far as how to connect it can control the session from here or without moving my mouse also via the laptop touchscreen ended updates in both places going back over to unreal we're going to want to click the controllers tab and then a new controller sample artnet controller I am also using camel calves most of these default settings are fine however we want to change the amount of universes to two it makes it easier to test especially if you're not sure whether your lighting software uses universe ID 0 or 1 for the first universe that makes it easy to try both and I believe the universe start it starts at 1 so that's fine and then remote universe range start that's the thing that you have to mess with as either a zero or 1 in this case 4.2 it's zero and you can see the range and auto-populates so based on how many universes we have and then we want to make sure this says aren't net and with that I believe if we go to the monitor tab you can start to see traffic so if I go over to dot - I pull up this fader and then click the button below to start an animation we can come back over to unreal and see that the values are animating so that's the raw plugin setup but now as far as actually being able to do anything with it this is where things get a little bit more interesting so back in dot two I'm just going to click this button that I set up to just turn off the lights it'll pull the fader down for good measure so then back in unreal can go to fixture types click the add new fixture type button and I'm going to call this clip a key sharpie and hit enter then I'm back in dot two you don't necessarily have to do this but we're going to be referencing it for the next step we go to set up pageant fixture schedule which is where you had add fixtures in dot to add a new fixture we're not actually going to add anything but we go to select other to get to the fixture library search for chirpy oh hey Becky chirpy standard lamp on 16-channel what we're looking at here is specifically the fixture profile and what all the parameters are so we reference this and then we reference the names of the different parameters in a section here and we populate a extra type with those parameters so in this case we add a mode because as you can see in dot two there can be multiple modes or with different amounts of channels depending on how many parameters you're wanting to use to set up things most efficiently for any given show so now that we have our reference in two we go back to unreal where we have our sharpie you click the modes ed button right click to expand and call it standard mode and hit enter and there's 16 channels and 14 functions because a couple functions use two channels each so we click the array elements button for functions 14 times until it says 14 array elements and if you had an extra one you can come down here to the down arrow here and delete one then we can right-click on functions expand all and this is the relatively tedious part but not too bad first we have a color one so yeah basically we're going to go through and if one of these has a coolant in the moving head blueprint we reference the name of that function which in this for example the dimmer is just dimmer we put that in the function name field as appropriate so we're not going to do all of these simple fixtures in this tutorial we'll just do the moving head but the sample library has all four default fixtures implemented using this exact technique I can say the other sample fixtures are approximately well the moving head is approximately a clay package Sharpie standard mode sixteen channels the static fixture is approximately a shove a slim par 56 with seven channels VP strobe fixture is approximately a Martin atomic 3000 in one channel mode and a EP moving mirror is approximately inhalation vision scan 577 16-bit mode in 16 channel mode so those are all implemented in the sample project on github but they use the exact same techniques here you pull up that mode and all in your lighting software and then it will tell you what things to implement and if you have functions on the fixture that are not present in the unreal equivalent I'm just putting the names in from the lighting software and then appending null underscore to the front of them so not everything is quite in there but it supports pretty much all of the default features for these fixtures for the samples so I'm going to be quiet and just kind of start punching through these and then just basically follow along you so here there isn't a focus parameter but there's the Zoomer ammeter so I'm just mapping those together and then here on Ram burger 10 you can see tennis pan Lebanese pan fine so this is one of those ones followed by the next ones hilt where uses two channels for essentially one function so and unreal or the panas channel 10 so on channel assignment 10 we say this parameter is just called pan and then we changed the data type to 16-bit and it will use two channels then it's the same for tilt so here we on channel 12 we have tilt which is 16-bit so the ninth array element is channel 10 the N thorium element is channel 12 so it properly skips channel 11 because channel 11 is part of the pan function to then channel 14 15 and 16 do not exist so functionally we are done over for the sake of completeness I am going to fill out the last three function names as nulls essentially okay so ran out of recording space so just restarting recording and have lost any according informations you'll be good to go so just continuing on no underscore our global fixture reset no underscore control and that part is done so it click Save extra patch and then we had a fixture of the type clay packy sharpie and so it defaults to clay pecky sharpie underscore patch I just replaced a patch with number in this case of one since it's the first one hit enter and then right click to duplicate it will create a second one and auto increment the name and you can see this is using first one is using channels 1 to 16 and the second is using channels 17 to 32 as expected now that we've got those patched we can go to the editor right click and use WASD to move around and then II moves up and Q moves down and then while holding right click the scroll wheel backwards close down the camera and it's moving it up speeds up the camera so now that we have nearly everything done we want to set our snap mode for demonstration purposes want to set the grid snap to one meter and then grab a moving head from VP moving head rack it out I get up and then hit the end key and that will snap it to the ground I'm actually going to also the W key P key and our key move between the translates rotation and scale tools respectively so I'm going to hit E and rotate this 90 degrees to see it easier and then I'm going to the W key hold down alt and then drag off a second one which you can do with any actor that you have selected now here's the here's the interesting part that makes everything come together after we've done everything else we go to our getting content folder we grab our sample dmx library we grab the first fixture expand this section here by just mousing over the line come down to the dmx components expand fixture patch click this arrow to select our asset or we can select it from a drop-down and we go to fixture patch select this drop-down and then we select the first one this is our first fixture with address 1 this is equivalent to setting the LCD on a physical fixture with the address and we grab the second one and we do the same and then we set it to number two now would be a great time to save just a moment and while it saves we can go over to dot two and back out of the fixture patch without changing anything and then save was nearly done so the save is done we can run the game all right so just click the play button and here we are I have my Unreal editor configured for a specific resolution on aspect ratio for some other work but it gives us a nice cinematic perspective on these two lights here so if I press shift f1 to regain my mouse cursor I'll grab this fader here and dot - you I'll bring it up and we have art night coming in then if I click this button here I can cycle forward through queues and if I grab this button here I can cycle backwards or it can hit this button up top to turn the fixtures off so so now that we've done that I'm just going to turn the lights off and stop the game and then very quickly I'm going to grab move this one light over to the other and drag these over and I'm going to drag off four more four more clones of these guys the same way it cloned off the second one and I'm going to grab all six of these set my grid snap to half a meter and just to get those nice and centered now grab our sample DMX library asset again actually no we don't need to because we clone to them but we do need to go to the DMX components of each one and change the patch well of course we only patch two fixtures so we go back to sample DMX library and duplicate or more of them so you can right click and duplicate or you can use the shortcut key ctrl W and it will again Auto increment the numbers then we come back to here of our second one or rather our third go to the DMX component and set it to number three sent our fourth one to number or and so on you okay so yeah file they ball and then we are basically done here is six of those guys which actually fits the my particular viewport aspect ratio very nicely so I can come back here and actually I can just kind of drag the window over to get these in the same view and then I bring up this Vader all of the lights come on then I can click this button to cycle forward through our queues and so you can uh click on the Q section to expand it you can see the full Q stack then I can click forward through them or backwards through them and they are all working fully properly you can also disable that queue stack I can pull the fader down and of course turn off I can just grab the sharpies group then say full to bring them on then I can windows please I can come over here and change the color I want to do a oh here I can make them lavender and they will indeed be lavender instead of yellow but I can set them to a gradual rotate on the color wheel and they'll very gradually transition through all of the colors or you can click the arrows in the other direction and they'll go very fast arguably too fast yeah basically if you want to mess with things that haven't been programmed you just click a group to select it or click it again to unselect it and then you can the parameters through this sidebar here as far as the dimmer which just turns it on and off position mainly with the sharpies and also the scanners or the moving mirror controls the pan-tilt a bit you can control gobos I'm not I don't remember if the gobos line up with the sample fixture do not line up on the vision scan I I don't quite have a perfect block on all of these bars what they actually are but I'm reasonably close with all of these and then there's of course color where you can control the raw color real parameter there's the swatch book which finds the closest color or you can just navigate the color picker and it will basically snap to whatever they are or if you have a fixture that supports RGB color as far as like three-component color instead of a color real like the pars then you can basically choose any 8-bit RGB color that way so yeah that's pretty much the bulk of it so they've moved to a nice orange in the background there and then yeah so you can basically bring these back on and because I haven't stored color information in the patterns I believe veterans combined with color if I want to back to color and there are these into rainbow vomit mode that's these particular fixtures rainbow vomit mode with a color wheel simulation I wouldn't call that super pretty but I don't know sometimes there's a use for it I guess so yeah that pretty much covers that I'm gonna bring these back - huh slow color rotate that pretty much wraps up the part three of the DMX for Unreal Engine virtual production mini course we will next move on to part four where we actually work with the DMX output through custom code and we will be basically building on top of this exact same project so you'll definitely want to keep this project handy or you can reference the simple project as uploaded on github but yeah moving on

Channel: LexyVFX

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Id: URo7cOgjPPI

Length: 38min 42sec (2322 seconds)

Published: Sat May 02 2020