Unreal Engine for Filmmakers - Add Cinematic VFX to your Films for FREE - UE5 [PART 1]

what's going on guys sam here and today i want to talk to you guys about someone overlooked huge advancement in unreal engine 5 something that feels a bit overshadowed by lumen and nanite which are incredible advancements but this is another groundbreaking feature of ue5 which is another game changer and that is the addition of fluid simulation into the real-time ue5 editor through niagara so what a fluid simulation is is it essentially sends out simulated gas or fluid into the scene based on your inputted vector settings so direction intensity and speed and then it applies physics and forces to that simulated gas or fluid which are specified by you much like a physics collision simulation except with fluids so this means that it will act in a realistic way and it's going to be able to interact with objects in your scene rather than just being a particle system which shoots out particles and uses image projection or specified physics to create the look so what that means is that you're going to have completely dynamic fluid simulations so fire smoke explosions things like that and also water and that's all going to be inside your real time game or cinematic render so just put this into perspective i used to use uh fume fx back in the day you would have to run a simulation wait for it to process and then it would take hours to render within your scene so now we've got realistic ray trace lighting from lumen fluid simulation which is updating in real time while interacting with objects in your scene and even objects in your game this even includes simulated physics objects so you know say you break a piece of a wall off and it flies through a cloud of smoke that will also interact with your smoke as well this is an incredible advancement in unreal engine 5 and something that's really going to take it to the next level in terms of virtual production and using it as a post-production tool for filmmakers because now you're able to have realistic real-time fluid simulations which are going to actually interact with your scene so we're getting closer and closer to having the full capabilities of a fully dedicated 3d renderer inside of unreal engine 5 and that means that there's a lot more that you can do with in-camera vfx and using it as a post-production tool as well so epic is definitely hearing us when we say we want these new features and it's really becoming an extremely viable and useful tool as a post-production workhorse in addition to all its other uses so let's just take a quick look at this fluid simulation now so this is what we're going to be creating here and as you can see we have this ship kind of flying through this cloud of smoke and i'm just going to go over some of the basics of how you can achieve this look and just how to you know basically set up your fluid simulation inside of unreal engine 5. so if you go inside of unreal engine 5 here you can see that i've set up the scene for you guys so if you guys want to learn how to build this scene you know this is kind of what my new course in unreal engine 5 goes over so we go over from start to finish building the scene from the ground up from scratch all the way through rendering with render passes and getting the best render settings for the most cinematic results out of your renders all the way through using those tools to composite in adobe after effects and blackmagic design fusion and it basically teaches you the full process full pipeline of creating a visual effects shot in unreal engine and using it with pretty much any compositor so it's a really valuable training i highly recommend it and you can pick that up on boundlessresource.com i'll leave a link in the description but anyway so we have this scene set up and what i'm going to be showing you guys today is we have this particular shot here set up so we just have this ship and it's kind of just flying by the camera so before we actually can have access to the new niagara fluid simulations we have to go up here into edit and go down to plugins and we're going to have to enable this plugin so we're going to search for niagara and we have a lot of different options here but we want to turn on this fluids which is the fluid simulation toolkit for niagara so we're gonna click on that and it's gonna warn you that this is a beta version uh that's okay we're gonna hit yes and then we're going to have to restart our engine so we're gonna go ahead and click on restart now all right so we're back inside of unreal engine here and uh might take some time for some shaders to compile it actually was really quick for me so be patient with that now we have our scene here and what i want to do is maybe add some smoke coming out from this building to have our ship be able to fly through it so what we're gonna do is go down into our content drawer i've created this new folder called niagara fluids and we're going to right click in here i'm going to go to fx and we're going to go down to niagara system what we're going to do is create a new system from a template or behavior example we're going to hit next and now you can see we have a lot of different options for our 2d gas simulations our 2d liquid our 3d gas and our 3d liquid simulations this is really powerful and as you can see you know even just from these thumbnails here we have some pretty high resolution stuff we have a lot of control that which i'm going to get into in this tutorial so for what we want to do i'm going to just go with this grid 3d gas simple particle source this is going to give us a good starting point for a lot of our effects here so it's going to create this niagara system and it's going to take some time to prepare the shaders here but we can in the meantime name it uh we'll just call this ns underscore fire our shaders have compiled so all we have to do right now is just take this and drag it out into our scene and immediately you're going to see that it's actually already starting to simulate and this looks pretty cool we can kind of position it here into the general area that we want it to be what's great about this is it's volumetric it has real volume to it so it's not just a 2d image projection this is a real simulation obviously our resolution isn't very high but we can control that so fluid simulations are voxel-based and what that is is a vox was basically a three-dimensional pixel so if we go into our niagara actor here and we go down here and we find our resolution max axis here if we increase this value to something like 250 you can see that now it's starting to look much higher quality we're getting a lot more resolution in here and it's looking more realistic so basically what that means is that there are more voxels here in our simulation so basically more pixels and therefore higher resolution just like increasing the resolution of an image it's going to cost you more in terms of your computer's resources but it's also going to look much better and more realistic so we can set our resolution maybe somewhere around 250 for now we can always increase this later and then also i'm going to show you a little bit about how you can actually increase that resolution only for your rendering so that it's not going to cost you a bunch when you're just moving around in your viewport and it will only increase that resolution when you render so you know let's try like 350 and see what happens and as you can see it's starting to significantly slow down my computer so our frame rate's going to suffer so maybe we'll go down 280 something like that and now it's still pretty smooth so that that should work for us like i said before we actually want our ship to interact with the smoke in our scene and the reason this doesn't happen immediately so if i take my ship here and i just and i start moving it you know through the smoke you can see it's not doing anything and the reason that's not happening is because by default nothing in your scene is set to collide with the particle simulation or your fluid simulation and that's because if it was if everything was set to automatically collide if you pulled out one of these particle systems into your scene it might crash your computer because it's you know calculating all this data and all these crazy interactions with all the objects in your scene so you're going to have to enable that through the use of tags so just to kind of demonstrate a little bit here what i'm about to do and how we can get our objects in our scene to interact with our niagara actor is if we grab a cube basic actor here and we just drag it into our scene we pull it up here around where we're going to be working with our fluid i'm just going to demonstrate what this whole collider system does so if we go into our cube settings and we search for tags and we go down here to our advanced settings and then we go into our tag here we add an array element and we're just going to type in here we're going to type in collider and hit enter and we need to make sure that that's all lowercase and we spell it correctly c-o-l-l-i-d-e-r now you can take this object and you can move it through your uh simulation and it's actually going to interact with your fluid simulation so that's a really cool great feature and you can see that we're you know it's it's interacting in a very realistic way and we can just do this in real time and have it update properly and it's also nice because then it's going to even kind of you know if we put it up in the middle here you can see that it kind of wraps around our cube very cool feature here so here you can see we have our ship and we have our niagara particle system and i've just animated this ship to fly through our scene as i showed you guys before i've just moved my niagara actor out into the middle of the scene so it will collide with our ship and we can actually see what's going to happen here so if we go into our ship and we search for tags so we just add an element and we're going to type in collider and we have to make sure that we spell it properly because our niagara fluid simulation is going to reference this exact tag in order to specify which elements or which objects in our scene are colliders which will interact with our fluid simulation so now that we've set that if we actually play through this animation you can see that boom now we have our ship hitting our smoke and it's causing it to react um you know passing right through it there you can do that for any uh object in your scene which is great but what i want to do now is actually go and start modifying my niagara system so if we click on this box we see our nsfire instance and we can x out of this get rid of that filter and we can double click on our niagara system so now what you can see in here is we have basically these two boxes right here and if you're familiar at all with how niagara works in the past you had your particle source emitters and then you could add a bunch of other emitters and things like that to your system but if i just go down here and turn on the sprite renderer and if i turn off my grid gas controls emitter what you can see is that if i zoom in here all this is doing here because i've soloed this particle emitter the fluid simulation works by emitting particles which act as your fluid into your scene and then it applies physics and forces to them and simulates the reaction of your fluid so this is basically just the building block or the starting point of how your fluid simulation is going to be emitted from the source okay so once it's emitted then this gas control emitter kind of takes over and simulates using the physics that you input into the parameters of this box it will then simulate the fluid simulation so uh your particle source emitter is basically just the source of your fluid simulation so if i were to make this emit at a much higher speed you would kind of have more of an explosion out this direction and then it would kind of you know float up as you specify in your gas control emitter the first node is providing your particle information which is then passed to the second node which then renders your fluid simulation based on that information so the way you control the look of your simulation at least in terms of how the source is going to act so if it's going to be an explosion or a steady stream of fire or you know it's shooting out in all directions or maybe it's a smoke that's spinning in a circle that's all going to be controlled in this area right here um the look of your simulation and the the fire and the smoke and all that is going to be controlled in here as you can see now it looks like fire now that's the important difference between these two boxes here so that's about it for this video guys if you are interested in learning how to build this scene uh you see here from the ground up from scratch make sure you go over to boundlessresource.com and check out that course i'll put the link in the description i'm also offering a bundle which includes the original unreal engine for filmmakers advanced course and this new course at a huge discount i think the total is like 70 or 100 discount total so make sure you guys go over and check that out as well subscribe and also comment any new videos or courses that you guys would like to see so i just kind of wanted to introduce you guys to the world of niagara fluid simulations obviously there's a lot more to go into on this but i just want to kind of introduce this to you and uh you know get this in your head so you can start playing with it so thanks for watching guys and have a good one

Channel: Boundless Entertainment

Views: 71,496

Keywords: unreal engine, unreal engine 5, fluid, simulation, fluid sim, fluid simulation, vfx, visual fx, visual effects, tutorial, how to, unreal engine 5 niagara tutorial, niagara, explosion, fire, smoke, smoke tutorial, smoke vfx, cinematic, cinema, filmmaker, unreal engine for filmmakers, ue5, lumen, lighting, night scene, game, game engine, virtual production, the mandalorian

Id: Yl_VJqmll-E

Length: 13min 8sec (788 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 16 2022